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On Easter Sunday, 1911, San Franciscos Central Theater was packed with more than a thousand people gathered to listen to Berkeley mayor-elect J. Stitt Wilson give his weekly socialist sermon, this one on the theme of resurrection. They heard Wilson contrast the values of love and sacrifice espoused by Jesus with the mercilessness of capitalism, and applauded as he concluded with a call for people to give themselves new life by working together in the socialist movement to bring about a social resurrection, a civilization based on their common humanity.

For Wilson, socialism was applied Christianity, practical Christianity, or as he told a conference of Methodist ministers, Christianity in overalls. An economy organized as a cooperative commonwealth would support, rather than undermine, Jesuss message to love thy neighbor as thyself. He criticized the churches for treating people as children of God on Sunday but keeping silence when they were treated as commodities during the working week. He called for social as well as individual salvation.

Many Socialist Party activists were ministers or, like Wilson, former ministers. A few months after Wilsons election as mayor of Berkeley, Louis Duncan, a Unitarian minister, was elected mayor of Butte, Montana, and George Lunn, a Presbyterian minister, won office as mayor of Schenectady, New York. But Wilson was one of the first to move beyond a vaguely progressive social gospel and make The Bible Argument for Socialism, as he entitled one of his pamphlets.

Wilson was born in 1868 in a small town in midwestern Canada, where his father labored as the local shoemaker. Moving to the United States, he worked his way through seminary and Northwestern University, just outside of Chicago, as pastor to various Methodist churches. He was serving at a working-class church in Chicago when the depression of 18941897 hit his congregation. He quickly saw that the usual remedies promoted by the church thrift, sobriety, willingness to work hard, charity for the deserving poor were completely inadequate. He searched for broader remedies and for a theology that would buttress them.

At a time when most Protestant churches were hostile to strikes, and some ministers even called for strikers to be shot down in the streets, Wilson spoke out on behalf of striking workers. At a rally supporting garment workers, he asked: What if the clothing in this room could tell its history? What a story of tears, misery, starvation, low wages, long hours, and abject slavery we would hear.

Wilson admired the leadership that Eugene Debs provided railroad workers in the 1894 Pullman strike and, once Debs was released from prison, invited the labor organizer to speak at his church. The church hierarchy repeatedly admonished Wilson and finally threatened him with dismissal, which would have forced him to leave school just short of getting his degree. He quieted down long enough to graduate, then publicly resigned not only from his ministry but from the church. Half of his congregation left when he did.

With the full support of his wife, and despite now having three children to support, Wilson took a new and precarious path. He would put his life behind Christs message of sacrifice for love of humanity and evangelize for the cooperative commonwealth, hoping to build a movement through mass conversions. His Social Crusade held meetings on street corners, in rented halls, and in a few sympathetic churches. From 1897 to 1901, his talks were attended by tens of thousands of people throughout the Midwest, and he recruited several other ministers to join him. The problem was that once someone was converted to socialism and subscribed to the Social Crusader magazine, it was not clear what they should do next.

That particular problem was solved in 1901. While Wilson was touring the Western states, drawing large crowds in Colorado and California, his fellow social crusaders met in Indianapolis along with many other socialists and formed the Socialist Party of America.

Wilson and his family settled in Berkeley, California, and for the next several years he toured the Western states recruiting new members. He was, labor historian Grace Stimson writes, the outstanding organizer for the Socialist Party of California. His speech on the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, Capitalism: The Nations Perpetual Disaster, gives us a sample of his clear and forceful style:

We were appalled by the sudden death by earthquake of 500 to 1,000 people in our sister city. Are we appalled when . . . ten times as many men were unnecessarily killed in the steel and coal industries of the Pittsburg district last year? . . . We call a natural calamity a terrible disaster, but the poverty and want of 10 million people, caused by social injustice, we call even such names as prosperity and national well-being.

By 1906 there were enough socialist ministers in the United States to form the Christian Socialist Fellowship, whose magazine, the Christian Socialist, emblazoned on its masthead: The Golden Rule Against the Rule of Gold. The 1907 conference issue featured Wilsons article Individual and Social Salvation, but by the time it came out he had moved to Great Britain.

The Socialist Party was split between revolutionary socialists and evolutionary or constructive socialists. The revolutionaries criticized Wilson for being unscientific and failing to sufficiently focus on the proletariat as the main agent of social revolution. Once they gained control in California, Wilson was no longer welcomed as a party representative.

Wilson had, over the previous several years, made friends in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a socialist organization that allied with major unions to form the British Labour Party. Christian socialism was a major current within Labour, and his friends were eager to launch a British version of the social crusade. In 1907, he and his family moved near Bradford, a small industrial city in Englands North, where ILP city councilors had won public ownership of utilities and free social and medical services what became known as municipal socialism.

In Bradford and surrounding towns, Wilson led an organizing campaign for the ILP, canvassing working-class neighborhoods, holding evening meetings in local halls and schools, and holding large Sunday meetings with himself and other well-known socialist clergy as the speakers. He also toured in Scotland and Wales, speaking to audiences that often numbered in the thousands on The Kingdom of God and Socialism, Moses: The Greatest of Labour Leaders, and The Impending Social Revolution.

A reporter for the Halifax Labour News explained Wilsons appeal to British workers:

He claimed for them the Bible as their property, with its great store of hope and record of the worlds struggle for humanity towards a higher life. He linked up their present effort with those of Moses, of Isaiah, of Amos, of Christ. . . . He had borne to them the Message from the heart of God to his people.

In 1909 control of the California Socialist Party changed hands, and Wilson and his family moved back to Berkeley. The new party leadership was heavily involved in a campaign to unionize Los Angeles, fighting a Merchants and Manufacturers Association that was equally determined to keep Los Angeles nonunion and use lower wages as a competitive advantage over heavily unionized San Francisco.

Job Harriman, leader of the Socialist Party in Los Angeles; Fred Wheeler, head of the Los Angeles Central Labor Council; and other like-minded Socialists hoped Wilson could help make the Socialist Party in California the party of labor and replicate the success of the British Labour Party. This meant building stronger ties with the state labor federations, which were dominated by unions in San Francisco and winning enough political power in Los Angeles to prevent the use of police to break up strikes and union organizing efforts. (Unfortunately, it also meant going along with the labor unions racist opposition to Asian immigration.)

In 1910, Wilson received 12 percent of the vote for governor, the best showing the Socialist Party would ever enjoy in a statewide race. The next year he successfully ran for mayor of Berkeley, gaining the support of enough progressive Republicans to win a majority against an incumbent Democrat. With his support, two other Socialists were elected to the School Board and one to the City Council.

Over the following two years Wilson worked himself to exhaustion. He promoted local tax measures that allowed the city to improve its sewer system, pave its streets, build parks, and begin to take public ownership of utilities. He helped fend off a recall aimed at the Socialists on the School Board and City Council. He campaigned throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for a state constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, which passed, and in support of Socialist candidates in other cities, most of whom came up short.

He visited Los Angeles to support Harrimans campaign for mayor in 1911, which was narrowly defeated. He helped organize a statewide initiative campaign to allow local governments to implement land value taxation (also unsuccessful). And he ran for Congress, receiving 40 percent of the vote.

Wilson felt he had demonstrated that the Socialist Party was capable of becoming a major party. He believed that newly enfranchised women would support Socialist candidates because, as potential mothers, they embodied the ethic of care essential to the cooperative commonwealth. A coalition of labor and women would, he hoped, transform California politics. Instead of running for reelection as mayor in 1913, he returned to statewide speaking on the Socialist Partys behalf. Membership in the Socialist Party tripled from 1909 to March 1914.

But the wave of enthusiasm did not last.

Women voters didnt flock to the Socialist banner, and the labor leadership abandoned their flirtation with the Socialists when Governor Hiram Johnson helped pass a number of modest prolabor reforms, including workers compensation and an eight-hour day for women. With the failure of the Los Angeles union drive, labor had only regional political power and could not hope to sustain a statewide workers party. In 1914 the California Socialists went into rapid decline, and by the end of 1915, they reported fewer members than in 1909.

A burned-out Wilson left the Socialist Party, convinced that party-building had failed and the abolition of capitalism cannot be achieved without a great and overwhelming Spiritual Awakening. A new approach was needed. But he had no idea what that might be.

In 1917, Wilson again ran for mayor of Berkeley, this time as an independent, and forced the conservative incumbent, a wealthy businessman, into a runoff. The day before the first round of the election, the United States entered World War I. Over the next three weeks until the runoff, Wilson was redbaited by the leader of a Berkeley-based citizen secret service organization sponsored by US Army intelligence. He lost the election by just 124 votes.

Moving on from this disappointment, Wilson thought that wartime patriotism might provide the basis for the national moral renewal he sought. Seizing on President Woodrow Wilsons claims that the United States was fighting to make the world safe for democracy, Stitt Wilson retooled his equation of Christianity and socialism into an argument that Christianity meant democracy, including democracy in industry, denouncing Kaiserism abroad and workplace tyranny at home.

His hopes for wartime and postwar democracy proved naive, however, as Debs and other former Socialist Party comrades were imprisoned for their opposition to the war and a deeper reactionary turn post-armistice reversed the gains that labor unions had briefly made. World War I exacted a deep personal toll, too: Wilsons son died in pilot training shortly before the end of the war.

Hoping to inspire a new generation of social-justice activists, Wilson went to work for the collegiate division of the YMCA, a stronghold of the social gospel in the conservative 1920s. He spoke on Christian Democracy at colleges around the United States, arguing for industrial democracy and adding material such as a lecture contending that evolution showed cooperation rather than competition allowed species to thrive.

Wilson twice returned to Great Britain and, in 1929, had the pleasure of participating in the campaign that produced a Labour government (although one dependent on support from the Liberal Party). Returning to a United States stricken by the Great Depression, Wilson proposed that the nation should bring the values of Jesus to the economy through national economic planning and spoke in many churches where the ministers and congregations were now more receptive to alternatives to capitalism. Urged on by the Young Socialists at the University of California, Berkeley, he rejoined the Socialist Party and was elected to chair the state central committee.

Part of his work was helping organize a Socialist-sponsored union among farmworkers, and there he met the American version of fascism. Rural county sheriffs worked hand in hand with agribusiness and deputized vigilantes to break up union meetings and picket lines. Wilson began speaking out about the threat of fascism in the United States, believing that the Socialist Party did not take the threat seriously enough. The national party made grandiloquent threats that they would crush the reckless forces of reaction, something far beyond the resources of a group that had attracted only twenty thousand members nationwide after several years of the Great Depression.

In 1934, Wilson again resigned from the Socialist Party and registered as a Democrat to support Upton Sinclairs leftist EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign. He campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, holding that Americans faced a choice between Roosevelt and fascism. Health issues limited his activities in subsequent years, but his last talk before his death in 1942 was to a local humanist group, calling for victory against fascism, and a social reconstruction based on the ethics of Jesus.

J. Stitt Wilson never claimed to know the best path forward to the cooperative society, saying that socialists were groping in the dark and needed to be open to receive whatever light is available. Throughout his life he adopted different strategies and tactics to advance the socialist movement, alternating between evangelism (making the Christian case for socialism) and practical politics (building organizations and competing in elections), while doing his best to follow the teachings of Jesus.

Wilson was part of a widespread working-class tradition of social Christianity that revered Jesus the Carpenter and rejected official church versions of Christianity that excused treating working people as commodities. The Socialist Party of America was inclusive in its ideological approach, and Debs was a master at bringing together the many strands of insurgent workers culture. He often invoked in the same speech the ideal of democratic citizenship, the Declaration of Independence, Karl Marx, and Christ on the Cross. Debss successor as party leader, Norman Thomas, was a Presbyterian minister.

The Christian socialist tradition stretched into the latter half of the twentieth century, most notably through the figure of Martin Luther King Jr. While studying for the ministry as a young man, King brought together the black religious tradition of Christianity as the promise of liberation and the Christian socialist theology of the younger Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rauschenbusch, who admired Wilsons work. Although he kept the term out of his public writings and speeches, King came to espouse a Christian democratic socialism that insisted on social and economic transformation.

Wilson had the same commitments. Faced with the suffering caused by capitalisms extremes of wealth and poverty, he devoted his life to ministering on behalf of a society that would embody Jesuss message of love and sacrifice for one another a socialist society of caring, cooperation, and democracy.

The rest is here:
The California Christian Socialist Who Thought Socialism Was Christianity in Overalls - Jacobin magazine

On Sunday, April 30, the International Committee of the Fourth International, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and the World Socialist Web Site will hold an online global rally to celebrate May Day 2023.

Two processes dominate this years celebration of the international unity of the working class: the war in Ukraine, which is escalating toward a global conflagration, and an international resurgence of the class struggle. These two processes are profoundly related. The same economic, geopolitical and social contradictions that drive the imperialist ruling elites onto the path of war provide the objective impulse for the radicalization of the working class and the outbreak of revolutionary struggles.

The war in Ukraine is now in its second year. The most reliable casualty reports estimate that over 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and that Russian deaths are between 50,000 and 100,000. Far from being horrified by this terrible toll in human life and issuing calls for a ceasefire, the United States and its NATO allies are pouring weapons into Ukraine. Having committed the prestige of the US and NATO to victory in the proxy war, the Biden administration cannot tolerate the political consequences of a failure of its military and geopolitical objectives. The logic of its war aims leads to reckless policies.

The pro-war media cannot restrain its enthusiasm over the prospects of an imminent Ukrainian spring counteroffensive, which, if and when it occurs, will result in casualty figures that will recall the horrors of the Battles of the Somme and Verdun during World War I. Having imposed, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, policies that resulted in the deaths of millions, capitalist governments and the media propaganda organs are inured to the fatal consequences of their war aims in the conflict with Russia. Mass death as a consequence of the subordination of social need to the imperatives of capitalist profit making and individual enrichment has become a regular occurrence under capitalism. The earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, which are believed to have killed over 150,000 people, are among the endless series of preventable disasters that mark contemporary life.

In order to drum up support for the war, the Biden administration adheres to the absurd narrative of the unprovoked war. The public is expected to believe that it all began when Vladimir Putin woke up one morning and declared, for no apparent reason, Let there be war in Ukraine. But history shows that wars are the outcome of a complex interaction of economic, geopolitical, and social processes. More than 100 years after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, historians are still trying to understand the different levels of causation that resulted in that conflict.

As the German scholar Jrn Leonhard has recently written:

Ever since Thucydides, historians have been aware of the difference between the structural and immediate causes of war; they have also understood the need to subject official justifications of war to an ideological critique. Distinctions can be made in this area, as in the search for the causes of revolutions; the identification of long-term, medium term, and short-term causes involves separating out determinants, catalysts, and contingencies. Especially with regard to the outbreak of war, moreover, the question of external and internal factors continues to play a key role to this day. To what extent does the root cause of a war lie in the system of international relations, and to what extent does it lie in the internal composition of states and societies.[1]

The narrative of the unprovoked war explains nothing about the historical, economic, social and political origins of the war. It directs attention away from any examination of the connection between the US-NATO war in Ukraine and 1) the previous 30 years of virtually uninterrupted war waged by the United States in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Syria; 2) the relentless eastward expansion of NATO since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; 3) the escalating geopolitical conflict with China, which is viewed by American imperialism as a dangerous threat to its own dominant world position; 4) the protracted decline of the global economic position of the United States, which finds its starkest expression in the growing challenge to the supremacy of the dollar as the world reserve currency;5) the series of economic shocks that have required desperate bailouts to forestall the complete collapse of the US financial system; 6) the evident breakdown of the American political system, exemplified in President Donald Trumps attempted overthrow, on January 6, 2021, of the result of the November 2020 national election; 7) the increasing domestic instability of a society scarred by staggering levels of inequality, intensified by the impact of the pandemic and a new inflationary spiral, which is radicalizing the American working class.

The most powerful refutation of the unprovoked war narrative is to be found in the innumerable statements of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), posted on the World Socialist Web Site, which has during the last quarter century analyzed the economic, political, and social contradictions that have driven the US corporate-financial elites desperate efforts to find a way out of intractable crises through war.

Twenty years ago, just one week after the Bush administration launched the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Socialist Equality Party, the American section of the ICFI, explained: The strategy of American imperialism consists of utilizing its massive military power to establish the unchallengeable global hegemony of the United States and completely subordinate to itself the resources of the world economy.[2]

Given its central role in world capitalism, the crisis of American imperialism had destabilized the entire political and economic system. Its policies, the SEP explained, were a response to what were, in essence, a global, rather than merely national, crisis. The brutally aggressive policies of successive American governments were an

attempt to resolve, on the basis of imperialism, the world historical problem of the contradiction between the global character of the productive forces and the archaic nation-states system.

America proposes to overcome this problem by establishing itself as the super nation-state, functioning as the ultimate arbiter of the worlds fatedeciding how the resources of the world economy will be allocated, after it has grabbed for itself the lions share. But this sort of imperialist solution to the underlying contradictions of world capitalism, which was utterly reactionary in 1914, has not improved with age. Indeed, the sheer scale of world economic development in the course of the twentieth century endows such an imperialist project with an element of madness. Any attempt to establish the supremacy of a single national state is incompatible with the extraordinary level of international economic integration. The profoundly reactionary character of such a project is expressed in the barbaric methods that are required for its realization.[3]

While the European imperialist allies of the United States in the NATO alliance are compelled by the present global balance of power to follow the scenario set by Washington, they are by no means innocent bystanders in the confrontation with Russia. All the old European imperialist powersweather-beaten veterans of two world wars in just the last century, along with savage crimes in their former colonies and experiments with fascism and genocide in their own countriesare beset with the same political and economic diseases that afflict the United States, while possessing even fewer financial resources to deal with them.

Although unable to pursue their imperialist ambitions independently, neither Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, nor lesser powers such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, and Switzerland are prepared to accept their exclusion from the redistribution of territory and natural resources and access to financial advantages that they expect will follow from the military defeat of Russia and its breakup into numerous statelets.

But even amidst its proclamations of unity, the NATO alliance is itself beset by deep internal divisions, which, in the near-term future, may suddenly explode in armed conflict. Among the little-discussed consequences of the war is the reopening of territorial disputes arising from the post-World War II settlement. The German ruling class has not forgotten that the Polish city of Wrocaw was once called Breslau, which was at the turn of the twentieth century the sixth largest city in the German Empire.

Nor has the virulently nationalistic and fascistic Polish government forgotten that the city of Lviv in western Ukraine was, prior to the outbreak of World War II, known as Lww, the third largest city in Poland.

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Between the lines of the unprovoked war narrative, the fact that the Ukraine war is part of a much larger global conflict, which is leading to World War III, is being ever more openly acknowledged. The question is not so much whether there will be a war between the United States and China, but rather when it will begin, where the conflict will break out, and whether it will involve the use of tactical and/or strategic nuclear weapons.

The former German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, recently wrote that the war is about the future world order, about its great revision in the 21st century. He denounced China and Russia for having entered into an unformalized alliance to break the dominance of the United States and the Westthe two great Eurasian powers against the transatlantic and also Pacific alliance of the West, led by the United States.[4]

Gideon Rachman, the leading foreign affairs correspondent of the Financial Times, wrote on March 27:

The fact that the president of China and the prime minister of Japan paid simultaneous and competing visits to the capitals of Russia and Ukraine underlines the global significance of the Ukraine war. Japan and China are fierce rivals in east Asia. Both countries understand that their struggle will be profoundly affected by the outcome of the conflict in Europe.

This shadow boxing between China and Japan over Ukraine is part of a broader trend. Strategic rivalries in the Euro Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions are increasingly overlapping with each other. What is emerging is something that looks more and more like a single geopolitical struggle.[5]

Although Rachman remains a fervent proponent of the unprovoked war narrative, he concludes his self-contradicting analysis with a stark warning:

But the danger of a slide into global conflict is far from over. The outbreak of war in Europe, combined with the rise in tensions in east Asia and the growing connection between these two theaters still has distinct echoes of the 1930s. All sides have a responsibility to make sure that, this time, linked rivalries in Europe and Asia do not culminate in a global tragedy.[6]

When events leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 are placed in the necessary historical and political context, there is no question but that the war was instigated by the United States and its NATO allies. All attempts to assess blame for the war by concentrating on the question of who fired the first shot? require an extremely limited time frame that isolates a single episode from a far longer succession of events. As Trotsky explained in 1934, The character of war is determined not by the initial episode taken by itself (violation of neutrality, enemy invasion, etc.) but by the main moving forces of war, by its whole development and by the consequences to which it finally leads. [7]

Contrary to the unprovoked war horror story, the February 2022 invasion was the outcome of a complex of events that extend back not only to the CIA-funded and orchestrated Maidan coup of 2014, which overthrew the elected pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich, but to the unleashing of reactionary nationalist tendencies, both within Ukraine and Russia, as a consequence of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

However, the fact that the war was instigated by the United States and NATO does not justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine, let alone diminish its reactionary character. Those who defend the invasion on the grounds that it was a legitimate response to the NATO threat to Russias borders are simply ignoring the fact that Putin is the leader of a capitalist state, whose definition of national security is determined by the economic interests of the oligarchic class whose wealth is based on the dissolution and theft of the previously nationalized property of the Soviet Union.

All of Putins miscalculations and blunders, in both the launching and prosecution of the war, reflect the class interests that he serves. The aim of the war is to counteract military pressure from the Western imperialist powers, and to retain for the national capitalist class a dominant position in the exploitation of natural resources and labor within the borders of Russia and, to the greatest extent possible, in the Black Sea region and the neighboring countries of Central Asia and the Transcaucasus.

There is nothing progressive, let alone anti-imperialist, in these objectives. When Putin evokes the heritage of tsarism, denounces Lenin, Bolshevism and the October Revolution, he is testifying to the historically reactionary and politically bankrupt character of his regime.

Regardless of their present conflict, the new post-Soviet ruling classes in Russia and Ukraine share the same criminal origin. Less than three months before the formal dissolution of the USSR, this writer, speaking on October 3, 1991 at a public meeting held at a workers club in Kiev as a representative of the International Committee, warned of the disastrous consequences that would flow from the nationalists agenda:

In the republics, all the nationalists proclaim that the solution to all problems lies in the creation of new independent states. Allow us to ask, independent of whom? Declaring independence from Moscow, the nationalists can do nothing more than place all the vital decisions relating to the future of their new states in the hands of Germany, Britain, France, Japan and the United States. Kravchuk [leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party and future president of post-Soviet Ukraine] goes to Washington and squirms in his seat like a schoolboy while he is lectured by President Bush.

What path, then, should the working people of the USSR follow? What is the alternative? The only solution that can be found is one based on the program of revolutionary internationalism. The return to capitalism, for which the chauvinist agitation of the nationalists is only one guise, can only lead to a new form of oppression. Rather than each of the Soviet nationalities approaching the imperialists separately with their heads bowed and their knees bent, begging for alms and favors, the Soviet workers of all nationalities should forge a new relationship, based on the principles of real social equality and democracy, and on this basis undertake the revolutionary defense of all that is worth preserving in the heritage of 1917.

At the very heart of this program is the perspective of revolutionary internationalism. All the problems that haunt the Soviet people today have their origins in the abandonment of the program of revolutionary internationalism.[8]

The warnings made by the International Committee nearly 32 years ago have been tragically vindicated. The working people of Russia and Ukraine have been drawn into a fratricidal conflict. Eighty years ago, they fought together, in defense of the October Revolution, to expel the Nazi army from the Soviet Union. Now, acting on the orders of capitalist regimes, they are shooting and killing each other.

The International Committees call for the unification of the international working class has not only acquired greater urgency. Objective conditions are now far more favorable for its mobilization on the basis of the program of revolutionary socialist internationalism. Alongside the deepening crisis of US imperialism and the intensification of global capitalist contradictions, there has been an immense growth of the international working class. Its economic weight and potential power has been vastly augmented by the emergence of massive urban centers, populated by tens of millions of workers, in countries where the proletariat had been until the last decade of the twentieth century only a small fraction of the population.

During the past decade there has been a steady escalation of the class struggle. A striking characteristic of the class struggle has been its international character. The revolutionary advances in communications technology are dissolving the barriers between the workers of different countries. Regardless of where it begins, the social conflict in any particular country almost immediately acquires an international audience and becomes a world event. Even the age-old barrier of language is being overcome by the application of translation and transcription programs that make documents and speeches, regardless of the languages in which they were written and spoken, easily comprehensible to a global audience.

These advances in technology facilitate a global revolutionary response to economic, social and political problems that confront the working class of all countries. Chinas sudden abandonment of its Zero-COVID policy in late 2022, resulting in more than one million deaths within less than two months, has demonstrated the impossibility of devising a national solution to a global crisis. This fundamental truth is being hammered home by the reality of the deepening social crisis.

The Ukraine war and the massive growth of military budgets have assumed the form of a war against the social conditions of workers in every country. Inflation, unemployment, and the slashing of budgets for social services has provoked an upsurge in strike activity throughout the world. Major social struggles have broken out on every continent.

Notwithstanding the differences that exist between countries, certain common features manifest themselves in the political conditions confronted by the working class in all countries.Regardless of how limited the demands of workers are, they confront bitter resistance from the employers and the state.

With ever greater frequency and intensity, the capitalist state is assuming direct leadership, on behalf of the ruling class, of the war against the working class. In countries as different in their economic development as Sri Lanka and France, the working class confronts as its central enemy the leader of the statein Sri Lanka, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, in France, President Emmanuel Macron. Despite their use of democratic phraseology whenever it is politically convenient, their decisions, relying on the police and military for their enforcement, assume a blatantly dictatorial character. The present universal breakdown of bourgeois democracy confirms the analysis of Lenin: Political reaction all along the line is a characteristic feature of imperialism.[9]

For this reason, the logic of the class struggle assumes the character of a political struggle against the state and raises the necessity for the development of independent organs of workers power. The call of the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee for the convening of a Socialist and Democratic Congress of Workers and Rural Poor, and the demand raised by the French section of the ICFI for the bringing down of the Macron government, are both necessary responses to the escalating conflict between the working class and the capitalist state.

A basic lesson of the twentieth century is that the struggle against imperialist war can be waged successfully only through the political mobilization of the working class on the basis of an uncompromisingly anti-capitalist, socialist program. All proposals for opposing war that ignore and cover up for the causes of warwhich are rooted in the nation state system and the capitalist profit systemare doomed to failure.

The great obstacle to the mobilization of the working class is the political influence retained by the pro-capitalist bureaucracies in the trade unions, reactionary labor and fake socialist parties, and a broad array of pseudo-left organizations of the affluent middle class. Their insidious influence must be overcome.

The International Committee has made significant advances in the development of an alternative revolutionary leadership in the working class. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is the concretization of the perspective advanced by Trotsky in the Transitional Program for the formation of factory committees. He called on the sections of the Fourth International to create in all possible instances independent militant organizations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society; and if necessary, not flinching even in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade unions.[10]

Moreover, the impulse given by the International Committee to the development of the IWA-RFC is based on Trotskys analysis of the fate of trade unions in the epoch of imperialism. In an uncompleted manuscript found on Trotskys desk after his assassination, he had written: There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely together with the state power.

It was, therefore, necessary to mobilize the masses, not only against the bourgeoisie, but also against the totalitarian regime within the trade unions themselves and against the leaders enforcing this regime.[11]

When the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left agents of the ruling class denounce the ICFI for opposing the unions, what they really are attacking is the refusal of the International Committee to accept the subordination of the working class to the dictatorship of the pro-imperialist and corporatist labor bureaucracies. Far from abstaining from the struggles of workers who remain within the prison walls manned by the police guards of the AFL-CIO in the United States, the IG Metall in Germany, the CGT in France and their equivalents all over the world, the IWA-RFC is involved in countless struggles within the trade unions, doing all it can to encourage and strengthen the rebellion against the bureaucratic apparatus. The votes cast by 5,000 auto workers in October 2022 for Will Lehman, the socialist candidate for the presidency of the UAW, who ran on a program that called for the establishment of workers control of the auto industry and the obliteration of the union apparatus, testifies to the growing influence and organizational and political potential of the IWA-RFC.

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is creating a worldwide network to assist in the development of a global strategy and the tactical coordination of the class struggle against corporate power and capitalist rule. Its aim is not to apply pressure upon and reform the reactionary bureaucracies, but to transfer all decision-making and power to the rank and file.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) is expanding its work to educate young people as Marxists, to develop their understanding of the struggle waged by Trotsky and the Fourth International against Stalinism and all forms of national opportunism, to turn to the working class, and to direct their boundless energy to the fight to build the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

The World Socialist Web Site, which is now celebrating 25 years of daily publication, is continuously developing the depth and scope of its political coverage and analysis of the class struggle, and on the basis of this essential theoretical work expanding the influence of Trotskyism in the struggles of the international working class.

The May Day rally will build on these achievements and dedicate the celebrationof this historic day of working class unity to advancing the struggle against war and for the transfer of power to the working class and the building of socialism throughout the world.

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Forward to May Day 2023! Build a mass movement of workers and youth against war and for socialism! - WSWS

In March, the administration of Howard University in Washington D.C. rejected without explanation an International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) request to hold a public antiwar meeting on its campus.

The decision is an act of censorship directed not only against the IYSSE but the democratic rights of all students and workers at Howard University. It sets a chilling precedent for freedom of speech at the university and beyond. We call on all students, faculty and staff members at Howard University to oppose this censorship and demand that the IYSSE be allowed to hold its planned meeting on campus!

The planned meeting is part of an international meeting series, The War in Ukraine and How to Stop it. The IYSSE has already held successful meetings in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Sri Lanka, the UK and Canada. The meetings focus on providing a historical background to the war and explaining the socialist perspective on how to fight it.

Howard University initially gave the IYSSE a tentative approval to host a meeting as part of this series on campus in an email dated March 14. Just one week later, on March 21, an official from Howard Universitys office of central scheduling rejected the event. Unfortunately, the officials email states, after reviewing this event with the appropriate personnel, we are unable to host this proposed event. Please know that this decision is not a reflection on yourself, your program, or your organization. Please let me know if there are any questions.

The IYSSE responded to this email by asking for the specific reasons for the rejection. The university has failed to provide an answer.

There are two fundamental questions that all students should ask:

First: Why are students and workers at Howard University deprived of the opportunity to hear about the historical background to the war in Ukraine and the socialist opposition to it?

It has been over a year since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Already, it is the bloodiest war in Europe since the end of World War II, with hundreds of thousands of casualties.

The dangers of this war cannot be overstated. It has the worlds most heavily armed nuclear powers on a collision course that threatens a planet-wide conflagration. This is not hyperbole. Without any democratic mandate or discussion, the US and NATO have armed the Ukrainian government to the teeth. In the past year, NATO has given more than $100 billion in weapons and war planning to the Ukrainian military. This includes budget-busting spending on the USs own military. The US and NATO are at war with Russia, in all but name.

The IYSSE, the student and youth organization of the International Committee of the Fourth International, opposes the Putin governments war in Ukraine. The IYSSE in the US works in solidarity with the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists in the former Soviet Union, who are fighting to mobilize workers and youth against this war, and oppose both the Putin government and the Zelensky government from a socialist standpoint.

from Mehring Books

The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

A left-wing, socialist critique of the 1619 Project with essays, lectures, and interviews with leading historians of American history. *Now available as an audio book from Audible!*

But our opposition to the Putin regime and its invasion of Ukraine comes from the socialist left, not the imperialist right. The fact is that the war in Ukraine was instigated by Washington and NATO. The official narrative given by the Biden administration about this war, that the Putin government is engaged in unprovoked aggression against its neighbor, is a self-serving lie. The US has not only invaded multiple countries and been at a constant state of war over the past 30 years. It has also systematically encircled Russia through the expansion of NATO and has been arming the Ukrainian regime for war since it coordinated the toppling of the pro-Russian Yanukovich government in the Maidan coup of 2014.

Washingtons real aim in this war is to assert US imperialisms domination over the vast resources of Russia and the former Soviet Union as part of a new imperialist redivision of the world. This insane operation has been intensified by the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the growth of class struggle internationally.

The IYSSE insists that students and workers have a basic democratic right to learn about this war, which has the greatest implications for their own lives and future. It is on Howard Universitys administration to explain why they refused to allow for a political discussion of these fundamental questions on their campus.

Second: Who were the appropriate personnel that rejected the IYSSE request to hold an antiwar meeting?

Howard University, a historically black college (HBCU), was founded after the American Civil War with the democratic goal to improve the education and advancement of disadvantaged persons in American society and throughout the world. Yet in its decision to reject, without any explanation, the IYSSEs request to hold an antiwar meeting on campus, Howard University repudiates the most elementary democratic rights of its students.

Students have a right to know who made this decision.

Was the university board of trustees involved? The boards leadership includes venture capitalists, along with representatives of Citigroup, ExxonMobil, and other corporations. Democratic Party congressional aides, media analysts and the cabinet officials of former Democratic presidents also sit on the board. In other words, Howard Universitys Board of Trustees represents the key shareholders of this war and the capitalist system as a whole: finance capital, big business, the media and the Democratic Party political establishment. These are the same forces that have helped instigate this war and have every interest in its continuation.

Students should also ask whether the universitys direct ties to the Pentagon played any role in this decision. In January, Howard University announced that it was forming a $90 million partnership with the US military to become the nations first HBCU-based University Affiliated Research Center. Announced to great fanfare, the director of Howards Data Science and Cybersecurity Center told The Dig that this initiative would provide operational advantages to our war fighters.

The Pentagon has already delivered tens of billions worth of weapons, including tanks and sophisticated weapons systems, to the Ukrainian army. It is, hence, an interested party in this war.

Oppose political censorship at Howard University! Build the IYSSE!

In Depth

The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

The act of censorship by Howard University comes amid a dangerous escalation of the war against both Russia and China, and growing effort to suppress discussion of revolutionary socialism as the genuine opposition to both capitalism and imperialist war. In Canada, Australia and New Zealand, IYSSE meetings have been threatened with censorship and its participants subjected to right wing threats by far-right Ukrainian nationalist and pro-NATO forces. Thuggish threats have also been launched against our comrades in Sri Lanka.

The IYSSE refuses to be intimidated by these attacks. We have held successful meetings in spite of these attacks and call upon Howard University students to fight for their right to hear the socialist perspective on the war in Ukraine.

This fight raises fundamental questions of political perspective. Howard University is at the center of a filthy nexus of the Democratic Party, big business, militarism and the promotion of identity politics.

At Howard, millions of dollars for ceremonial positions and lavish speaking fees have been showered on racialist ideologues such as Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nahesi Coates. Hannah-Jones, the multimillionaire author of the New York Times 1619 Project, a mythological, racial re-envisioning of American history as a nonstop war between whites and blacks, was given $20 million in seed money to establish a so-called Center for Democracy and Journalism at Howard.

This has occurred while the low-paid workforce is denied basic job protections and living wages. Meanwhile, the students live in dangerously unsanitary dorm rooms on the campus.

Nikole Hannah-Joness purported first-of-its-kind academic center committed to strengthening historically-informed, pro-democracy journalism has printed nothing about the plight of the staff, or its students, or the creeping hand of US militarism, for that matter.

The role of ideologues like Hannah-Jones is to cover up the basic class issues in society, while promoting the interests of the wealthy upper-middle class that is closely tied to the US capitalist system and war machine.

In opposition to these forces, the IYSSE and the World Socialist Web Site have exploded the racial myths of society and exposed the reality of the class struggle, both at Howard and more broadly in our refutation of the 1619 Project.

It is for this reason, above all, that the universitys appropriate personnel have sought to ban us. But in resorting to this attempt at censorship, Howard University has only revealed that it knows our views will find support at its institution among students and university workers.

We call on all Howard University students, lecturers and staff to oppose this antidemocratic ban on the IYSSEs antiwar meeting! Students and workers have a democratic right to learn about the war in Ukraine! Fight to build the IYSSE at Howard University! Get in touch with the IYSSE today to join our campaign against censorship at Howard and against the war in Ukraine!

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Original post:
Oppose political censorship of antiwar views at Howard University! - WSWS

It is baffling that some people feel they can hurl the word socialist at someone as a slur to insult and demean that person when in fact the U.S. is a mixed economy. It works according to an economic system that features characteristics of both capitalism and socialism. Most advanced countries have a mixed economic system that protects some private property and permits a level of economic freedom in the use of capital, but also allows for governments to intervene in economic activities in order to achieve social aims and for the public good. At its core, socialism is when a society does things for the common good.

Capitalism and socialism can work well together. They prevent one another from becoming too extreme, too radical. Extreme socialism leads to concentration of power which leads to tyranny. Extreme capitalism leads to concentration of wealth which leads to tyranny.

Taking up a collection in church to help a family whose house burned down is socialism. North Dakotas publicly owned bank is socialism. Municipally owned sports stadiums, our military, postal service, police and fire departments, public schools and parks, public infrastructure, Social Security and Medicare all are socialistic.

We are all beneficiaries of a capitalist, socialist society.

Joanne Garing

North Huntingdon

See more here:
Letter to the editor: Our capitalist, socialist society - TribLIVE

The El Maizal commune is one of the most dynamic communal experiences in the country (Photo: Comuna El Maizal/Twitter)

On 20 October 2012, during the last council of ministers of the Venezuelan government attended by Hugo Chvez Fras, the then president pronounced what went down in history as the golpe de timn, the change of direction of the Bolivarian revolutions policy towards socialism. In his speech at the Miraflores Palace, Chvez called for self-criticism and higher efficiency of state management, not simply by increasing the financial resources and institutional power of the ministries, but by strengthening peoples power through the comunas (communes).

The Bolivarian revolution was not to be limited to the seizure of the bourgeois state and the replacement of one ruling class with another. At the center of the process was always the aspiration to lead the transformation to a Communal State in which the communes form the political and economic basis of the future socialist society and in which the organized people build the conditions to meet their own needs. Chvez concluded his speech with the slogan commune or nothingeither the revolution invests in peoples self-organization and self-government, or the revolution is betrayed.

The problem Chvez posed in his last speech to the council of ministers refers to one of the central problems of any revolutionary movement, namely the relationship between the party, government, and organized people in the process of building socialism. Based on a meticulous study of revolutionary experiences in history, Chvez asked himself how to build the political process of socialism beyond the action of the state, and directly with the people.

Chvezs slogan from 10 years ago has in the meantime grown and turned into concrete projects that the organized Venezuelan people continue to protect using all means necessary as they advance along the path of the socialist revolution.

Beyond the rhetoric of the Western media, the Venezuelan people still constitute the key actors in the Bolivarian revolution. For many, the communes serve as a primary instrument for building socialism. The Ministry of Popular Power for the Communes and Social Movements, led by Jorge Arreaza, has registered 3,600 communes. However, according to ngel Prado, one of the founders of the El Maizal commune in the state of Lara and a member of the national leadership of the Union Comunera, There are only about 500 communes really active throughout the country. In 2021, Prado was also elected mayor of Simn Planas for the PSUV, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela founded by Chvez in 2007.

On March 4 and 5 of 2022, some 60 communes from the five regions of Venezuela founded the Union Comunera in a first congress held in the El Maizal commune. The Union Comunera is a kind of trade union of the communes, the result of an organizational process started years ago. Today, it occupies a decisive role in the daily life of the communes: it coordinates and acts as a multiplier of the communes experiences accumulated over the last 15 years, elaborates and disseminatesinternally and externallythe organizations political line, and builds political, ideological and technical training programs according to the needs in the territories. The Union Comunera was an important step forward in stabilizing the idea of communes in the country, Prado adds.

The El Maizal commune is one of the most dynamic communal experiences in the country. Established on March 5, 2009, it encompasses a territory of 2,300 hectares between the two states of Lara and Portugesa in the west of the country and more than 3,500 families with a total of 14,320 people. This is a territory that before the start of the Bolivarian revolution was abandoned by public institutions and where people lived in absolute poverty with precarious housing and an agricultural production that was barely enough for their own consumption. Surplus products were bought by intermediary traders who paid them a paltry price. This reproduced the subordination of direct producers to the arbitrariness of middlemen, large landowners, and multinational corporations.

With the rise of Chavismo, the situation changed radically. In 2009, the Chvez government enlarged the highway connecting Caracas with the West. The Comandante visited the construction site and stopped at the municipality of Sarare where he visited us. This meeting was decisive for the development of our communes and thus the whole territory, says Jos Luis Sifontes, one of the PSUVs provincial commune policy coordinators. From 2009, we started to occupy abandoned land and greenhouses and set up communal production units that were then regularized by the government. We have also built houses for about 300 families and school facilities for the whole territory. The funding came from the Great Housing Mission and the Ministry of Peoples Power for Education, but we did the work ourselves.

The beginnings of the El Maizal commune are exemplary for the dialectic between the socialist government and the peoples power of the communes. Driven by Chvezs electoral victory and the democratization of the countrys political and economic structures, the self-organized people acted on the territory, creating the conditions to meet their needs autonomously. The Chavista government, in turn, provides support where the communes need it, respecting the forms of territorial self-government. This is also the framework that can help one understand the regularization of occupied land, the financing of housing and schools and many other government projects in the territories. The government therefore does not simply control its citizens with policies from above, but provides the framework in which the people expand their participation from below. The commune activists insist, however, that building self-government is not simply a (precarious) balancing act between public institutions and popular power, but the permanent quest for total autonomy in the territories through communes.

Today, 14 years after the foundation of El Maizal commune, around 120 direct producers run 14 food production units: white and yellow maize, beef and pork, eggs, milk and cheese, coffee and various vegetables. In addition, a company created in 2011 manages the distribution of gas throughout the commune. Thanks to this collective management of the production and distribution of basic necessities, the commune largely succeeds in guaranteeing food sovereignty, which the activists describe as a fundamental weapon against the sanctions imposed by the United States, which, especially during the years 2015 and 2021, caused severe consequences among the Venezuelan population.

A second fundamental weapon against the political and economic isolation produced by US imperialism is international solidarity. The Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil (MST) has sent its members to be part of its internationalist brigade in Venezuela since 2005. Their function is summed up in their slogan technicalize knowledge, elevate consciousness. In the different areas of agricultural production in the country, the MST supports producers thanks to the experience and knowledge accumulated over the last 40 years of occupying land, building camps all over Brazil, and developing sustainable agriculture against agribusiness that exploits workers and destroys territories.

In the El Maizal commune, specifically, the internationalist brigade has helped run the Che Guevara Agricultural School for three years. Thanks to the permanent presence of the MST, the school offers technical, but also political and ideological courses in which several dozen young people from the area can perfect their learning of agricultural techniques and elaborate the deeper meaning of territorial production in the construction of socialism. This school does not replace the public school, but adds to it.

If El Maizal represents the ideal example of an agricultural commune, the Eternal Commander March 5 socialist commune is one of the most advanced urban communes in terms of territorial rootedness. Located in the El Valle neighborhood, it covers a hill of over 11 hectares of the city, brings together some 6,000 inhabitants and has 19 socially-owned production units. This is an area where problems existed before the revolution and continue to exist today: many homes do not have running water, electricity is precarious, to reach the highest homes one has to climb hundreds of stairs without the possibility of using public transport.

The young militants active in the barrio are mostly organized in the Left Cultural Front (FCI). In the neighborhood that approaches the main street Av. Intercomunal de El Valle, two militants, Gabriela and Ericsson, welcome me and tell me about their journey. The FCI was born in 2010/2011 as a student movement. We came into contact with the world of communes initially thanks to El Maizal began to work on political-ideological training. Then, in the years 2017/2018, we built brigades that went across the country to bring together the experiences of the communes. From there the idea of the Union Comunera was born.

Communes are not only political-organizational structures in a given territory, but they should create their own economic-productive base. In the urban context, socially-owned enterprises cannot produce food like in rural communes, but they are active in the service and distribution sector, often from shops, which play a fundamental role in the neighborhood. Gabriela explains: Here we sell products from the other communes, such as coffee, panela, cocoa, products from the Andean areas. This economic exchange constitutes the financial base of the communes. But that is not all, because the construction of a network of producers and territories has a political and educational purpose. By doing this, we strengthen the role of the communes and insist on the centrality of organization in the revolutionary process.

At least two other projects of the March 5 Commune deserve attention. The first is a recycling system that on the one hand helps to build sustainable garbage collection, and on the other provides jobs for people living in the area. Together with the Peoples Power Ministry for Ecosocialism, a recycling training school has also been opened where people can learn work techniques another example of the government-peoples power dialectic with the aim of strengthening the peoples way to socialism. This moral economy is an essential element in the formation of a workers consciousness that is not simply based on exchange value, but on concepts such as self-organization, mutualism, and sustainability.

The second area of political work is called La Ruta de las Flores. It is a feminist communal policy that offers answers to the needs of women, children and adolescents in the area. I met Emily, 24 years old and also a militant of the FCI, in the Communal Technical House Tejiendonos Mujeres, a feminist meeting center of the March 5 Commune. She explains to me that their organization does not simply stop at the practical issues of feminist intervention such as sex education, campaigns against gender violence, network of psychologists supporting women and children, etc. They are working on drafting a text of theoretical orientation that seeks to establish a communal feminist line that combines gender and class contradictions. We are not against men, we dont want half the cake or to overturn gender relations, we dont want to be either leaders or oppressed. What we want is to change the recipe of the cake, we want another way of relating on all levels, Emily told me.

Capital is not simply an economic relationship between workers and bosses, but a relationship that touches every social sphere, even outside the world of work. Socialism therefore cannot be limited to changing economic property relations, socialism is also a cultural and moral issue. The Ruta de las Flores is an example that highlights the moral significance of the communes as organizational instruments that aim to permanently create new social relations. Started in the March 5 Commune, this feminist project now exists in four other communes in the states of Sucre, Lara, Miranda and Tchira.

Ten years after the death of Hugo Chvez, political participation of the people, self-organization, and self-government from below continue to constitute the soul, body and heart of Chavismo. The construction of socialism, however, cannot be limited to local activism. Jos Luis Sinfontis recalls how Chvez also insisted on this: Before his death, Comandante Chvez explained it precisely in one of his speeches: those who stop at the local cannot build socialism; localism is counter-revolutionary.

The other slogan of the communes, independence, commune and socialism, sums up this internationalist perspective. Independence: from foreign interference, especially US imperialism, but also from multinationals and the national bourgeoisie with special interests (large landowners, private investors etc.). This independence also means food, political, and economic sovereignty. Commune: commune or nothing, a revolutionary process that is not top-down, with the belief that the communes can serve as a tool against the bureaucratization of the party and government. Socialism: acting local is not enough, communes without clear structures, without a government, and without socialist policies are reduced to petty-bourgeois localism.

The militants in the different territories of the country fight for the communes, as they attempt to transform Venezuela into a communal, socialist state.

See more here:
The advance of the commune in Venezuela - Peoples Dispatch