http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OPvWFDzDlA

In 1944, to honor the Allied victory in Italy, the great Arturo Toscanini–a refugee from Fascism in his home country–decided to conduct a performance of Verdi’s “Hymn of the Nations”. “Hymn” is a composition that Verdi orginaly built around the national anthems of Britain, France, and Italy. In order to honor all four of the major Allies, Toscanini decided to add “The Star Spangled Banner” for the U.S. and “The Internationale” for the Soviet Union. The music was performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, with the Westminister Choir and the great tenor Jan Peerce as soloist; conducted by Toscanini. It was filmed as a featurette to be shown in movie theaters, and was narrated by Burgess Meredith.

In the early 50’s, at the height of the Red Scare, U.S. censors removed the portion of this performance that featured the “Internationale”.

For years this sequence in the original featurette was considered forever lost. But recently it was rediscovered in Alaska and now this rousing rendition of the Internationale–together with chorale and orchestra under the direction of a legendary conductor–can now be enjoyed again.

As you listen to this song, remember that there have been times and places when singing this song could get you immediately arrested and or killed or “dissappeared”. Germany under the Nazis, the U.S. in the 1950’s, Chile in September 1973…people suffered and died over this song. Let us remember those who have suffered for Socialism and carry with us the knowledge in our hearts that the great truths of Socialism shall triumph someday.

By Raskonikov Radek

AUSTIN – Today I went to the march in Austin to support public education. Though it is not certain how many people there were, estimates have it that about 11,000 people showed up. There were many different progressive organizations there, as well as teacher’s unions. There was a very large number of ultra-Leftists who were entirely isolated from the people. They had red flags and signs that said “join the socialists”, and were trying to dominate the march. Most of the teachers unions and other progressive groups were trying to avoid the ultra-Leftists; I heard one say “I am trying to create a buffer between the socialists and us”.

The strategy of the ultra-Left is extremely harmful to the movement for working class unity. By isolating themselves from the working class, the ultra-Leftists obstruct the revolutionary process. A comrade from the Houston Communist Party was there, with a very modest sign, which said “stop the budget cuts! stop the attacks on working people! put people before profits!”; many of the working people at the demonstration said how much they liked his sign and did not show any animosity towards him.

The ultra-Left was largely looked down upon and ignored; the only people that gave them any attention were the Tea Party thugs, with whom they tried to argue. It is crucial today that communists do not separate themselves from the working class like ultra-Left groups. The working class today largely supports the Democrats; it is only by working on their level of political consciousness that communists will actually reach them. As long as one is guided by the end goal of Socialism and revolution, one does not become a revisionist if one puts down the red flag and instead carries a sign with a less radical slogan.

The role of communists today should be to ally themselves with the organizers of these kinds of demonstrations and try to steer the demonstration in a more progressive way without isolating themselves from the masses. As long as they try to tie each of their actions to the working class and to the larger movement of socialist revolution, there is nothing reformist about it. The ultra-left, who refuses to work with other less radical organizations, will show up at these demonstrations, fully exposing themselves and trying to organize the demonstrations outside of the demonstration itself. This will fail, as most people have no understanding of socialism and generally have inherited many negative bourgeois prejudices against socialism. Thus, only if one works within the organizations that organize these events can one assist our class assume the role of the ruling class.

Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East

Appendix to the report of the Fourth Session
John Reed’s speech:

I represent here the revolutionary workers of one of the great imperialist powers, the United States of America, which exploits and oppresses the peoples of the colonies.

You, the peoples of the East, the peoples of Asia, have not yet experienced for yourselves the rule of America. You know and hate the British, French and Italian imperialists, and probably you think that ‘free America’ will govern better, will liberate the peoples of the colonies, will feed and defend them.

No. The workers and peasants of the Philippines, the peoples of Central America and the islands of the Caribbean, they know what it means to live under the rule of ‘free America’.

Take, for example, the peoples of the Philippines. In 1898 the Filipinos rebelled against the cruel colonial government of Spain, and the Americans helped them. But after the Spaniards had been driven out the Americans did not want to go away.

Then the Filipinos rose against the Americans, and this time the ‘liberators’ started to kill them, their wives and children: they tortured them and eventually conquered them. They seized their land and forced them to work and make profits for American capitalists.

The Americans have promised the Filipinos independence. Soon an independent Filipino republic will be proclaimed. But this does not mean that the American capitalists will leave or that the Filipinos will not continue to work to make profits for them. The American capitalists have given the Filipino leaders a share of their profits — they have given them government jobs, land and money — they have created a Filipino capitalist class which also lives on the profits created by the workers — and in whose interest it is to keep the Filipinos in slavery.

This has also happened in Cuba, which was freed from Spanish rule with the help of the Americans. It is now an independent Republic. But American millionaire trusts own all the sugar plantations, apart from some small tracts which they have let the Cuban capitalists have: the latter also administer the country. And the moment that the workers of Cuba try to elect a government which is not in the interests of the American capitalists, the United States of America sends soldiers into Cuba to compel the people to vote for their oppressors.

Or let us take the example of the republics of Haiti and San Domingo, where the peoples won freedom a century ago. Since this island was fertile and the people living on it could be put to use by the American capitalists, the government of the US sent soldiers and sailors there on the pretext of maintaining order and smashed these two republics, setting up in their place a military dictatorship worse than the British tyrants.

Mexico is another rich country which is close to the USA. In Mexico live a backward people who were enslaved for centuries, first by the Spaniards and then by foreign capitalists. There, after many years of civil war, the people formed their own government, not a proletarian government but a democratic one, which wanted to keep the wealth of Mexico for the Mexicans and tax the foreign capitalists. The American capitalists did not concern themselves with sending bread to the hungry Mexicans. No, they initiated a counter-revolution in Mexico, in which Madero, the first revolutionary President, was killed. Then, after a three-year struggle, the revolutionary regime was restored, with Carran a as President. The American capitalists made another counter-revolution and killed Carranza, establishing once more a government friendly to themselves.

In North America itself there are ten million Negroes who possess neither political or civil rights, despite the fact that by law they are equal citizens. With the purpose of distracting the attention of the American workers from the capitalists, their exploiters, the latter stir up hatred against the Negroes, provoking war between the white and black races. The Negroes, whom they lawlessly burn alive, are beginning to see that their only hope lies in armed resistance to the white bandits.

At the present time the American capitalists are addressing friendly words to the peoples of the East, with a promise of aid and food. This applies especially to Armenia. Millions of dollars have been collected by the American millionaires in order to send bread to the starving Armenians. And many Armenians are now looking for help to Uncle Sam.

These same American capitalists incite the American workers and farmers against each other: they starve and exploit the peoples of Cuba and the Philippines, they savagely kill and burn alive American Negroes, and in America itself American workers are obliged to work under frightful conditions, receiving low wages for a long work-day. When they are exhausted they are thrown out on to the street, where they die of hunger.

The same gentleman who is now in charge of bringing aid to the starving Armenians, Mr. Cleveland Dodge who writes emotional articles about how the Turks have driven the Armenians into the desert, is the owner of big copper mines where thousands of American workers are exploited, and when these workers dared to go on strike the guards protecting Mr. Dodge’s mines drove them at the point of the bayonet out into the desert — just as was done to the Armenians.

Many Armenians are grateful to America for its attitude to the Armenians who suffered from the brutality of the Turks during the war. But what has America done for the Armenians apart from issuing wordy declarations? Nothing. I was in Constantinople at that time, in 1915, and I know that the missionaries refused to make any serious protest against the atrocities, saying that they had a lot of property in Turkey and so did not want to bring pressure to bear on the Turks. The American ambassador, Mr. Strauss, himself a millionaire who exploited thousands of workers in his enterprises in America, proposed that the entire Armenian people be shipped to America, and himself donated quite a large sum for this project to be carried out; but his plan was to make the Armenians work in American factories and provide cheap labour so as to increase the profits of Mr. Strauss and his friends.

But why do the American capitalists promise aid and food to Armenia? Is it out of pure philanthropy? If so, let them feed the peoples of Central America and help the Negroes of America itself.

No. The main reason is that there is mineral wealth in Armenia, and that it is a big reservoir of cheap labour which can be exploited by American capitalists.

The American capitalists want to win the confidence of the Armenians with a view to getting their claws into Armenia and enslaving the Armenian nation. It is with this aim that American missionaries have established schools in the Near East.

But there is also another very important reason: the American capitalists, together with the other capitalist nations, united in the League of Nations, are afraid that the workers and peasants of Armenia will follow the example of Soviet Russia and Soviet Azerbaidzhan, will take power and their country’s resources into their own hands, and will work for themselves, making a united front with the workers and peasants of the whole world against world imperialism. The American capitalists are afraid of a revolution in the East.

Promising food to starving peoples and at the same time organising a blockade of the Soviet Republics — that is the policy of the United States. The blockade of Soviet Russia has starved to death thousands of Russian women and children. This same method of blockade was applied in order to turn the Hungarian people against their Soviet Government. The same tactic is now being used in order to draw the people of White Hungary into war against Soviet Russia. This method is also being used in the small countries bordering on Russia-Finland, Estonia, Latvia. But now all these small countries have been obliged to make peace with Soviet Russia: they are bankrupt and starving. Now the American Government no longer offers them food; they are no longer of any use to America, and so their peoples can starve.

The American capitalists promise bread to Armenia. This is an old trick. They promise bread but they never give it. Did Hungary get bread after the fall of the Soviet Government? No. The Hungarian people are still starving today. Did the Baltic countries get bread? No. At a time when the starving Estonians had nothing but potatoes, the American capitalists sent them ships laden with rotten potatoes which could not be sold at a profit in America. No, comrades, Uncle Sam is not one ever to give anybody something for nothing. He comes along with a sack stuffed with straw in one hand and a whip in the other. Whoever takes Uncle Sam’s promises at their face value will find himself obliged to pay for them with blood and sweat. The American workers are demanding an ever larger share of the product of their labour; with a view to preventing revolution at home, the American capitalists are forced to seek out colonial peoples to exploit, peoples who will furnish sufficient profit to keep the American workers in obedience and so make them participants in the exploitation of the Armenians. I represent thousands of revolutionary American workers who know this, and who understand that, acting together with the Armenian workers and peasants, with the toiling masses of the whole world, they will overthrow capitalism. World capitalism will be destroyed, and all the peoples will be free. We appreciate the need for solidarity between all the oppressed and toiling peoples, for unity of the revolutionary workers of all the countries of Europe and America under the leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks, in the Communist International. And we say to you, peoples of the East: Do not believe the promises of the American capitalists!

There is only one road to freedom. Unite with the Russian workers and peasants who have overthrown their capitalists and whose Red Army has beaten the foreign imperialists! Follow the red star of the Communist International!

GRANMA INTERNATIONAL

Havana. March 2, 2011

Cuba categorically rejects any attempt whatsoever to take advantage of the tragic situation created in order to occupy Libya and control its oil

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/news-i/2marzo-Cuba%20categorically.html

• Statement by Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs to the UN Human Rights Council, Geneva, March 1, 2011

Mr. President:

Humanity’s conscience is repulsed by the deaths of innocent people under any circumstances, anyplace. Cuba fully shares the worldwide concern for the loss of civilian lives in Libya and hopes that its people are able to reach a peaceful and sovereign solution to the civil war occurring there, with no foreign interference, and can guarantee the integrity of that nation.

Most certainly the Libyan people oppose any foreign military intervention, which would delay an agreement even further and cause thousands of deaths, displacement and enormous injury to the population.

Cuba categorically rejects any attempt whatsoever to take advantage of the tragic situation created in order to occupy Libya and control its oil.

It is noteworthy that the voracity for oil, not peace or the protection of Libyan lives, is the motivation inciting the political forces, primarily conservative, which today, in the United States and some European countries, are calling for a NATO military intervention in Libyan territory. Nor does it appear that objectivity, accuracy or a commitment to the truth are prevailing in part of the press, reports being used by media giants to fan the flames.

Given the magnitude of what is taking place in Libya and the Arab world, in the context of a global economic crisis, responsibility and a long-term vision should prevail on the part of governments in the developed countries. Although the goodwill of some could be exploited, it is clear that a military intervention would lead to a war with serious consequences for human lives, especially the millions of poor who comprise four fifths of humanity.

Despite the paucity of some facts and information, the reality is that the origins of the situation in North Africa and the Middle East are to be found within the crisis of the rapacious policy imposed by the United States and its NATO allies in the region. The price of food has tripled, water is scarce, the desert is growing, poverty is on the rise and with it, repugnant social inequality and exclusion in the distribution of the opulent wealth garnered from oil in the region.

The fundamental human right is the right to life, which is not worth living without human dignity.

The way in which the right to life is being violated should arouse concern. According to various sources, more than 111 million people have perished in armed conflicts during modern wars. It cannot be forgotten in this room that, if in World War I civilian deaths amounted to 5% of total casualties, in the subsequent wars of conquest after 1990, basically in Iraq, with more than one million, and Afghanistan with more than 70,000, the deaths of innocents stand at 90%. The proportion of children in these figures is horrific and unprecedented.

The concept of “collateral damage,” an offense to human nature, has been accepted in the military doctrine of NATO and the very powerful nations.

In the last decade, humanitarian international law has been trampled, as is occurring on the U.S. Guantánamo Naval Base, which usurps Cuban territory.

As a consequence of those wars, global refugee figures have increased by 34%, to more than 26 million people.

Military spending increased by 49% in the decade, to reach $1.5 trillion, more than half of that figure in the United States alone. The industrial-military complex continues producing wars.

Every year, 740,000 human beings die, not only on account of conflicts, but as victims of violent acts associated with organized crime.

In one European country, a woman dies every five days as a result of domestic violence. In the countries of the South, half a million mothers die in childbirth every year.

Every day, 29,000 children die of hunger and preventable diseases. In the minutes that I have been speaking, no less than 120 children have died. Four million perish in their first month of life. In total, 11 million children die every year.

There are 100,000 deaths a day from causes related to malnutrition, adding up to 35 million a year.

In Hurricane Katrina alone, in the most developed country in the world, 1,836 people died, almost all of them African Americans of few resources. In the last two years, 470,000 people died throughout the world as a result of natural disasters, 97% of them of low income.

In the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti alone, more than 250,000 people died, almost all of them resident in very poor homes. The same thing occurred with homes swept away by excessive rainfall in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil.

If the developing countries had infant and maternal mortality rates like those of Cuba, 8.4 million children and 500,000 mothers would be saved annually. In the cholera epidemic in Haiti, Cuban doctors are treating almost half of the patients, with a mortality rate five times lower than those being treated by physicians from other countries. Cuban international medical cooperation has made it possible to save more than 4.4 million lives in dozens of countries in four continents.

Human dignity is a human right. Today, 1.4 billion people are living in extreme poverty. There are 1.2 billion hungry people, and a further two billion are suffering from malnutrition. There are 759 million illiterate adults.

Mr. President:

The Council has demonstrated its capacity for approaching human rights situations in the world, including those of an urgent nature which require attention and action on the part of the international community. The usefulness of the Universal Periodic Review, as a means of sustaining international cooperation, of evaluating the undertakings of all countries without distinction in this context has been confirmed.

The spirit which animated our actions during the review process of this body was to preserve, improve and strengthen this Council in its function of effectively promoting and protecting all human rights for everyone.

The results of this exercise express a recognition of the Council’s important achievements in its short existence. While it is true that the agreements reached are insufficient in the light of the demands of developing countries, the body has been preserved from those whose aim was to reform it to their convenience in order to satisfy hegemonic appetites and to resuscitate the past of confrontation, double standards, selectivity and imposition.

It is to be hoped from the debates of the last few days that this Human Rights Council will continue constructing and advancing its institutionalism toward the full exercise of its mandate.

It would be very negative if, on the pretext of reviewing the Council’s institutional construction and in abuse of the dramatic juncture which is being discussed, it should be manipulated and pressured in an opportunist way in order to establish precedents and modify agreements.

If the essential human right is the right to life, will the Council be ready to suspend the membership of states that unleash a war?

Is the Council proposing to make some substantial contribution to eliminating the principal threat to the life of the human species which is the existence of enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons, an infinitesimal part of which, or the explosion of 100 warheads, would provoke a nuclear winter, according to irrefutable scientific evidence?

Will it establish a thematic procedure on the impact of climate change in the exercise of human rights and proclaim the right to a healthy atmosphere?

Will it suspend states which finance and supply military aid utilized by recipient states for mass, flagrant and systematic violations of human rights and for attacks on the civilian population, like those taking place in Palestine?

Will it apply that measure against powerful countries which are perpetrating extra-judicial executions in the territory of other states with the use of high technology, such as smart bombs and drone aircraft?

What will happen to states which accept secret illegal prisons in their territories, facilitate the transit of secret flights with kidnapped persons aboard, or participate in acts of torture?

Can the Council adopt a declaration on the right of peoples to peace?

Will it adopt an action program that includes concrete commitments guaranteeing the right to alimentation in a moment of food crisis, spiraling food prices and the utilization of cereal crops to produce biofuels?

Mr. President:

Distinguished Ministers and Delegates:

What measures will this Council adopt against a member state which is committing acts that are causing grave suffering and seriously endangering physical or mental integrity, such as the blockade of Cuba, typified as genocide in Article 2, Paragraphs B and C, of the 1948 Geneva Convention?

Thank you very much.

Translated by Granma International

HAVANA, Cuba, Feb 25 (acn) Cuba stated on Friday in Geneva that
interventionism in Libya is
unacceptable and opposed the exclusion of that Arab nation as a member of
the Human Rights
Council, the intergovernmental organ that is part of the United Nations
system.

Rodolfo Reyes, Cuba’s permanent representative at the organization,
spoke in one of the
sessions to analyze the issue, and recalled that less than 72 hours before
Cuban Foreign
Minster Bruno Rodriguez had expressed that some politicians and media
outlets incite to
violence, military aggression and foreign intervention in Libya.

Feelings are running high everywhere and I’m afraid that could lead to
serious
international and internal mistakes, warned the minister, cited by Reyes,
the National
Television Newscast reported on Friday.

We wish the Libyan people to achieve a speedy peaceful and sovereign
solution to the
situation created there, without any kind of interference or foreign
intervention, which
guarantees the integrity of the Libyan nation, said Rodriguez in his
speech, read then in
Brussels.

The ambassador stressed that the concerns that declaration reflected
became a reality and
that that State is amid a civil war, within the context of a world
economic crisis of great
dimensions, which plunges the peoples of that region and the world into
despair.

We’re all concerned about the loss of human lives and the damages
caused to the civilian
population due to the current conflict in that Arab nation, asserted the
diplomat, whose
statements were also published by the www.cubadebate.cu Web site.

He warned that the risk of taking advantage, in an opportunistic way,
of the tragic
situation to satisfy interventionist appetites, take sovereignty away from
the Libyan people
and seize its resources, can’t be accepted.

Some are already talking about a humanitarian military intervention,
which we oppose,
because, instead of solving the situation, it would complicate it even
more and could lead to
other serious implications, he said sententiously.

Reyes declared himself to be against some elements included in the
approved resolution,
which constitute what he described as “a disastrous precedent” for
cooperation in terms of
human rights, which the work of the Council should be based on.

He recalled that, from the start, when we were creating this new
Council, Cuba opposed the
clause on the suspension of a State’s membership.

In this regard, he pointed out that its inclusion in Resolution 60/251
set a negative
precedent that burdened the new organ with an additive that is
unparalleled in any other
organ of the United Nations.

Immediately afterwards, he asserted that it had never been cited until
today, but that its
use on this occasion will open the door to those seeking to legitimize
this mechanism, with
the purpose of using it selectively against countries disagreeing their
patterns.

Cuba, consequently, disassociates itself from the paragraph of the
approved resolution, he
stated.

Lastly, Reyes expressed that the island calls on calm and reiterates
its confidence in the
capacity of the Libyan people to solve their internal affairs, without any
foreign
interference, and to preserve the country’s peace, stability and sovereignty.

This is the first time that the suspension of a member of the of the
Human Rights
Commission, to which Libya belongs since May, 2010, is recommended, the
Telesur television
network reported.

The final decision in this regard will be made at the UN General
Assembly, the next meting
of which has been scheduled for March 1st in New York, specified the state
television network.

by Gary Hicks

==================================================================

SECTION 1 WHAT IS MARXISM? WHAT IS LENINISM?

Suggested readings:

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

V.I. Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism

Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism

SECTION TWO MARXIST PHILOSOPICAL FOUNDATIONS

Suggested readings:

Dialego, Introduction to Marxist Philosophy

Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach………..

Mao Zedong, On Practice

Mao Zedong, On Contradiction

Additional reading:

Angela Davis talk on art and theory, 1985 http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/9443/

Georges Politzer, Introduction to Philosophy. Politzer was a French communist, murdered by the Nazis during World War 2. His book will have to be tracked down via Amazon, etc. as it’s long out of print.

SECTION 3 A BASIC INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL ECONOMY

Suggested readinga:

Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital[WLC] and Wages, Price, and Profit [WPP],

Suggest reading these in the following order:

>> Introduction to WLC by Frederick Engels, where Engels explained the distinction between labour-power and labour. This difference was not accounted for by Marx in WLC but is employed in WPP , coincident with the differentiation made in Capital.

>>WPP, entirety

>>WLC, entirety, again keeping in mind Engels’ caveat

>> And finally a must-read: Part 8, in Volume 1 of Capital. It was once published by Progress Publishers under the title “The Genesis of Capital”.

Additional readings. Remember that this is an introductory course. There will be time later for more advanced stuff:

>> John Eaton , Political Economy. Probably the best English basic text, after all these decades. This book should be used selectively in this section, with close attention to the chapter on agriculture and rent, as well as those chapters on the falling rate of profit and the crises of capitalism as a system.

>> Any work, in whole or in part, by Victor Perlo. Again, selective reading. PLEASE NOTE: much of Eaton’s and Perlo’s material will be more appropriate for use in the section on Imperialism.

SECTION 4 IMPERIALISM, WAR, AND THE CRISES OF CAPITALISM

Suggested reading:

>>V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

>> WEB DuBois, The African Roots of War

>>William K. Tabb, Four Crises of the Contemporary World Capitalist System

>>Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

SECTION FIVE POLITICAL STRATEGY 1

Suggested reading:

>>V.I. Lenin, Where to Begin?

What Is To Be Done?

>>Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution

The first Lenin reading is a short article that discusses the role of the party press, the need for one, it’s role as both collective agitator and collective organizer, and it’s central role/importance in buildng a party.

The second Lenin reading is a long pamphlet that was going to be an enlargrement of the above reading, but it became necessary to devote the work to discuss a trend in Russian social-democracy [communism, as it was called at that time] known as Economism. Economism belittled the importance of developing a working class that would be able to speak and act for itself. The class therefore should leave methods of political struggle to other, more “expert” forces who would look out for the class’s interests.

The book also addresses the importance of having a tight, combative party that supported professional revolutionaries who had skills of organizing workers and their allies and combatting the enemy, especially the state repressive agencies.

The Rosa Luxemburg pamphlet was the first work to take up the arguments of Eduard Bernstein, the leading “expert’ of intenational Social-Democracy [communism] at the end of the 19th Century. It was Bernstein that argued that new technologies, means of prduction, along with the legalization of several parties in Europe, made Marxist class struggle and certain Marxist theories, a thing of the past.

SECTION 6 POLITICAL STRATEGY 2

>>V.I. Lenin, The State

The State and Revolution

The Impending Catastrophe[Crisis] And How To Combat It

The first of these works by Lenin is a speech given to students at a Komsomol [Young Communist League] school in 1920, three years into the October 1917 Revolution. It’s the kind of work that should be kept around to be read over and over again since, as Lenin makes clear in his pamphlet, the nature of the state always raises new questions in new conditions.

The second work here, a pamphlet, is basically a message to the Bolsheviks on the eve of the October Revolution. The message: you are about to seize state power and you need t tighten up on your understanding of the state. All of these years of fighting the Tsar’s army and police have been mere dress rehearsal. You now have to understand the concept of the state in conditions of running one! A brilliant exposition of the history of Marxist understanding of the state, mixed in with in-your-face, on the ground considerations.

The third pamphlet is an exposition by name of the screwups in society as a result of theTsar’s rule and foreign capital’s dominance of the major industrial and financial institutions.

SECTION 7 POLITICAL STRATEGY 3

>>V.I,. Lenin, “Left Wing” Communism. An Infantile Disorder.

>>Mao Zedong, On Correcting Mistaken Ideas In The Party.

“Left Wing communism” is often used by comrades for arguing against tendencies to forsake participation in elections/taking seats, and also against those would forego participation in the official/traditional trade

unions. Often missed is the point that these left-wing tendencies are the response to rightist opportunism in word, thought and deed………in both parliament and trade union struggles. The pamphlet while criticising left wing tendecies is fundamentally a handbook for combat within parliament [congress] and the dominant parties of capitalist collaboration………..and within the trade unions ruled by class collaboratinist leadership and bureaucratic organization.

Mao’s pamphlet, while written in 1929 and addressing problems within the People’s Liberation Army, is surprising light-shedding upon today’s problems of building disciplined organizations.

SECTION 8 MARXISM AND SOME HISTORICAL POLEMICS

Suggested readings:

>>J.V.Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism?

>>Carl Davidson, Left in Form, Right in Essence. A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism.

.>>[ModernRevisionism] KKE/Greek CP: Thoughts about the factors that determined the reversal of the socialist system in Europe.

Historically, the International Communist Movement has had to respond to political forces, some of them calling themselves Marxist, that have misunderstood the relationship of reform to the revolutionary process. The above three articles are introductions to those political forces historically called Anarchism, Trotskyism, and Modern Revisionism.

The Stalin article on Anarchism should be seen as an extension of the readings in SECTION 7. The KKE/Greek CP article should be seen as a supplementary reading to Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution, in SECTION 5.

SECTION 9 THE UNITED FRONT AGAINST REPRESSION, RACISM,AND WAR……………..THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM

Suggested reading:

>>Georgi Dimitrov, 1935: The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism.

>>Joe Slovo, 1988:The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution

>>Sam Webb, [2005 ?] Socialism Revisited, Parts 1 and 2

SUMMATION/WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

This is a discussion without any assigned readings, at least in this first draft. Propose that the following be addressed:

>>What were the goals of the study? This may vary from location to location, but it will be interesting to see if there are any common red threads wich run through all of these efforts.

>>What readings were actually used? Were they useful, and why? What power of explanation did these readings have in our further understanding of Marxism?

>>Were young people involved? Persons of color? Women? LGBTQ? How did it go in relating the special questions of these people to the class politics that we’re trying to get a handle on?

>>Was the group composed of both party and non-party people? What were the dynamics that took place?

>>Overall, what are the positive things/lessons that happened in the course of this study? What are things, dynamics, readings, etc. to be avoided in future studty groups?

>>Participants might want to cnsider themselves the core of a wider study process. In that sense, how should we network across the country?

The document is called Marxist Leninist Education Project 2. Mlep2 is so called to distinguish it from the original Mlep, a project of the pre-party formation called Line of March Political Organization, which flourished in the 1980s. It was a project that originated from a process of study organized by the Union of Democratic Filipinos [the KDP], and joined in on by the Northern California Alliance, the Racism Research Project, and others.

After a first run of the 39 week study group, the Mlep was tried out in a number of different cities: Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, DC-Baltimore area, Madison WI, and SF Bay Area, among others.

The 39-week Mlep Long Course, as it came to be called [there was also added on an 8-9 week Short Course, and in some areas Seminars on US History, Political Economy, and Party Building] typically consisted of 10-15 participants, including two co-facilitators. Participants were divided into groups of three, which each had a chair [ in some places rotated over a period of time]. The original study consisted of the following topics:

1. Introduction to Marxism Leninism

2. Philosophy………..dialectical and historical materialism, the theory of knowledge

3. Political economy of capitalism

4. Imperialism

5. Underdevelopment in less-developed countries

6. Political strategy: What is to be done?

7. Political understanding of the state: The state and revolution

8. More political strategy: “Left wing” communism

9. The international communist movement and other trends: anarchism, terrorism, Trotskyism, Revisionism, Maoism

10.The united front against war and racism

11. Summation process

As mentioned above, the 39 week course was later offered as a 9 week course. Typically, a locality might offer one or both in a given year. But to get back to the 3 person study groups: each weekly session, which was usually held on a Saturday or Sunday and lasted 3-4 hours, was a session where a particular topic was addressed by 3 or 4 study teams who had each prepared a 5-10 minute presentation on one of several discussion questons which had been assigned to the teams the previous week. The co-facilitators kept in touch with the teams during the week, in order to identify what questions were causing problems in understanding. So the co-facilitators knew in advance where they might have to intervene and try and add some clarity to the matter at hand.

The two biggest objections to study was, first, that it was too theoretical; and second, there was a mass struggle going on. The first question had to do with the fact that most of us were raised in the United States were the victims of a bad education, and an environment of anti-intellectualism in our culture. We, and ultimately the masses of our people, had to be convinced that political theory and training were a legitimate form of political struggle. The academy, as well as the community and the workplace were battlefields, and in all locales the question was [and remains] what kinds of thinking and politics will hold sway: bourgeois or proletarian?

As to the raging struggle going on , and which we should not abandon for theory, there were two points of response. First, that we had to engage with and become good at using…theory. If we didn’t, then we would not know how to think adequately, and we would all go into battle without strategy or tactics………….and botch it. Second, the struggle is long and protracted………..consequently, we could promise our participants that there would be plenty of it awaiting them upon the completion of Mlep!

All of this activity was, in that time, based upon the assumption that a communist party had to be built that was not reformist and revisionist at its core, but rather a combative party armed with theory and approaches to engaging in good practice. For a whole host of reasons, Line of March failed to bring that party into being, despite its best efforts and human talent at hand. But the struggle to build that party still remains, preferably inside the one party in our country which, despite itself, remains “the mind, the will, the honor of the working class ” [Lenin].

Many of the readings below can be located online. Sometimes, study questions are also available. I would suggest that this be started as an 8-10 week study, once a week………or as two weekends with a full week sandwiched in between.

by Zoltan Zigedy

Some see the description “Marxist” as an anachronism. Certainly much has changed in the world since the times of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Indeed, capitalism – the object of their study – has evolved strikingly from the socio-economic order they sought to understand in the nineteenth century. Yet we are constantly reminded of the fruitfulness of their key analytical tools: class, exploitation and profits.

We find these tools useful in some of the most unlikely places, as demonstrated by a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. Writing on the Journal’s refreshingly eccentric sports page, author Matthew Futterman tackles the political economy of the National Football League (The NFL’s $1 Billion Game of Chicken (2-17-11). Futterman states: “The League has run out of new ways new ways to make another quick $1 billion, so its turning its focus to the biggest piggy bank of all: its own players.” Within the next two weeks, the player contract expires and NFL management will likely lock out – call a management strike on – the players and their union.

Futterman adds that behind this threatened lockout is “a notion that’s familiar to investors, but that represents a radical notion in professional sports: the idea that a sports league, like a giant company, must show steady growth over time. And more radically, a slowdown in the rate of growth, even without actual losses, is sufficient grounds to ask labor to make concessions.” In other words, professional football is a giant monopoly business with its own unique expressions of class, labor exploitation and profit accumulation.

Of course this backdrop of social confrontation and the drive for greater profits is not readily apparent to the average fan. Professional football occupies a special place in US culture. On one hand, it postures as a “pure” sport with great athletes – athletes bred, trained and motivated for most of their young lives – competing in a brutally violent game. On the other hand, it is presented as capturing the US ethos: overwhelming power, domination, confident cockiness, as well as respect for authority and unquestioning patriotism. Unmistakably, this representation is a profoundly conservative ethos.

But as Futterman’s candor shows, the NFL is far more than this popular image. From tickets to television, from media noise to gear, from advertising to fantasy football, the NFL both occupies a huge chunk of US cultural life and stands as a profit-generating behemoth.

It is this last aspect that draws little attention. Even less attention is given to the conflict between owners and workers, especially the players.

Between 2000 and the 2010 season, revenues have grown from about $4 billion to $9 billon. While every NFL team is highly profitable, owners view their protected franchises – their teams – as their major source of wealth. Just as stock market investors have come to place equity value over dividend return, team owners are most interested in seeing their team’s worth grow. For example, the NY Jets were purchased in 2000 for $635 million. Ten years later, another comparable franchise – the Miami Dolphins – sold for $1.1 billion.

The explosion of revenue in the NFL has come from several inter-connected sources. From 1993 to 2005 NFL owners extorted massive public funding for new stadiums. By threatening to move franchises, team owners and compliant city and regional officials have contrived a massive public welfare program for the benefit of the wealthy owners; the WSJ estimates that public subsidies averaged $500 million per year over the 13-year span.

Thanks to brand new stadiums with not-too-subtle class divisions (end-zone seats vs. luxury sky boxes), ticket revenues exploded, doubling between 1997 and 2007. Today, the average ticket costs $76 per game. It’s an unspoken truth that most season ticket holders are far removed from the working class who largely follow their team from in front of their television sets.

But competing media conglomerates have been the most kind to the NFL owners. Media rights to NFL broadcasts and properties have jumped from $2.6 billion annually in 2005 to $3.8 billion in 2010.

One might think that the NFL team owners would be quite satisfied with their lofty financial achievements, but like all capitalists they have an unquenchable thirst to accumulate. But as Futterman cogently puts it, they are looking for new ways to “make a quick $1 billion…” With new stadiums built and steadfast resistance to further subsidies on the part of the public, the team owners have turned away from the public troughs. With ticket prices sky high, they are afraid of squeezing fans further. And media contracts will increase only modestly over the next three years.

Therefore, owners are turning to the tried-and-true, centuries-old capitalist tactic: increase labor productivity by reducing wages and increasing the workload. They hope to add two more games per season to increase revenue. Thus, players will work 1/8th more for the same salaries. Standing in the way of this intensification of the owners’ exploitation of the players is their union’s resistance. Consequently, the lockout threatens to cancel the next season and pressure the players’ ability to earn a living.

As much as fans admire NFL players, they show little sympathy for their economic plight. Attention to the mega-salaries of superstars blinds them to the facts of an NFL career. The average median salary of an NFL player in 2009 was $770,000. But the average career lasts only 3 years, giving the average player a lifetime earning of $2 million plus from the NFL. Most players come from modest backgrounds and, unlike autoworkers or plumbers, have devoted fully 10 previous years of intense, competitive training without compensation beyond athletic scholarships. Thus, a 24-year-old average NFL retiree has earned well under $200,000 a year over his career, leaving his job often with debilitating injuries and little skill for any later opportunities. The media-hyped splendor of the super-star masks the far less glamorous status of the NFL’s ordinary player. Clearly, a lost season for players who only average three productive years is a powerful economic blow.

So, yes, players are workers, though unusually well paid for a brief time, and workers with their own unique advantages and difficulties. Players, like most fans, have drunk the cultural kool-aid that elevates all NFL players to elite status. The players don’t want to be seen as workers, but neither do many other well paid professionals or craftsmen for that matter.

For those of us who are consumers of the players’ product – fans – we need to take sides in a struggle between admittedly well-off players and the handful of mega-rich owners who seek to get more for less from their employees. In the end, that is the central question of Marxist and scientific socialist theory: exploitation. Exploitation defines class position as well as the distribution of the surplus, in this case NFL earnings. Unfortunately, the market determines the consumer’s place in this arguably decadent and politically numbing exercise in primitivism and violence – we lose a bit of our souls every Sunday in the fall. And our dollars combine to generate the $9 billion that the owners are so greedily striving to stuff into their pockets. But behind our shared football mania is an exploitative socio-economic system, just as ancient slavery stood behind the entertainments of the Roman circuses and the encounters of gladiators.

The lesson here is not that we should drop all activities to organize huge rallies in support of the small number of NFL professionals who are exploited by their employees, though there is much that we can easily do to show our solidarity with them. We certainly have more urgent priorities in supporting the public employees in the class war now raging in Wisconsin and breaking out in numerous other states. The living standards of all government employees –federal, state and local – as well as their union rights are under assault from many quarters, an assault that presages further attacks upon all workers. Instead, we must recognize that the Marxist notion of class – employees versus employers – trumps all other notions that divide workers by strata, job description, race, gender or nationality. It is “class,” as Marxists understand it, which serves as a basis for unity, and not some bogus unity forged from artificial ties with fickle friends in bourgeois politics or opportunistic, tenuous common interests. Those loose ties maybe be useful and even tactically desirable, but not at the expense of class partisanship.

A healthy sign of this class solidarity is the recent open letter from several current and former members of the Green Bay Packers professional football team urging support for Wisconsin’s embattled public workers. Is it an accident that they played for the only publicly owned team in the National Football League?

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com