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This is the report delivered by Deepal Jayasekera to the 2022 International May Day Online Rally held on May 1. Jayasekera is the assistant national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka. To view all speeches, visit wsws.org/mayday.

Every bourgeois government in South Asia is engulfed by the immense economic, political and social crisis of global capitalism, highly intensified by the more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and the present US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

As part of an international upsurge of the class struggle, the workers, youth and rural toilers throughout South Asia have entered into struggle, including strikes and mass protests against the ruling class onslaught on their basic social and democratic rights, which is placing the full burden of the economic crisis on them.

India has been caught up in the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, with intensified pressure from Washington on Delhi to break its decades-long ties with Moscow and closely line up with the US against Russia, as in the US-India military-strategic partnership against China. The US-NATO war drive against Russia, with its associated harsh sanctions on Moscow and the resulting breakdown of the global supply chain, has severely intensified Indias economic crisis.

In this situation, the working class and rural toilers in India are entering into struggle against increased attacks on their social and democratic rights by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Several million workers participated in the March 28-29 general strike.

In Sri Lanka, the global crisis of capitalism finds its sharpest expression. Growing popular protests throughout the island demanding the resignation of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse have shaken the government to the core. Since April 9, thousands have engaged in continuous protests, day and night, at the main protest site at Galle Face Green, in central Colombo. These mass protests have been triggered mainly by widespread anger over shortages of essentials like fuel, cooking gas and medicines, skyrocketing prices and hours-long daily power outages.

Working people, youth, professionals and the rural poor are united in this popular uprising, which cuts across all linguistic and religious communal linesSinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Christiandefying decades-long reactionary efforts by all sections of ruling class to whip up communalism to divide and weaken the working class.

Now, the mass protests have reached a turning point, with the working class deciding to intervene. On April 25, about 250,000 teachers throughout the island joined a one-day strike demanding the resignation of the Rajapakse government. Three days later, millions of workers all over the country joined a one-day general strike with the same demand.

This intervention on the part of the working class has further deepened the political crisis confronting the Rajapakse government. The government is hanging by a thread, effectively losing its majority in parliament, with 40 of its members announcing that they will act independently in the future.

Desperate to cling to power, the Rajapakse government is biding its time and plans to unleash a brutal police-military repression against the mass uprising. On April 11, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, in an address to the nation, issued a thinly veiled threat to anti-government protesters that his government will launch a brutal crackdown if they fail to end their campaign.

Just eight days later, a heavily armed police battalion opened fire on thousands of people protesting against fuel price hikes in Rambukkana, killing one worker, Chaminda Lakshan, and injuring dozens more. This shooting is a clear warning to working people and rural toilers and also an obvious signal to investors and global bankers that the government is prepared to crush any popular opposition to its harsh austerity measures.

As with the government, the opposition bourgeois parties are terrified that the current anti-government uprising will develop into a militant movement challenging bourgeois rule as a whole. Sections of the ruling class and main parliamentary opposition parties, the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), are working to trap dissent within capitalist rule through the formation of an interim government, which will definitely continue with same IMF-dictated austerity measures, further worsening the conditions confronting the working people and rural toilers.

In this situation of the governments preparations for a brutal crackdown and opposition parties interim government trap, the anti-government popular movement faces a grave danger flowing from its lack of a clear political perspective and program to fight bourgeois rule, despite its determination and militancy. This has been clearly shown by the list of demands published by the organizers of the Galle Face protests as the alternative, rejecting the Prime Ministers April 13 offer for talks with them.

While demanding the resignation of Gotabhaya and Mahinda Rajapakse, they have advocated an interim government formed from the existing parliament, excluding anyone from the Rajapakse family; empowerment of the 19th amendment to the constitution, which had made cosmetic changes to some powers of the widely hated executive presidency; a mechanism for taking back all the wealth plundered by members of the Rajapakse family and their associate officials; and holding presidential and general elections within a six-month period.

Galle Face protest organizers, while promoting no politics, are actually advocating politics similar to bourgeois parliamentary oppositionthe SJB and JVPwhich are exploiting popular anger against the government to bring an alternative capitalist government to power, which will not only not resolve any of the burning issues confronting the working people, but will makes them worse. The ruthless demands of global finance capital will not be lessened but further intensified in the near future.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is actively intervening in this popular movement, advocating an independent working class revolutionary socialist program and perspective.

As elaborated in its statement on April 7, the SEP, while standing squarely behind the demands of working people: Gota has to go! raises this demand: What is to replace him? It is not enough to demand Rajapakses removal . [A]s a key step in addressing the current political crisis, the SEP demands the immediate abolition of the executive presidency, which, with is sweeping autocratic powers, holds a gun to the heads of the working class.

The SEP is proposing that the working class fight for the establishment of a government of workers and peasants that will be committed to socialist policies. Such a government will be established through independent organs of the working class. Our proposal to the working people is to form their own action committees at every factory, workplace, plantation and neighborhood, breaking from the trade unions, which are acting as an industrial police force against workers on behalf of the government and employers.

The SEP statement on April 7 has proposed a program and policies to animate the work of the Action Committees to address the pressing needs of the masses, including the repudiation of the debt of the small farmers, fishermen, small industrialists and businessmen; for workers democratic control over the production and distribution of all essential items and other resources critical for the lives of people,; to nationalize the banks, big corporations, plantations and other major economic nerve centers; to repudiate all foreign debts; and to say, no to the austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank.

The fight of the Sri Lankan working class, rallying poor farmers and other oppressed masses, for a government of workers and peasants based on socialist policies is part of a broader struggle for socialism in South Asia and internationally, to be conducted with the unity of their class brothers in South Asia and globally.

Build the International Committee of the Fourth International in South Asia!

by David North, Chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board

40 minutes

by the Young Guard of the Bolshevik-Leninists in Russia

10 minutes

by Evan Blake, Coordinator of the Global Workers' Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic

14 minutes

by Michelle, a working parent in Michigan, USA

3 minutes

by Eric London, Socialist Equality Party (US)

12 minutes

by Keith Jones, National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada)

10 minutes

by Tomas Castanheira, Socialist Equality Group (Brazil)

9 minutes

by Deepal Jayasekera, Assistant National Secretary of the Socialist Eequality Party (Sri Lanka)

11 minutes

by M. Thevarajah, Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)

14 minutes

by Christoph Vandreier, National Secretary of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Germany)

9 minutes

by Chris Marsden, National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK)

8 minutes

by Alex Lantier, National Secretary of the Parti de l'Egalit Socialiste (France)

9 minutes

by Ula Atei, Sosyalist Eitlik (Turkey)

9 minutes

by Nick Beams, Socialist Equality Party (Australia)

13 minutes

by Gregor Link, International Youth and Students for Social Equality (Germany)

5 minutes

by Cheryl Crisp, National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia)

10 minutes

by Tom Peters, Socialist Equality Group (New Zealand)

8 minutes

by Joseph Kishore, National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (US)

12 minutes

The rest is here:
May Day 2022: The significance of anti-government popular protests in Sri Lanka and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party - WSWS

France'slong-established Socialist Party has fallen into line behind the hard-left France Unbowed, joining a left-wing alliance aimed at depriving President Emmanuel Macron of a majority in parliament in next months elections. Some party heavyweights see it as the final nail in the coffin of the fracturedSocialists; others feel it's an opportunity for revival. But does the PS really have a choice?

Winning just 1.8 percent of the vote in the presidential election first round in April, the Socialist Party (PS) hit a new low in its steady decline towards political oblivion.

In the red corner, Jean-Luc Mlenchon with his hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) movement scorednearly 22 percent and is now running in whathes termed "the third round" vote. The 70-year-oldwantsto force the freshly re-elected Macron into a power-sharing government, with himself as prime minister.

It's a long shot, but Mlenchon inched a step closer on Wednesday when LFI convinced the PSto follow the French greens (EELV) and Communist Party (PCF) and join the "Social and Ecological People's Union"(NUPES).

It means they will field one list of candidates rather than compete against each other in legislative polls on 12and 19June.

Former Socialist president Franois Hollande hadwarned that snuggling up to LFI "called into question the very history of socialism" and could lead to the "disappearance of the the Socialists". Hevowed toturn down any deal.

But PCF leader Fabien Roussell gave a wake up call sayingno one on the left couldwin on their own. PS leaders subscribed to his message and ignored Hollande's.

"We want to elect MPs in a majority of constituencies to prevent Emmanuel Macron from moving ahead with his unjust and brutal policies and to beat the far-right," the PS and LFI said in a joint statement.

The alliance still needs to be approved by the PS's governing bodies on Thursday evening.

Someformer Socialist Party heavyweights, known as elephants, remainstaunchly opposed at what they see as a threat to the party's social-democratic identity.

Former Socialist prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he had quitthe party and would follow other prominent figures in rallying Macron.

But the elephants are no longer representative of the left.Indeed many disgruntled Socialistsblame Hollande himself for taking the party on a more economically liberal course, paving theway for Macron and soundingthe party's demise.

Arecent Ipsos pollshowed 56 percent of voters wanted Macron to lose the legislatives and go into a "cohabitation" with the hard left, while 57 percent supported the left uniting tofieldjoint candidates.

Sojoining NUPESmay be a gamble worth taking.

"What's certain is that given LFI's score, it's impossible [for the left] to remain outside of the LFI alliance," says political historianChristophe Batardy.

Parties have to win at least 12.5 percent of the vote to qualify for the second round. Presidential poll results based on France's 577 constituenciessuggest"the left wouldn't even feature in half of the constituencies in the second round", Batardy explained.

"Mlenchon alone would get 15 percent and the left alliance 30 percent," he told RFI.

The PS and its affiliateshold28 of the 577 seats in parliament peanuts compared to the ruling LREMs 267.

Under the deal, parties will run on the united ticket in a maximum of "winnable"seats.LFI is set to run in the most constituencies, EELV in 100, the PS in 70 and PCF in 50.

"Seventyconstituencies is a good deal," political scientist Christophe Bouilloud told RFI.

"After its memorable defeat in the first round, the only ambition PS leaders can have is to salvage what can be saved, to savethe outgoing MPs."

If the gamble pays off, it wouldbe "the affirmation of a political force on the left".

But someSocialists are refusing to stand down. Stephane Le Foll, a former minister under Hollande, said he was ready to lead them in a separate campaign.

"Its cobbled together,"snorted former Socialist prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, denouncing the "exorbitant price" the PS was paying by being absent in some 500 constitutuencies.

There are also solid financial reasons why the PS needs more MPs.

Like EELV andthe right-wing Republicans (LR), the PS got less than 5 percent of votein the first round of the presidential polls. This means campaign costs are not reimbursed.

MPs bring in much-needed funding.

"Parties get 37,000 per year for every MP, and there is also1.64for every vote a candidate gets," Batardyexplains.

"So there are both existential and very big financial stakes in this election."

"It was either lay down or perish,"says Jean Petaux, a political scientist in Bordeaux. "Some PS heavyweights think the party will just end up being a branch of LFI."

But Bouilloud is more upbeat, seeing the albeit risky alliance as "an extraordinary opportunity" to clarify the political chess board on the left.

"Peopleopposed to the deal will most probably rally around Macron's majorityand that will clarify a lot of things because LREM has always been, structurally, a breakaway of the right withinthe Socialist Party."

It's a reminder, he says, that a large part of Hollande's electorate in 2012 moved over to Macron in 2017 and are still with him in 2022.

"There's no need for a PS in the centre or to the right of the political spectrum.LREM more than enough occupies that role in French politics."

The deal reflects common ground between the PS and LFI, particularly on social policy.

Candidates running under the NUPES banner will defend raising the minimum wage, reducing retirement age from 62 to 60,capping prices on essential productsand rolling back some of the market reforms introduced underHollande.

But itinvolvesbig compromises, notably on Europe, with Mlenchons eurosceptism contrastingsharply with the Socialist Partys history as a driving force for European integration.

The agreement signed with EELV mentions unilaterally "disobeying"the provisions of some EU rules if they prevent the implementation of social and economic goals.

The deal signed by the PS, however, refers to "temporary exemptions" rather than disobedience and says they must remain "within the rule of law".

Nonetheless, the very notion of defying EU regulations has caused consternation in Brussels.

EU law is already suffering from verbal attacks from people like [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban and [leader of Polands ruling Law and Justice party] Jarosaw Kaczyski,"Philippe Lamberts, co-leader of the Greens group in the European Parliament told Politico online.

"If the French do it too, there is a risk that the whole EU construction will collapse.

This could all be a storm in a tea cup, however, with observers suggestinga forced cohabitation between Macron and Mlenchon remains an unlikely scenario.

"It would be a democratic miracle if this left alliance were victorious," Bouilloud says.

"It's the first time there's been a push during a mandate to try and upturn the result of a presidential election by imposing a cohabitation on a newly re-elected president, and we have no idea how the electorate will react."

PS elephants may be riled over what they see as humiliating concessions to Mlenchon, who broke from their own partyin 2008after failing to dilute its pro-EU stance and has criticised it ever since. But LFI also needs the PS.

"LFI needs the rest of the left to get an absolute majority and govern," says Elisa Steier, author of Genesis of the Plural Left.

"There is still a big fragility within LFI and the PS hasn't forgotten that," she told RFI.

"LFI is not anchored locally, whereas the PS has both local notoriety and adeep knowledge of the country.

"It's difficult for the PS, but we probably shouldn't bury the party too soon."

Go here to read the rest:
Will crawling into bed with France's hard left save or sink the Socialists? - RFI English

This letter is in response to Stan Shingaras April 4 letter to the editor, Freedom has never been free.

Thank you Mr. Shingara for your service to our country. Before my response, it is important to understand the definition of socialism and communism.

Websters Dictionary definition: Communism is a system of government where the state controls the means of production, a single authoritarian party holds power. Socialism is a social system in which the producers possess political power and the means of producing and distributing goods. A blend of socialism and democracy has served us well for decades. Most notable socialist programs are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, N.A.S.A., military, vaccines, health care for veterans, and assistance programs.

To suggest that President Biden is the leader of the socialist Democratic party is ludicrous. Biden served 36 years in the U.S. Senate and eight years as vice president. There are no politicians, Democrat or Republican, state or national, that support replacing democracy with socialism.

Communism would never happen in the U.S. ever. Biden responsible for high gas prices, rampant inflation, crime, illegal immigrants, drugs killing thousands of Americans, people infected with COVID-19? No facts to support any of the above.

Great danger when people are constantly lied to, people believe the lies. Are you referring to former President Trumps lies about Biden stealing the election?

$31 trillion national debt. $4.1 trillion was spent on COVID-19. Trump increased the national debt by $7.7 trillion. When Congress passed Trumps tax cut for the rich and corporations he went to his Florida resort and essentially said to his millionaire friends, I just made you millions of dollars and me too.

Compromised military unable to protect nation. U.S. defense spending is more than China, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Germany combined. The U.S. military is the best trained, best equipped, most dedicated men and women on this planet.

William Albertson Sr.,

Milton

Continued here:
Socialism and democracy | Opinion | dailyitem.com - Sunbury Daily Item

The dominant historical narrative of the twentieth-century US left is overwhelmingly secular, neglecting the role of religion. Nowhere is that more evident than the virtual absence of A. J. Muste from American historical memory. When Muste appears in history books, it is often solely in reference to his influence on civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet Muste was a leader in the most important social movements of the twentieth century not only civil rights but socialism, labor, civil liberties, pacifism, and the antiwar movements. He was a beloved figure on the US left, known for his unique ability to transcend bitter sectarian conflicts and build coalitions which advanced common purposes, as Michael Kazin has observed. When Muste died in 1967, newspapers in the United States, India, and around the globe proclaimed that the world had lost the American Gandhi.

To understand the twentieth-century US left, then, one must understand A. J. Muste and the religious faith that animated his commitment to socialism and nonviolence.

Mustes radical career began during World War I. A Dutch immigrant, he had been raised and ordained in the Calvinist Reformed Church of America. But when he accepted a pastorate in Upper Manhattan, he began taking classes at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, which pushed him toward a modern religiosity and sensibility.

In 1914, Muste left the Reformed Church to become the minister of a more liberal congregation outside of Boston. Once there, he felt a deep connection to the regions history of nonconformity. He joined the Socialist Party and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a transnational organization whose members pledged to build a world-order based on Love by following the example of the life and death of Jesus Christ.

Yet pacifism and socialism were anathema in the repressive atmosphere that swept the country after President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany. Muste lost his pulpit and became a founding member of the nascent American Civil Liberties Union.

Still eager to put his radical ideals into practice, Muste traveled in 1919 to nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, to see if he might be of service to the thirty thousand textile workers on strike, in one of the many industrial conflicts during a year that saw millions walk off the job. He was quickly elected head of the strike committee, having earned the trust and admiration of workers for his inspiring speeches and pragmatic ability to get things done.

After four violent and turbulent months, the strike ended in victory with Muste elected national secretary of the newly formed Amalgamated Textile Workers of America. The union would ultimately be defeated by the Red Scare that blanketed the United States in the postwar years, but Muste had found his cause: only through working-class internationalism, organization, and power would a new world be born.

These views placed him on the far left of the FOR, which insisted that strikes were coercive and therefore a form of violence. More broadly, mainline Protestantism was far too identified with the status quo for Mustes taste. It now seemed to him that the revolutionary left was the true church. Here was the fellowship drawn together and drawn forward by the Judeo-Christian prophetic vision of a new earth in which righteousness dwelleth.

Mustes commitment to labors emancipation continued through the 1930s. The Musteites, as they were known, differed from other left-wing groups in their preference for action over theory, believing that praxis was the most effective method for building working-class consciousness and power. By the early 1930s, they could boast of having organized hundreds of thousands of workers in their Unemployed Leagues and of playing a leading role in the movement for industrial democracy including the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike, one of the crucial strikes of the New Deal era.

But, in 1935, the Musteites made a fateful decision to merge with the Communist League of America, a Trotskyist group led by James P. Cannon, and form the Workers Party USA. It didnt go well. The Trotskyists reneged on the conditions of the merger and worked behind the scenes to undermine Mustes leadership.

Broken in body and spirit, in the summer of 1936, Muste vacationed in Europe, where he found himself drawn back into Christianity. While sightseeing in Paris, he entered a church where he was saved, he would later recount, by a mystical experience that reignited his religious faith and his commitment to nonviolence.

After his reconversion to Christianity, Muste came to see his experience on the secular left as a parable for the limitations of left-wing political action that de-emphasized individual morality. As he would argue in his 1940 book, Non-Violence in an Aggressive World, the proletarian movement had been right in prophesying that men cannot live the good life under a bad system, but they had erred in assuming that a good system would automatically create good men. Questions of ethics and morality of the relationship between means and ends had to be faced if radicals hoped to build a just and peaceful society. If we are to have a new world, Muste asserted, we must have new men; if you want a revolution, you must be revolutionized.

Mustes critique echoed that of other leftists who had begun to rediscover the virtues of democracy in the face of Stalinism. Yet whereas many of them were on the path toward deradicalization, Muste developed a new left politics for the American Century an era characterized by US military and cultural dominance, a Cold War with the Soviet Union, a nuclear arms race, and decolonization in the Global South. Essentially, Muste envisioned the creation of a new church, or fellowship, that would prophetically oppose racism, nationalism, and war using Gandhian satyagraha or, as he called it, nonviolent direct action.

In 1940, Muste was given the chance to realize his vision when the FOR hired him as national secretary.

The organization was roiled with crisis, constantly grappling with the meaning and ethics of pacifism in the context of acute class struggle and the rise of fascism in Europe. Keen to maintain its political relevance in the face of dwindling membership and prestige, the national committee had decided it was finally time to overcome its apprehensions about the coercive aspects of Gandhian nonviolence and put it into practice as a method of social change. With his impeccable radical credentials, Muste was the ideal figure to move the peace movement in this new direction.

Mustes efforts sparked a renaissance in American pacifism. He hired a slew of young organizers, including James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and Glenn Smiley, to carry out his vision. The main targets of their early experiments with nonviolence were racial discrimination and segregation. In numerous forums, Muste made the case that Christians should refuse to cooperate with Jim Crow institutions and practices.

Under his leadership, the FOR and its sister organization, the Congress of Racial Equality, desegregated restaurants, swimming pools, and other sites of consumption throughout the Midwest and Northeast in the 1940s and 1950s. When a grassroots civil rights movement blossomed in the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama, Muste was largely responsible for raising financial and institutional support to send figures like Rustin, Smiley, and James Lawson to the South, where they trained activists in nonviolent tactics.

Martin Luther King Jr himself gave Muste immense credit, arguing in 1963 that the current emphasis on nonviolent direct action in the race relations field is due more to A. J. than anyone else in the country.

Muste and other pacifists who embraced nonviolence in the 1940s were not only concerned with attacking white supremacy but also American nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Their concerns had magnified with the dropping of the atomic bomb and the onset of the Cold War. To persuade his fellow Americans to repent for the sin of atomic warfare and renounce the bomb, he and other radical pacifists engaged in civil disobedience against the war-making and conscripting State by refusing to register for the draft or pay taxes for war.

Pacifist resistance failed to spark an antiwar movement in the early years of the Cold War, so dominated by anti-communist consensus and political conformity. But this began to change in the mid-1950s amid rising concerns about nuclear fallout, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchevs denunciation of Stalin.

Seizing the opportunity, Muste attempted to revitalize and unite the US left around anti-militarism, nonalignment in the Cold War, and revolutionary nonviolence. These efforts included the founding of Liberation magazine in 1956, which would become an important organ of the New Left, and the formation of a new group called the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) to promote and coordinate civil disobedience campaigns.

Muste was at the center of the action. As head of CNVA, he organized and participated in countless demonstrations, including a 1959 protest at the Mead Missile Base in Omaha, Nebraska, which featured the seventy-four-year-old Muste climbing over the fence and being arrested by the authorities.

He also built connections with the European peace movement and with anti-colonial activists in Africa and India. Among the most dramatic transnational peace protests he helped organize were the 1959 Sahara protest against nuclear imperialism, the 1961 San Francisco to Moscow March for Peace, and the 1963 International Friendship March from New Delhi to Peking. The alliances and friendships that came out of these efforts made Muste an internationally renowned peace leader, earning him the moniker American Gandhi.

Starting in 1964, Muste became utterly consumed with ending the war in Vietnam. I cannot get it out of my head or my guts that Americans are away over there, he said, not only shooting at people but dropping bombs on them, roasting them with napalm and all the rest. Over the next several years, he worked relentlessly to overcome the divisions in the broad left and the peace and civil rights movements, which were inhibiting a stronger stance against President Lyndon B. Johnsons war. These efforts culminated in the formation of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (aka the MOBE), with Muste serving as national chairman.

Muste called for nonviolent resistance to the war, presiding over the draft card burnings at the US Capitol and participating in myriad civil disobedience campaigns. His final act of defiance, at age eighty-two, was to bypass the State Department and visit with Ho Chi Minh to convey the spirit of peace to the stricken people of Vietnam. He died on February 11, 1967, soon after his return.

Central to Mustes enduring radical politics was his philosophy of history as a joint project of human beings and God. Drawing parallels to his biblical namesake, Muste held that history began when Abraham left the city of his ancestors. By going out to find a city which existed and yet had to be brought into existence, Abraham demonstrated that divinity was to be found in the history of human work and creation.

For Muste, the crucial thing about men, or societies, is not where they came from but where they are going. It was precisely when human communities decided to intervene in their own destiny that history was made rather than lived.

The decades since Mustes death havent been pretty for left-wing politics. The Left has faltered and declined, at times losing faith even in the power of human beings to make change. But Muste would have insisted on the human and divine imperative to continue dreaming and creating. Without a vision, the people perish, he wrote in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, paraphrasing Proverbs 29:18.

Regardless of whether one shares his pacifism or religious faith, Mustes thoughtful and determined efforts to win a more just, peaceful world should inspire us to rebuild a dynamic left that can once again reshape US politics.

See the original post:
AJ Muste Was a Prophet of the 20th-Century US Left - Jacobin magazine

As the Russian governments criminal war in Ukraine continues, socialists in the US have forcefully condemned the invasion while focusing most of our energy on opposing the potentially catastrophic escalation in tensions between Russia and the United States. This in turn has resurrected a common accusation from the post-9/11 years that in taking such a strong antiwar stance, the Left isnt being true to our own values.

After all, the criticism goes, were supposed to be internationalists. But if were willing to abandon the Ukrainian people by criticizing the US government coming to their aid or, in earlier versions of this accusation, if we oppose the military liberation of Iraqis or Afghans arent we showing ourselves to be not internationalists but isolationists?

Absolutely not. Opposition to war and the militarism of our own government has always been at the heart of what leftists mean by internationalism.

The International Workingmens Association, later known as the First International, was founded in 1864 to bring together the worlds left-wing parties and trade unions. Primarily led by Karl Marx, it also included a significant faction around the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

While the two factions had fundamental disagreements, they agreed on issues of war and peace. Both took it for granted that workers in every country should oppose the wars declared by capitalist governments but fought by the working class. And both found inspiration in the 1871 Paris Commune, a brief revolutionary experiment that flowered at the end of the Franco-Prussian War when workers and disenchanted soldiers took over the municipal government in Paris and instituted radical policies like reopening abandoned factories under workers control.

The song most associated with left-wing internationalism, The Internationale, was written by a French Communard, Eugne Pottier. His anthem has been translated into every language and sung around the world by socialists, communists, and anarchists ever since. Heres the direct English translation of some of the original French lyrics:

Let the armies go on strike / Guns in the air, and break ranks / If these cannibals insist / On making heroes of us / Soon they will know our bullets / Are for our own generals

Shortly after the Commune was crushed the French and Prussian governments united to destroy this experiment in working-class power, massacring vast numbers of Communards in the process the International Workingmens Association collapsed amid factional strife between Marxists and anarchists. About a decade and a half later, though, the mass socialist parties that were springing up around the world came together to form the Socialist International the Second International. In the decades leading up to World War I, the congresses of the Second International repeatedly passed resolutions promising that if their respective governments tried to go to war with one another, the socialist parties in each country would instigate general strikes to stop their respective war machines from churning.

When war actually came, some member parties like the Socialist Party of America and the Bolsheviks in Russia stuck by their word. Many conscripted European soldiers also continued to wonder if they might have more in common with each other than with the officers on the front or the bosses at home.

The Christmas Truce of December 1914, in which some soldiers on both sides defied the higher-ups to celebrate the holiday together, was one early manifestation of this impulse. In 1917 and 1918, the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia (on the slogan Land, Peace, Bread) and the kaiser was brought down in Germany (when a mutiny in the Navy stopped an attempted last stand to stave off German defeat). In the United States, the most famous expression of this anti-militarist sentiment was the fiery 1918 speech that socialist leader Eugene V. Debs gave in Canton, Ohio. The master class, Debs proclaimed, has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

Unfortunately, though, most of the social democratic parties in Europe got caught up in the patriotic fervor instead of staying true to their earlier commitments. In Germany, for example, socialist parliamentarians voted for war credits and enthused about a war of liberation that could witness the tsars prisons thrown open by soldiers marching under the German flag.

In the early days of the war, those who held fast to their principles and rejected the war met in neutral Switzerland for the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference. These were the socialist movements hard-core internationalists. The conference presaged the formation of the Third International the Communist International, or Comintern after the Russian Revolution.

In its own very different way, the Comintern would eventually fail in its mission of promoting global working-class solidarity against the bosses and generals in every country. When the Bolsheviks first took power, they assumed that either the revolution would spread to the West or it would be crushed in Russia. Neither happened, and eventually the Soviet Union emerged as an important global power in its own right and the Comintern became an arm of its foreign policy.

But the core ideas of working-class internationalism animating all three Internationals continue to guide many on the Left.

At its core, socialism is about empowering the working class and not just the part of it that lives in the United States. Wars are one of the most extreme ways imaginable that ordinary people can be disempowered. Politicians declare the wars, their capitalist friends make a killing manufacturing the guns and bombs, and working-class people on both sides are literally killed.

Vladimir Putin and his oligarch friends, for example, are in no more physical danger than Dick Cheney and his friends at Halliburton were during the war in Iraq. Its working-class Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians who are doing the dying now and who will continue to die in even greater numbers if people like Hillary Clinton get their openly expressed wish and Ukraine becomes an Afghanistan-style quagmire for Putin.

In Debss Canton antiwar speech, he praised those few German socialists who had the courage to stand by their antiwar convictions and spoke of the thousands of socialists who have languished in the jails of Germany because of their heroic warfare upon the despotic ruling class of that country. He took it for granted that solidarity with them and opposition to the war that was being waged by his government against theirs went hand in hand the same approach taken by Jacobin writers who express love and solidarity for the brave antiwar protestors in Russia while also opposing calls for deeper or more direct US involvement in the conflict.

Thoughtful people can disagree on some of the particulars. New York magazines Eric Levitz, for example, argues that sending some level of military aid to Ukraine isnt an imperial intervention so much as a means of enabling Ukrainians to fight on their own behalf, and that without such military aid to the Ukrainian government, the Russian government has little incentive to get serious about peace negotiations.

Others, like my Jacobin colleagues Branko Marcetic and Daniel Bessner, have argued that the Joe Biden administration has consistently displayed a disinterest in pursuing a negotiated settlement instead of inflicting maximum military pain on Russia, and that there are far greater possible downsides to flooding the country with weapons than NATO-friendly progressives are willing to grant ranging from making the war longer and bloodier to Osama bin Ladenstyle blowback resulting from US arms winding up in the hands of far-right forces like the Azov Battalion.

They also point out that if were serious about winding down the military-industrial complex and no longer having the United States in the business of keeping the world supplied with deadly weapons, we have to start opposing arms transfers in particular cases even when there may be real trade-offs and that in any case, given the long history of unintended consequences from Western military interventions, the best things we can do for Ukrainians are to focus on humanitarian aid, promote peace negotiations, and admit refugees. Whats happening right now may be an arms dealers dream, but there are a great many ways it could be a nightmare for everyone else.

Other issues are vastly easier calls for anyone with an anti-militarist bone in their body. A no-fly zone, for example, would be the height of insanity. It wouldnt lead to World War III. The American military entering a war zone with the announced intention of shooting down Russian planes would be World War III. The only remaining question would be whether it would stay conventional or confirm Albert Einsteins prediction that, whatever weapons World War III is fought with, World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

That scenario is thankfully quite unlikely although heading off even a 1 percent chance of the end of human civilization should surely be at the top of any remotely sane list of priorities. Such a war would bring far more suffering to the segment of society that started it than any previous war, but all wars, conventional or nuclear, bring devastation to people at the bottom. Even in a global thermonuclear conflict, if there are any escapes to be had, either to mineshafts ( la Dr Strangelove) or spaceships ( la Dont Look Up), theyll only be available to the wealthiest and best connected. As with all previous wars, the rest of us would be fucked.

The lack of a mass socialist movement in the United States and similar societies has meant that what previous generations of leftists understood as internationalism often feels like a half-garbled memory. But before throwing around the term, we should remember its history ranging from Eugne Pottier writing about armies going on strike and workers around the world singing that song in their own languages to Eugene V. Debs going to prison for declaring his solidarity with the German working class by opposing sending the US working class to kill them.

Its a term that has always meant opposition to both foreign tyrannies and allegedly anti-tyrannical wars that never seem to play out like their cheerleaders predict. Its what the Industrial Workers of the World were singing about in one of my favorite lyrics in the IWW songbook:

Well, Ive been agitatin now for fifty years or more / for jobs or for equality and always against war

You want to talk about the tradition of socialist internationalism? Thats the tradition.

Accept no substitutes.

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No, Left-Wing Opponents of War Aren't Isolationists - Jacobin magazine