By Suzanne Weiss

March 11, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Against the Current — From its beginnings in the 1800s, modern socialism has embraced equality and liberation for women. The socialist movement has made a major contribution to political, cultural, and intellectual changes challenging women’s second-class status. For many women, joining a socialist movement opened the road to developing their talents, achieving social influence, and contributing to social change.

At first, the socialist movement was almost entirely male. Beginning in the late 1800s, women socialists played an increasing role, including in leadership positions. Although few in number, their involvement ran far ahead of women’s participation in mainstream political life.

By Giacomo D’Alisa

March 11, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Undisciplined Environments — In a recent article Michael Lowy ponders if the ecological left has to embrace the ecosocialist or the degrowth ‘flag’; a concern that is not totally new. Lowy is a French-Brazilian Marxist scholar and a prominent ecosocialist. Together with Joel Kovel, an American social scientist and psychiatrist, in 2001 he wrote An ecosocialist manifesto, a foundational document for several political organizations worldwide. Thus, entering into a discussion with Lowy is not a simple academic whim, but a demand that many politically-engaged people of the ecological left are wondering about.

By Max Elbaum

March 11, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Organizing Upgrade — Even before the semi-formal anointment of Trump as the GOP’s post-2020 top leader at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Feb. 28, the twice-impeached former President had been awarded the crown.

Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, considered Trump’s most powerful opponent in the media-proclaimed “Republican Civil War,” had surrendered without a fight. On Feb. 13 he had told the country, “Trump’s actions that preceded the [Jan. 6] riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.” Four days later he said on FOX News that he would “absolutely” support Trump for President if he was the 2024 GOP nominee.

That’s game over. The Trump-provoked, Confederate-flag-waving assault on the Capitol Jan. 6 didn’t split the GOP. Rather, it revealed that from bottom to top the Republican Party has become even more Trumpified than it was while Trump was President.

By Reihana Mohideen

March 6, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — There is an active, strong and militant women’s movement in the Philippine. To a large degree the Philippines women’s movement is also an anti-capitalist movement, and it has had a significant political impact on the left, the labour movement and on politics in general.

There is an understanding that all issues are women’s issues and that there are no artificial divisions between women’s issues and issues taken up by the labour movement and the movements of the urban poor, peasants, students and other sectors. With all the issues facing the poor majority in the Philippines, women are the ones who are hardest hit, whether it be poverty, the economic crisis, job losses, contractualisation, healthcare, reproductive health, education, oil prices, corruption, governance, the illegitimate debt, war, militarism, climate change, and other environmental issues. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is a clear illustration of this.

By Seiya Morita

March 5, 2021  — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Michael Löwy's article "Leon Trotsky, prophet of the October Revolution" in Imprecor[1], the French-language journal of the Fourth International, is an excellent piece overall. However, I would like to point out that his statement about Russian Marxism includes a couple of misunderstandings.

By Kevin B. Anderson

March 5, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from MROnline — It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.

By Bryan Palmer

March 5, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Canadian Dimension — Born poor on Belfast’s Shankill Road in the midst of the Great Depression was certainly no entré to a life that would cross paths with Bertrand Russell, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Ernest (Ernie) Tate would nevertheless work closely with luminaries such as these and many others who, like him, opposed the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. A lifelong revolutionary socialist, Tate was a leading organizer of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, worked for Russell’s Peace Foundation and its International War Crimes Tribunal, and partnered with the then leftist, David Horowitz (now a prominent conservative spokesman), in taking the anti-war side at an Oxford Union debate.

By Don Fitz

March 5, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — March 2, 2021, was the five year anniversary of the murder of Berta Cáceres, who opposed the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras. That date was less than one month after the deaths of dozens of people from the Tehri Dam disaster in Uttarakhand, India. The two stories together tell us far more about consequences of the insatiable greed of capitalism for more energy than either narrative does by itself.

By David Broder

March 5, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Weekly Worker — To accuse others of ‘misuses’ of Antonio Gramsci might sound like the defence of some stale orthodoxy. But the challenge is, if anything, to assert the communist character of the Sardinian Marxist’s actual work, in the face of its dominant political and academic uses.

In a famous 1976 book Perry Anderson counted Gramsci among the first generation of so-called “western Marxists” - an array of thinkers counterposed to the “construction of socialism” in the eastern bloc.¹ In the then Trotskyist-influenced Anderson’s reading - and in the more acid tones of Domenico Losurdo’s more recent work² - western Marxism had come to represent a gradual distancing of Marxist analysis from any connection to party-building or political practice. Such a trend intensified over the first half of the 20th century: hence currents like the Frankfurt School were focused on academic production rather than writing for party newspapers.

By Saladdin Ahmed

March 5, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Islamo-leftism is one of the latest rhetorical inventions of the Right propagandists in France and the United States. This term is just another device to obscure reality by classifying the perceived enemies of White nationalism under one term. Equating political Islam and leftism can only be a sign of: 1) genuine political and historical ignorance, or 2) racism. 

To unpack this, let us analyze the terminology and look at a few historical facts. Let us also be charitable in our interpretation and assume that those who adhere to the term “Islamo-leftism” do not mean to implicate “Islam” as such simply, because that would be absurd given that “Islam” refers to a religion with thousands of variations and hundreds of millions of believers, just like Christianity. 

By Kshama Sawant

March 5, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Alternative (US) — The reemergence of a socialist movement in the United States, and rapid growth of organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Socialist Alternative (SA), is of enormous historical importance. This is not only because Marxism is beginning to take root again on the hard soil of U.S. capitalism, but also because of the enormous challenges facing the working class in this period.

Capitalism is in the midst of its worst crisis in nearly a century, and it is a compound one – not only do we face the deadly disasters of COVID-19 and the economic collapse, but also the coming climate catastrophe. The disasters we’ve seen in the past year could become far worse unless socialists and the working class rise to the historic tasks in front of us.

By Dave Holmes

February 26,2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Arguing for Socialism — In a recent Green Left article Dave Bell raised some important issues about China. What is China’s place in the world economic and political system, what is its influence in Australia and how should socialists should relate to it?

Introduction by Richard Fidler

February 26, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Life on the Left — I first met André Frappier in the late 1970s, when we were members of the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue ouvrière révolutionnaire, a pan-Canadian Marxist cadre organization. When the league decided to hoist its banner in the 1980 federal election campaign, André — already well-known as a union militant — was chosen as our candidate in a downtown Montréal riding. (No, he was not elected!)

Along with many others, André and I parted company with the RWL/LOR soon afterward. For André, this was by no means the end of his political activism, quite the contrary, as this recent interview by Pierre Beaudet shows. It is published in the current issue of Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, no. 25, winter 2021, under the title “À contre-courant : André Frappier, toujours présent,” also published as a separate text on the NCS webpage.

My translation, along with a few supplementary notes and this introduction.

* * *

By Dick Nichols

February 25, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The February 14 elections in Catalonia took place in a phantasmagorical setting created by the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ruling of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia that they had to go ahead despite the danger of an increased infection rate in a country where 20,000 have already died of the pandemic.

As a result, 25% of the 90,000 citizens chosen by ballot to staff polling stations requested exemption; candidates gave rousing speeches to vacant halls while thousands of eyes watched on over Zoom, and the TV debates between the lead candidates were weird combinations of robotic set speeches and uncontrollable screaming matches.

With COVID-19 still raging in a half locked-down country, it was inevitable that the abstention rate would surge and decide the main issue in the elections: would the independentist majority in the Catalan parliament withstand the onslaught of Spanish unionism, this time carried out under the banner of the Party of Socialists of Catalonia (PSC), the Catalan affiliate of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE)?

Introduction and translation by Richard Fidler

February 25, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Life on the Left — The following is the third of a series of articles on contemporary imperialism by Argentine Marxist Claudio Katz. I translated the first article (The United States’ failed imperial recovery) and cited a section of the second in my review of the work of Leo Panitch (Remembering Leo Panitch). In this third instalment, Katz draws attention to what he considers an increasing asymmetry between the enduring geometry of post-WWII imperialism and the changing features of 21^st century global capitalism.[1] Katz published his text under the title “La indefinición imperial contemporánea.”

By John Molyneux

February 25, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Global Ecosocialist Network — Ecosocialism now rests on strong theoretical foundations as a result of the tremendous pioneering work done by John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, Michael Lowy, Ian Angus, Fred Magdoff, Kohei Saito, Jonathan Neale, Sabrina Fernandes, Martin Empson, Patrick Bond, the adjacent work of Naomi Klein and many others. As a result of this work we can confidently assert that:

By LeftEast

February 25, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from LeftEast — This year the Turkish government’s campaign to stamp out dissent has broken new ground, but a new spirit of resistance is there to meet it, particularly at one of the country’s landmark public universities. In what follows, two participants in the oppositional student movement at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul tell us about their struggle against the imposition of a new rector aiming to put the university securely under the command of the ruling party.

By John Riddell

February 13, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Project — The socialist movement lost an outstanding educator and organizer with the passing of Ernest (Ernie) Tate in Toronto on 5 February. An outstanding partisan of global anti-imperialist solidarity, Ernie also contributed, with his partner Jess MacKenzie, to building revolutionary Marxist groups and to promoting socialist unity in Canada and Britain.

Raised in an impoverished working-class community in Belfast, Ernie left school at age 14, taking a job at Belfast Mills as apprentice machine attendant. An avid reader and a rebel at heart, Ernie sympathized – unusually, given his Protestant background – with the Irish republican movement.

During a youthful jaunt through France in 1954, Ernie was deeply impressed by the mass solidarity actions celebrating the victory of Vietnamese freedom fighters in Dien Bien Phu. The following year, Ernie took the path of so many of his countrymen and emigrated, settling in Toronto.

By Jessica Bell, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal 

Introducing BA Santamaria[1]

“Sometimes depicted as a man totally dedicated to principle, even perhaps despite consequences, he emerges…rather as an agile political pragmatist reformulating theory to suit the purpose at hand…

“[Santamaria’s] driving will is the explanatory key which allows us to see our intrepid anti-communist crusader not so much as a grand conspirator, but as a tragic figure in the classic sense, whose own indomitable will and imagination betrayed him, seducing him into a political adventure which was bound to fail.”

– Fr Bruce Duncan[2]

‘To change masters is not to be free.’—José Martí.

By Ian Ellis-Jones

February 12, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Cuba — perhaps more than most other countries — has been the victim of imperialism and colonisation.  

The greatest impact of imperialism and colonisation is on people, in particular, indigenous people. Cuba is no exception.