Category: Party of Communists USA
U.S. Communists Oppose Move of Embassy to Jerusalem; Call for Immediate Recognition of Independent Palestinian State by U.N.
worker | December 9, 2017 | 9:28 pm | Announcements, Donald Trump, Imperialism, Party of Communists USA, Party Voices | Comments closed

The Party of Communists USA (PCUSA) condemns and vehemently opposes the unilateral decision of US President Donald Trump to recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel and transfer the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This decision by Trump is not supported by the vast majority of the American people, and has been roundly condemned around the world. The Turkish Party of Labor, or Emek Partisi (EMEP) described the move as a provocative act. PCUSA believes that we in the US bear a special and urgent responsibility to fight this cataclysmic move with all the political and economic might we can muster. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) struggle must intensify in every trade union, community organization and political formation.

In the US, writing for the organization Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbi Alissa Wise pointed out the danger of the Trump decision: “There’s a reason the status of Jerusalem hasn’t been determined yet – it’s at the core of the struggle against permanent Israeli domination and Palestinian dispossession. [And] we have to take the initiative and start conversations not just about what happened today, but what’s been happening for the last 70 years and more.”

 In Italy, the Unione Sindicale di Base (USB) said: “The decision of the current U.S. President to transfer his embassy to Jerusalem reiterates, in a very delicate phrase of political and military tension in the Middle East, the war choices adopted by this administration in every geopolitical scenario, from Latin America up to the Far East.”

From Cyprus, the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL), representing a neighboring country in the region of Palestine and Israel warned, “[T]his provocative decision constitutes a flagrant violation of the Palestinian people’s national rights and represents support for the Israeli occupation, threatening to undermine the possibility of a two-state solution and to provoke new conflicts both in Jerusalem and in Palestine, and more broadly throughout the region.”

Reaction to the Trump decision inside Israel was swift: “Trump is a crazy pyromaniac capable of setting the entire region ablaze with his madness,” stated the leader of the Joint List, Members of Knesset (MK) Ayman Odeh. “If there is one thing that the past few days have proved, it’s that the US shouldn’t remain the sponsor for discussions between Israel and the Palestinians,” Odeh added. “If the Israeli government wishes for the world to recognize West Jerusalem as the Israel’s capital, all it needs to do is recognize East Jerusalem as the capital city of Palestine.”

It is the responsibility of every Communist and peace loving person to stand on the side of peace. It is the responsibility of every Communist Party to organize for peace and to stand together alongside those forces fighting for peace. The PCUSA, therefore, without reservation or hesitation, condemns the Trump decision and its imperialist, war making intentions. In the words of the Spanish republic fighting fascism in 1936: THEY SHALL NOT PASS!

California: Communists to celebrate the 100 years of the October Revolution in Los Angeles
worker | November 17, 2017 | 7:36 pm | Announcements, Party of Communists USA | Comments closed

Friday, November 17, 2017

California: Communists to celebrate the 100 years of the October Revolution in Los Angeles

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/11/california-communists-to-celebrate-100.html
An event in honour of the 100 years since the Great October Socialist Revolution has been scheduled to take place on Saturday 18th November in Los Angeles, California. Below you can read the details about the event:
When: November 18th, From 2-4 PM.
Where: 1st Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, 2936 8th Street, Los Angeles, CA. 90005 (Severance Room).
Program: Tribute to John Reed: “Ten Days That Shook The World”.
Film: “Life of Lenin”, Music: Revolutionary Songs.
Food & Refreshments, Book table.
For more info email: info at partyofcommunists dot org. 
RECOMMENDED PCUSA ACTION: Write or call your Member of Congress and tell them to keep DACA and Pass the DREAM Act
worker | September 11, 2017 | 8:27 pm | Announcements, DACA, Dream Act, Party of Communists USA | Comments closed

This morning Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration will “wind down,” and in six months, end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a Department of Homeland Security initiative put in place in 2012 that temporarily deferred the deportation of approximately 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. DACA has been an unqualified success and has benefited not only the DACA recipients themselves, but also the country and the economy.

The young immigrants who met the requirements and passed the necessary background checks for DACA were promised by the federal government that they would not be removed from the United States for two years at a time, as long as they kept applying to renew, kept a clean criminal record, and were either enrolled in school or graduated, or serving in the military or honorably discharged. Because of these requirements, we know that nearly all of the recipients are deeply integrated into their local American communities and labor markets.

Along with protection from removal, DACA recipients are entitled to receive an employment authorization document (EAD), allowing them to be employed in the United States legally, along with certain other benefits. More than 100 legal experts and 20 state attorneys general have recently argued that DACA is a lawful use of the executive branch’s prosecutorial discretion, and as I have written before, the granting of an EAD to deferred action recipients is clearly authorized by statute. Together this means that eliminating DACA is entirely a political decision and not a legal one. The impact of this political decision is significant: 800,000 young immigrants—many of whom have never known another country except when they were small children—will become instantly deportable and lose the ability to work legally and contribute to the United States, and will be effectively left without labor rights and employment law protections in the workplace.

To call this decision tragic is an understatement. Not only is it inhumane—after President Trump promised to treat DACA recipients with “heart”—but the evidence is clear that DACA has positively benefited the U.S. labor market. The vast majority of DACA recipients are employed, 87 percent, and on average DACA recipients saw their wages increase by 42 percent after receiving an EAD. Those gains—and the higher tax revenue to the federaland state and local governments that have accompanied it and benefited public coffers—are now in jeopardy.

President Trump has also repeatedly voiced his desire to help improve working conditions for American workers, but by ending DACA he is harming the U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who are employed alongside DACA recipients. Once DACA recipients lose their work authorization, they will effectively be unable to complain when they are paid below the minimum wage, aren’t paid for overtime hours, or when their employer subjects them to unsafe conditions at the workplace. All immigrant workers who are unauthorized are often too afraid to speak out when employers take advantage of them, because they know their bosses can threaten them with deportation and use their immigration status to retaliate against them. The impact of this is not theoretical: research has shown that unauthorized immigrants suffer much higher rates of wage theft than U.S. citizens. The reasonable fear unauthorized workers feel keeps them docile and quiet, which in turn diminishes the bargaining power of Americans who work alongside unauthorized workers. Ending DACA and forcing these young workers out of the formal, regulated labor market, thus making them easily exploitable, will not help American workers, it will do the opposite.

Ending DACA will destroy the educational and employment prospects of 800,000 young immigrants who did nothing wrong, while at the same time hurting the wages and labor standards of American workers. If President Trump were serious about improving labor standards for working people, he would reconsider and reverse his decision.

Party of Communists USA (PCUSA) – The October Revolution: A Beacon for Americans Today
worker | August 14, 2017 | 8:18 pm | Party of Communists USA, Russia, USSR | Comments closed

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Party of Communists USA (PCUSA) – The October Revolution: A Beacon for Americans Today

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/08/party-of-communists-usa-pcusa-october.html
The October Revolution: A Beacon for Americans Today.
Contribution of the Party of Communists, USA (PCUSA) at the Scientific Conference in honor of the 100 years since the October Revolution.
Leningrad, August 10-13, 2017.
This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the socialist revolution in Russia. It was the first time that the working class anywhere in the world was able to seize and hold power. The revolution grew out of the conditions of imperialism and the First World War. Russia had been ruled by a tsar, or emperor, making it one of the most reactionary regimes in Europe.
In the 1930’s, when the entire capitalist world sank into depression, and tens of millions were left jobless and starving (much like today), the Soviet Union was forging ahead building a new society without unemployment and hunger. They transformed a country with a 90% illiteracy rate into one in which nearly everyone could read and write.
The Soviet Union not only freed the workers but also fought against racism and sexism. The great Afro-American activist Paul Robeson said about his trips to the Soviet Union, “I felt like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being.”
Achievements of the Revolution.
Under the Bolsheviks the last serfs of Europe were freed and the country was transformed into a modern, industrialized socialist state. The prison house of nations became the community of nations.
The Soviet Constitution abolished racism and every man and woman were guaranteed the right to work, A 40-hour work week, social security, housing, food, education, and medical care were the law. Child labor was abolished; Homosexuality was decriminalized; and Women for the first time were granted the right to vote, hold office, and were paid the same wages as men.
Influence Abroad: The West Invaded and later Pushed “Reforms” to forestall Revolution.
Fearing the spread of Soviet socialist revolution, Winston Churchill remarked, “We have to strangle the baby in the cradle.” Thus in 1918, an Expeditionary Force consisting of 17 nations and 22 legions invaded the young Soviet Union. It was during this war that the British army first used chemical weapons in battle. Over 8 million people were killed, but the Soviets defended their revolution and the invaders were expelled by 1921.
The benefits of the Bolshevik Revolution were not limited to Russia alone. The 40-hour work week, minimum wage, social security, abolition of child labor, free education, the right to clean water, and many other concessions that Americans now take for granted are a by-product of socialism. President Roosevelt did not “give” these concessions. It was the militancy of workers led by a young, militant American communist party who were inspired by the example of their Russian comrades.
The Soviet Union Rescues the World from Nazism.
When Mussolini, Hitler, and the rest of the Fascists unleased war upon the world, it was the Soviet Union that bore the brunt of the attack. The battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of the Second World War. The total number of Soviet lives lost exceeded 22 million.
The accomplishments of building socialism and defeating fascism are a tribute to the leadership of the Communist Party and its General Secretary Joseph Stalin. Communists are reviled by anti-communist “historians” in the pay of world capitalism for this reason.
During the post-war period, the Soviet Union became a beacon for workers in the West that demanded greater concessions from their capitalist masters. The USSR with its policy of proletarian internationalism, provided a shining example to national liberation movements throughout; Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
To destroy the Allied alliance which included the Soviet Union, finance capital replaced Henry Wallace with Harry Truman on the Democratic Party ticket in 1944. Truman became President when President Roosevelt died. The Truman administration started the Cold War, which began with the first use of nuclear weapons that were dropped on civilian centers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. It was Karl Marx who said we should “question everything.” It was Lenin that pointed out in history we must view everything from a class viewpoint; who benefits from capitalist policy?
The Capitalist-owned mass media began a propaganda war falsifying history against the Soviets and their allies, concealing their true motives for dropping those nuclear bombs on Japan. Western Capitalists spent trillions of dollars over many decades trying to defeat socialism militarily. Unable to defeat the USSR with an escalating arms race, the Western powers funded a counter-revolution inside the country led by Mikhail Gorbachev and other traitors. The Soviet Union did not collapse. She was betrayed by paid anti-communist forces within Russia.
Lessons to Be Learned.
We know from our study of history that the return of capitalism to the USSR is a temporary historical setback. Without the USSR and a strong world communist movement to act as a brake on capital, we live in an era of widening imperialist wars, fascist attacks on the working class, mass unemployment, drug addiction, diseases like AIDS and Hepatitis C killing millions.
Our movement is daily studying to learn from the Soviet Union’s great battles and achievements as well as the human errors that led to her deliberate destruction. The main lesson we learned from the tragic collapse of the USSR is that reformism and concessions to capitalism only lead workers to defeat, and a life of poverty and insecurity.
We honor the bold fight by the workers and peasants in the Bolshevik Revolution against capitalism and for a working-class socialist world.
Today, we must organize workers, students and soldiers in the USA to build a mass working class Party that will turn this era of imperialism into a new, higher stage of human development called socialism.
From our historic viewpoint, the Soviet experiment was not a failure. It was a successful first step towards building a scientific socialist society. Its success can be measured by the economic reforms that workers in the US and the West have today. It’s no accident that the quality of life for workers in capitalist countries has deteriorated substantially since 1992, the year the USSR went out of existence. The success of national liberation movements in China, Vietnam, DPRK (North Korea), Cuba, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Angola to be free of colonial oppression are a direct result of the Leninist policy of Soviet proletarian internationalism.
Let us be inspired by the shining example of October to create a new, socialist-communist world free of all exploitation and imperialist war! Long live the example of the 1917 Revolution! Peace, land, bread!
We Communists have been peace activists all our political lives. That is why we find life today so troubling. The two USA parties of monopoly capitalism, the Democrats and Republicans, worship war and military spending. Along the way, they corrupt the minds of workers and promote hatred among peoples. It has been suggested that the leaders of these parties are addicts, that they are addicted to war. The truth is that the capitalist economic and social system that these parties represent cannot exist without war and conquest.
We founded the PCUSA in 2014 precisely because we saw the urgent need to build a strong Communist movement in the United States that would not tap dance around the peace issue. We need a fearless voice to represent the working class on the peace question. This is the job of every Communist.
The centennial of the 1917 October Revolution to be commemorated in New York (Left Forum, 2-4 June)
worker | May 26, 2017 | 6:39 pm | Announcements, Marxism-Leninism Today (MLToday.com), Party of Communists USA, Party Voices | Comments closed

Friday, May 26, 2017

The centennial of the 1917 October Revolution to be commemorated in New York (Left Forum, 2-4 June)

 https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-centennial-of-1917-october_26.html

Marxism-Leninism Today is co-organizing a panel commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution at the Left Forum in New York City.

Jointly co-sponsored with the Party of Communists USA, the panel is entitled: “The Russian Revolution and its Indelible Stamp on the Course of World History”  
The event will take place on Sunday, June 4th at 10:00 AM. Room 1.124 John Jay College, 899 10th ave (between 58 & 59th Sts.).
Featured panelists include Zoltan Zigedy and Joseph Jamison both members of the Editorial Board of Marxism-Leninism Today;  George Gruenthal an officer of the PCUSA; and Grover Furr Professor at Montclair State University and author of  several volumes , including “Khrushchev Lied“; “Yezhov vs Stalin” and “Trotsky’s Amalgams”.
Party of Communists, USA: Statement of the PCUSA Peace and Solidarity Commission on Global War
worker | April 25, 2017 | 8:11 pm | Analysis, Canada, class struggle, DPRK, Imperialism, Party of Communists USA, political struggle, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine | Comments closed

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Party of Communists, USA: Statement of the PCUSA Peace and Solidarity Commission on Global War

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/04/party-of-communists-usa-statement-of.html
Statement of the PCUSA Peace and Solidarity Commission on Global War.
US imperialist aggression and military preparations throughout the world are solely menacing an imminent outbreak of WWIII. All its desperate confrontational maneuvers in every embroiled theatre, whether through a growing number of European states to threaten the Russian Federation, or in Syria, Iraq or Yemen, on the Korean Peninsula or in the South China Sea threatening China, are toward that unified (rationally unthinkable) strategic objective.
US provocative actions globally are one in purpose; they are not at all comprehensible as interventions in separate conflicts. US disturbance in other countries is posed conjunction with its major front, NATO, through US inspired neo-Nazi movements in several European countries (notably the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Romania); with its highly reactionary regional vassal states in Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Persian Gulf principalities), with its subordinates in Asia (Japan, South Korea, and Australia); by its promotion of civil unrest in Latin America (prominently in Venezuela at the moment); and by its rapidly increasing militarization of the Artic in conjunction with its servant Canada.
US military and political involvement raising protracted regional tensions has instigated violent crises in several countries in both hemispheres, whether by wars of indirect or direct aggression or subterfuge. Intervention is simply an empty pretext: it is not predicated on independent or pre-existing civil conflicts in other countries or propagandistically imagined threats to the peace of the world by other states. Neo-Nazi movements in Europe would not exist without US organization and funding for previously suppressed and dispersed criminal elements in those societies. There is no civil war in Syria, inherently a stable, secular society and republic, not divided ethnically or religiously. The war there is one of indirect aggression on the part of the US since 2011 through brutally barbaric foreign mercenary terrorists, not Syrian rebels, from over 80 countries, ostensibly seeking to impose a theocratic autocracy but serving as a purely invented rationale for intended US-Saudi-Turkish partition of Syria. Indirect aggression and the pursuit of pretext for intervention leads of false flag operations, such as the sarin gas attack in Syria in 2013 and the currently alleged sarin gas attack in that country, when the known supplies for sarin gas to US-backed terrorist elements in Syria is coming from NATO through Turkey. The struggle in Yemen is not one of an Iran allied Houthi minority posing a threat against a US ally, the Absolute Monarchy of Saudi Arabia, but the opposite: a national resistance struggle of all popular democratic forces in Yemen against US-Saudi imperialist aggression. Oppositional elements in Venezuela are being directly organized and funded by the US, which would otherwise have no power to disturb the political order of that popular Bolivarian state. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, seeking only to defend itself from constant US threats for its destruction throughout its existence after an artificially US imposed partition empowering Japanese collaborationists among Korean capitalists and landlords against the unified Korean anti-imperialist resistance, is being demonized absurdly as if a representing a threat of global aggression. All conflicts threatening the peace of the world today have been instigated or contrived by US imperialism, which are being resisted at national levels by popular and progressive forces in the different forms confronted.
The political style of US aggression, whether conducted at the sole initiative of the presidency or with the consent of the Congress (by either declarations of war or authorizations for the use of force), is not the issue: US imperialist designs now threatening WWIII are. The constitutional question is a serious misdirection of the US peace movement. From 1812, the Congress of the United States has overwhelming supported all US wars, whether apparently defensive or aggressive. The US Congress today is fully behind all current US wars of indirect aggression and of military strike build-up throughout the world. Formal declarations of war or stronger resolutions of authorization will only give the appearance of popular support for continued and intensified aggression that does not exist and provide a pretext for treating opposition as treasonous, as is already occurring within the government under the anti-Russia hysteria generated during and since the 2016 US presidential elections.
What needs urgently to be done as a first step to stop US imperialist aggression in the world is the illegalization by the General Assembly of the United Nations of all wars of indirect aggression, as the Soviet representative to the League of Nations, Maxim Litvinov, appealed for prior to WWII but failed to achieve, and of any moves outside the UN framework to disarm other states. The Peace and Solidarity Commission of the Party of Communists, USA, calls on all domestic peace and anti-imperialist organizations to support the illegalization in international law of wars of indirect aggression and to support universal disarmament by negotiations under multilateral treaties (the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in particular), and the illegalization of any show of force by one state to compel other states to disarm.
Election of Donald Trump: Its Effect on International Women’s Day 2017

International Women’s Day: News From the US

Election of Donald Trump: Its Effect on International Women’s Day 2017

This year marks the 104th anniversary of International Women’s Day started by communist Clara Zetkin. Though American women have made some gains since that time there are many more that still need to be fought for. To this day, women in the US are not entitled by Federal Law to maternity leave, sick days for themselves or for ailing children or parents, vacation time, daycare services, or welfare benefits that help women take care of their own children or their ailing parents. This shows a complete disregard for the position of women and of the family.

Under President Donald Trump women’s rights are continuing to erode. Donald Trump has threatened to appoint Supreme Court judges who would repeal Roe v Wade and to exempt Big Corporations from providing birth control to female employees.

Women represent the backbone of the family and society. They help raise the next generation of workers. Yet, women continue to live in a state of constant crisis, going from a paid job at work to an unpaid job at home without any time of their own due to low wages, high inflation, and constant cuts in social services.

Trump’s cabinet is stacked with multi-billionaires whose policies, such as housing, job creation, job safety, healthcare, environmental protections are against working people. Under the Trump Administration there will be further drastic cuts to social services, such as Foodstamps, headstart programs, and Medicaid and also privatization of social security and education. These cuts are not being made because there is a lack of money; but because the government’s priorities are for the profits of big corporations, not for the benefit of society. Over $1 trillion continues to be spent on wars that benefit military contractors; while over ½ trillion is spent on government subsidies to billionaire Big Corporations like Exxon and Wal-Mart. Yet while officially 57% of the US budget goes towards military spending, the Trump Administration is demanding cuts be made to the Foodstamp program that represents a mere 1% of the budget. A program that is literally a lifeline to 1 in 7 hungry Americans; 83% of which are: children, seniors, and the disabled.

Since Trump’s inauguration, there have been many women’s rights marches throughout the country; mainly organized by the Democratic Party whose motto is “Voting Democratic will ensure Women’s Rights”. However, Let’s not forget that it was Democrat President Jimmy Carter who voted against the Equal Rights Amendment and for the Hyde Act; Democrat Bill Clinton who destroyed Welfare; and Lastly Democrat Barack Obama who in 2011 during a high inflationary period that was combined with high unemployment slashed Foodstamps & also turned around and signed an act virtually eliminating it in 2021. Capitalism is based upon cheap labor and exploitation. The Democrats and Republicans represent the left and right wing of the same bird. Under such conditions, women with hungry children are the easiest to exploit and there is little economic incentive for either party to change the system.

Although Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party is using these marches for its own ends, other truly progressive women’s groups like Code Pink, and smaller groups like Women Warriors, PSL, and PC USA (Party of Communists USA) have been able to come forward to refocus the spotlight on the conditions of working women under capitalism and to try to mount an offensive; not only to maintain the rights women currently have, but to demand greater rights. If perhaps nothing more, Trump’s presidency has had the affect of mobilizing women on the streets and opening up the subject of Women’s Rights in a way not seen since the 1970’s; something that would not have happened if Hillary Clinton had been elected to office.

 

Jessica Coco

Correspondent for Labor Today

Women’s Commission, Party of Communists USA (PCUSA)