By CLIFF CONNER Following World War II, a think tank named the RAND Corporation took the lead in formulating policies guiding military-industrial Big Science. Some of the titles of books and articles about RAND provide a hint of what it represented in the public imagination: “The Think Tank that Controls America,” “America’s University of Imperialism,”…
By CHRISTINE MARIE “Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression.” Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya; forward by Lise Vogel (London: Pluto Press 2017). Social reproduction feminism is not new. Marxist thinkers began to focus in earnest on the relationship between production and social reproduction in capitalist society nearly 40 years ago, in the context of what…
By GARY BILLS We are republishing an article that appeared in the print edition of Socialist Action newspaper in May 2007. The article is pertinent to the widespread discussion on gun control today, when some are calling for repeal of the Second Amendment. After a horrific gun crime like the one at Virginia Tech [32…
By KAMRAN NAYERI and ALIREZA NASSAB The following paper was prepared for and presented at the III Conferencia Internacional de La Obra de Carlos Marx y Los Desafios del Siglo XXI (The Third Conference on the Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st Century) in Havana, Cuba, in May 2006. The conference was organized…
By JEFF MACKLER This is the second part of a series of articles. Part I appeared in the October 2017 issue of Socialist Action. The Russian Revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (Nov. 7 in the new calendar) remains the seminal event in modern human history, if for no other reason that it marked the first…
Connecticut: ‘Solution is Socialism’ By KEITH LESLIE — NEW BRITAIN, Conn. — On Nov. 4, Socialist Action Connecticut and the Central Connecticut State University Youth for Socialist Action held their second annual conference, entitled “The Solution is Socialism.” More than 100 workers, students, and activists from as far away as Alabama turned out for a…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Following is the text of a talk delivered by the author on Nov. 4 at the “The Solution is Socialism” educational conference in Connecticut. The conference was hosted by the Youth for Socialist Action chapter at Central Connecticut State University, where the sessions were held. Usually, when I begin a talk about…
By JEFF MACKLER Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Vladimir Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, famously argued that the “Russian Question” was key to the standing of every party on earth that claimed allegiance to the heritage of revolutionary socialist politics. To this day, 100 years after Lenin’s Bolshevik Party led the world’s first…
By JOHN LESLIE On Nov. 3, 1979, members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party (ANP) attacked an anti-Klan march in Greensboro, N.C., that was organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP). Five members of the CWP were murdered and 10 others were wounded with the collusion of federal and local law…
By CHRISTINE MARIE and ANN MONTAGUE This is a particularly important moment to be considering the meaning of the Russian Revolution for women, LGBTQI activists, and gender politics. We have seen the protests against the Misogynist in Chief by more than 3 million U.S. women being channeled into clubs to rebuild the Democratic Party in…
By BARRY WEISLEDER “James Connolly and the Reconquest of Ireland,” by Priscilla Metscher. (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 2002), 243 pages. The aftermath of the 101st anniversary of the Easter Rising is a good time to become (re)acquainted with the views of the great Irish republican socialist, James Connolly. Though many of today’s Irish nationalists and “socialists” pay homage…
By DAVID JONES “Trotsky in New York 1917, A Radical on the Eve of Revolution,” by Kenneth D. Ackerman. (Berkeley, Calif., Counterpoint 2016), $30. One hundred years ago, on Jan. 13, 1917, the small Spanish passenger vessel SS (or Vapor Correo) Montserrat (Vapor is Spanish for steamship, Correo for mail) arrived in the harbor of…
By DAVID KIELY and CHRISTINE MARIE With the advent of the Trump administration and a conservative Congress, women and their allies marched in Washington and in hundreds of other cities on Jan. 21. The fact that the Washington march blossomed from a little seed into a huge national undertaking almost overnight is a sign that millions…
By LAZARO MONTEVERDE “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” by Leonardo Padura. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2014. Originally published in Spanish in 2009 as “El hombre que amaba a los perros.” Available in hardcover and paperback in both languages. With the publication of “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” Cuban writer Leonardo Padura joins the…
By CLIFFORD D. CONNER “Unsinkable Patriot: The Life and Times of Thomas Cave in Revolutionary America,” by Michael Schreiber, 2016. Available from Amazon, 737 pages, $25.95. Thomas who? If Thomas Cave’s name does not ring any bells, it does not indicate a deficit in your education. He was not an outstanding historical figure in any…
By CHRISTINE MARIE — NEW BRITAIN, Conn. — An ambitious Youth for Socialist Action educational conference drew close to 100 participants, including students from at least six different colleges, to Central Connecticut State University on Saturday, Oct. 22. The conference was opened by the past president of the CCSU YSA, David Kiely, who said that…
By LAZARO MONTEVERDE Sept. 11, 2016, marks the 43rd anniversary of the violent 1973 coup in Chile against the elected left popular front government of Salvador Allende. Like the ancient Roman god Janus, imperialism has two faces. One face is political, the other economic. We must, if we wish to change the world, understand both…
The Seventeenth National Convention of Socialist Action was held Aug. 19-21 in Kansas City, Mo. The convention was preceded by the party’s traditional three-month pre-convention discussion period, which included some 50 written contributions from SA members. Delegates from across the country presented reports of their work in many movements—including struggles against global warming and for climate justice,…
By MARK UGOLINI John Riddell and Mike Taber, “To the Masses” (Haymarket Books 2016), 1299 pp., $55 Thanks to John Riddell and Mike Taber for the huge effort over many years that has brought us “To the Masses” and the other wonderful books that make up their series on the Communist International in Lenin’s time.…
By MICHAEL SCHREIBER The autumn of 1805 was unusually mild. Farmers were able to plough their land almost until Christmas. And in Philadelphia, the balmy temperatures might have “gone to the head” of a group of journeymen cordwainers [shoemakers], who had the temerity on Nov. 1, 1805, to undertake what was one of the earliest…
By NICK BAKER We are seeing a renewed interest in socialism today. The campaign of Bernie Sanders, who claims to be a “democratic socialist” to mask his 98-percent Democratic Party-line voting record, has given much publicity to the word “socialist,” and many young Sanders supporters call themselves socialists. The Sanders candidacy is no accident. His…
On the fortieth anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Rebellion in South Africa, we reprint two articles from International Viewpoint, the English-language on-line journal of the Fourth International. The author of the first article, Noor Nieftagodien, is the head of the History Workshop at Wits University. The second author, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, is currently a PHD student…
By BARRY WEISLEDER Is it time to build an international revolutionary workers’ party? James P. Cannon consistently said yes. Isaac Deutscher, for most of his adult life, said no. Both were highly esteemed Marxists, selflessly dedicated to workers’ self-emancipation. But their difference on this crucial point amplified important political divergences. Some 45 years after their…
By BRUCE LESNICK I wholeheartedly support the populist programs that Bernie Sanders advocates—from single-payer health care, to free college tuition, to taxing the rich and more. But borrowing from Malcolm X [see excerpt below], Bernie is a house socialist and I’m a field socialist. Bernie doesn’t want to replace or overthrow capitalism. Like all house socialists, he thinks capitalism can be fixed or tamed…
By GEORGE BRYAN — SPECIAL FEATURE: Seven presentations from the debates — Two Socialist Action-sponsored public forums entitled “Debating the 2016 Presidential Election and the Key Issues of our Time” attracted a total of 250 Bay Area political activists in Oakland and San Francisco over the weekend of Feb. 5-6. Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the Democratic…
