“Should Fascism achieve power it will ride over your skulls and spines like a frightful tank”, wrote Leon Trotksy in a letter to a German communist in December 1931. “Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only unity in struggle with the social democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-communists, you have very little time left.”
Do you ever feel undervalued at work—like you contribute much more than your pay packet suggests? Karl Marx gets you. In the mid-nineteenth century, he argued that the whole working class is exploited by the capitalist class. This isn’t just a hyperbolic flourish, but an economic fact. The entire point of capitalist enterprise is to accumulate more wealth by systematically stealing a portion of the value workers create. This process is called exploitation.
Women’s rights in the US are at a critical juncture. A leaked draft Supreme Court judgement indicates that five conservative judges support overturning the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that established a woman’s right to abortion as a constitutional right.
Here’s a fun game to play in lockdown: guess the name of the current NSW opposition leader. You get three tries. Give up? His name is Chris Minns, and, like the NSW Labor Party, he might as well not exist. Despite the Berejiklian government’s COVID clusterfuck, NSW’s Labor opposition has been virtually silent, having promised to “take politics out of the pandemic” as Minns put it in an interview on 2GB. That means that, despite a crying need for an approach that puts health before profits, what passes for an official opposition has quietly backed the government’s reckless policies.
The word “apartheid” is used today to describe Israel’s racist treatment of Palestinians. But the word, meaning “separateness”, originates in Afrikaans, the language of the white minority who ruled South Africa until the 1990s. In the eyes of the Afrikaners, “apartheid” wasn’t a slur; it was their affectionate name for South Africa’s brutal system of segregation.
Why do so many American socialists think it's important to back the Democrats? In part, you can thank Stalin.