Saturday, January 6, 2018
Italy- Communist Party: The time is now!
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.â€
 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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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!
Friday, December 1, 2017
European Communist Initiative: On the intensification of the militarization and aggressiveness of the EU
Friday, December 1, 2017
European Communist Initiative: On the intensification of the militarization and aggressiveness of the EU
Friday, May 26, 2017
The centennial of the 1917 October Revolution to be commemorated in New York (Left Forum, 2-4 June)
Marxism-Leninism Today is co-organizing a panel commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution at the Left Forum in New York City.
New York Times, April 30, 2017
When Communism Inspired Americans
by Vivian Gornick
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/…/when-communism-inspired-americans.html
At a rally in New York City in 1962, the famously liberal journalist Murray Kempton said to an audience full of old Reds: “I have known many Communists in my life. I have not known them as criminals. I knew them once as activists — and we had our quarrels. But while this country has not been kind to you, it has been fortunate in having you. You have been arrested, you have been followed, you have had your phones bugged, you have had your children fired. Throughout this, I can think of numbers of you I have known who have remained gallant and pleasant and unbroken.†He added, “I salute you and I hope for times to be better.â€
My mother was in the audience that night and said, when she came home: “America was fortunate to have had the Communists here. They, more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was.â€
My parents were working-class socialists. I grew up in the late 1940s and early ’50s thinking of them and their friends as what they themselves called “progressives.†The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers.
In my childhood, these distinctions did not exist for me. The people who came to our Bronx apartment or were present at the fund-raising parties we attended, the rallies we went to, and the May Day parades we marched in were all simply progressives. At the kitchen table they drank tea, ate black bread and herring, and talked “issues.†I understood nothing of what they said, but I was always excited by the richness of their rhetoric, the intensity of their arguments, the urgency and longing behind that hot river of words that came pouring ceaselessly from them.
They were voyagers on that river, these plumbers, pressers and sewing machine operators; and they took with them on their journey not only their own narrow, impoverished experience but also a set of abstractions with transformative powers. When these people sat down to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them; above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as obligations. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism).
While it is true that thousands of people joined the Communist Party in those years because they were members of the hardscrabble working class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit pickers), it was even truer that many more thousands in the educated middle class (teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to an urgent sense of social injustice.
Most Communists never set foot in party headquarters, laid eyes on a Central Committee member, or were privy to policy-making sessions. But every rank-and-filer knew that party unionists were crucial to the rise of industrial labor; party lawyers defended blacks in the South; party organizers lived, worked, and sometimes died with miners in Appalachia; farm workers in California; steel workers in Pittsburgh. What made it all real were the organizations the party built: the International Workers Order, the National Negro Congress, the Unemployment Councils. Whenever some new world catastrophe announced itself throughout the Depression and World War II, The Daily Worker sold out in minutes.
It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith, even when a 3-year-old could see that it was eating itself alive.
I was 20 years old in April 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalin’s rule. Night after night the people at my father’s kitchen table raged or wept or sat staring into space. I was beside myself with youthful rage. “Lies!†I screamed at them. “Lies and treachery and murder. And all in the name of socialism! In the name of socialism!†Confused and heartbroken, they pleaded with me to wait and see, this couldn’t be the whole truth, it simply couldn’t be. But it was.
The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map.
The effective life of the Communist Party in the United States was approximately 40 years in length. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were Communists at one time or another during those 40 years. Many of these people endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin, and even imprisonment. They were two generations of Americans whose lives were formed by political history as were no other American lives save those of the original Revolutionists. History is in them — and they are in history.
Vivian Gornick is the author, most recently, of the memoir “The Odd Woman and the City.â€