Liberation Audio

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used his platform at the annual foreign ministers’ summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on September 10 to bash China and stir up trouble in a region 8,000 miles away from his office in Washington, D.C. Pompeo urged the members of ASEAN, a 10-nation regional cooperation bloc founded in 1967, to “Reconsider business dealing with the very state-owned companies that bully ASEAN coastal states in the South China Sea.” By “bully[ing] ASEAN coastal states”, Pompeo was referring to competing territorial claims by China and its neighbors to the waters of the South China Sea. The Chinese government and publicly-owned Chinese companies have constructed facilities in these disputed areas in recent years, as have other countries involved in the disputes. This is not a new strategy for Washington — by inflaming this hot-button issue, the Secretary of State hopes to isolate China diplomatically and economically in order to preserve U.S. dominance in East Asia and beyond. Liberation News spoke with K.J. Noh, a peace activist and scholar on the geopolitics of Asia, about Pompeo’s actions at the summit and their significance. On the issue of construction in contested territory, Noh explained, “China is not unique regarding construction or claims in the South China Sea. Five out of six of the claimants to the South China Sea have built facilities on contested Islands, including airstrips and other military facilities. The contested claims to the South China Sea among the various nations themselves bisect, tri-sect, quadri-sect — they are simply not just about China.” Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/in-latest-us-move-vs-china-pompeo-stirs-up-division-in-southeast-asia/

A popular uprising against police violence has broken out across Colombia following the shockingly brutal murder of Javier Ordóñez in Bogotá on September 8. In footage taken by witnesses that quickly spread and outraged the nation, Ordóñez was pinned to the ground and shocked over and over with a taser. Ordóñez, who was unarmed, repeatedly begged the officers to stop but the police showed no mercy. He was eventually taken into custody and beaten further before dying in the early hours of September 9. Since the killing, large protests have taken place every night. While the uprising began in Bogotá, the capital city, the movement quickly spread to other major population centers to become a truly nationwide phenomenon. Police responded to the demonstrations with deadly repression. At least 7 protesters have been confirmed killed by police, and more than 200 have been injured. The cops’ violence was so over the top that their actions were even denounced by the mayor of Bogotá, who remarked that by shooting live ammunition into crowds the police “disobeyed express and public instructions from the Mayor’s Office, so who do they obey? Justice, action and reform are urgently needed!” People have fought back with militant action. 17 police outposts were burned down on Wednesday night alone, and 194 cops were reportedly injured. The revolt poses a serious challenge to the rule of President Ivan Duque, who represents a far-right current in Colombian politics connected with the country’s notorious death squads and supported by the United States. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/colombia-erupts-in-struggle-against-police-murder/

“We the inmates of Attica Prison, have grown to recognize beyond the shadow of a doubt, that because of our posture as prisoners and branded characters as alleged criminals, the administration and prison employees no longer consider or respect us as human beings, but rather as domesticated animals selected to do their bidding in slave labor and furnished as a personal whipping dog for their sadistic, psychopathic hate. We, the inmates of Attica Prison, say to you, the sincere people of society, the prison system of which your courts have rendered unto is without question the authoritative fangs of a coward in power.”—”The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform,” July 2, 1971 The 1971 Attica prison uprising was a class conscious effort to tear down the curtain of silence and draw national attention to one of the most ostracized and exploited sectors of society—the millions of working class women and men forced to endure stark living conditions, as well as physical and sexual abuse behind bars. On Sept. 9, 1971, almost 1,500 inmates in Cell Block D took over the Attica Correctional Facility several months after having formally submitted a 27-point manifesto to the prison administration and the media. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/attica-the-making-and-significance-of-a-heroic-prison-uprising/

Louise Thompson Patterson was a key figure in the U.S. communist movement and the Harlem Renaissance. In this video, she speaks about her introduction to Marxism and her radicalization. This interview was conducted over three decades ago and the audio files have been digitized as part of NYU Tamiment Library’s invaluable Oral History of the American Left project. Liberation School has been transcribing and publishing interviews from this collection not as an endorsement of all the statements expressed in them, but to help a new generation of organizers and revolutionaries gain access to the experiences, lessons and perspectives of prior generations of U.S. communists. While much has been written in academic circles about the role of communists in the Black freedom struggle, this history is systematically omitted in history textbooks and rarer still do we get to hear from the Black radicals themselves. Read the full transcription: https://liberationschool.org/louise-patterson-on-her-introduction-to-marxism-and-radicalization/

The following is the first of a two-part article based on a talk the author gave at the People’s Forum in July 2020. This first part focuses on Kollontai’s struggle for proletarian feminism against bourgeois feminism as well as her struggle to center gender equality within the party’s platform. Part two focuses on her writings on the family, love, and communism. The Russian communist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai lived from 1872 to 1952. Prior to the 1917 revolution, she was an active speaker, writer, and organizer in the socialist women workers’ movement in Russia and Europe. Kollontai was the first woman to be a cabinet official: she was people’s commissar for welfare in the first Bolshevik government after the October revolution. She also founded the new government’s “women’s department” (Zhenotdel), and was one of the first women to hold an official diplomatic post. More exciting than these official responsibilities were Kollontai’s revolutionary work and writing, which focused not only on the relation between the struggle for gender equality and socialism, but also the general role of love and solidarity in struggle. Attention to these can help us clarify our analyses and sharpen our politics today. A Marxist committed to organizing women workers, Kollontai argued that women’s subordination was anchored in economic conditions; that is, in the conditions of “the production and reproduction of immediate life,” to use Frederick Engels’ formulation [1]. These conditions involve how both human existence is produced and reproduced and how the means of existence—food, clothing, shelter, tools, and so on—are secured and arranged. Women’s position in the economy—which includes the sexual division of labor in the family—determines women’s position in society. The repercussion is that women’s liberation depends on the elimination of capitalism, of class society and exploitation, and the communist rearrangement of production and life. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/kollontai-socialism-and-feminism-part-one/

Over a hundred years ago, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in Tennessee in a nail-biting vote. After decades of organizing, the question of universal suffrage in the United States lay in the hands of 96 legislators, all men and all white, who filed into the room wearing red and yellow roses to indicate how they planned to vote, yellow for suffrage and red against. Twice that day on August 18, 1920, the lawmakers attempted to table the motion and failed, the vote to table tied each time. In a roll call vote, Harry T. Burn threw down his red rose and voted for the 19th Amendment. The Speaker of the House followed suit, in what became a futile machination to later undo the vote. Burn credited his vote to a letter from his mother who had been motivated to write to him when Burn’s mentor gave a particularly racist and sexist speech denouncing the 19th Amendment. The amendment went into effect on August 26, 1920, which is now celebrated as Women’s Equality Day. The hotly contested amendment reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Contrary to what most of us learned in school, and continue to learn in school, the struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States was a fierce campaign that involved tens of thousands of diverse women who organized, took militant political action and repeatedly challenged the status quo. In a recent conversation with historians specializing in this movement, historian and curator Kate Clarke Lemay described the suffrage movement: “Women staged one of the longest social reform movements in the history of the United States. This is not a boring history of nagging spinsters; it is a badass history of revolution staged by political geniuses. I think that because they were women, people have hesitated to credit them as such.” It literally took hundreds of years for women to win the right to vote in the United States. That struggle was deep and multi-faceted and rife with contradictions that reflected the divisions of class and national oppression that characterize women as a group. The movement for suffrage was not homogenous. The movement faced deep opposition. It was also rich in militant action, organizing tactics and the building of political power for disenfranchised groups. There are many books, especially coming out this year, that detail the rich and varied history of the suffrage movement. There is a ton of eye-opening historical digging into the suffrage movement that has been shared, particularly in the last few months, for the centennial this year. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/100-years-of-universal-suffrage-a-history-of-struggle/

Hundreds of protesters gathered in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Aug. 23 to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake, which had occurred just hours prior. With emotions strong and tensions high, conditions were exacerbated further by excessive police force directed at protesters, including the use of tear gas and pepper balls. Liberation News was on the scene to talk to those on the front lines in the rebellion against police brutality. The police and rightwing violence our reporters witnessed was a harbinger of the racist killings to come perpetrated by Kyle Rittenhouse. While the immediate anger against racist police terror was palpable to all, a local medic and activist working on the ground emphasized that the roots of Kenosha’s unrest go far deeper than the brutal attempted murder of Jacob Blake. By and large, Kenosha mirrors the plight of working class and Black communities across the Midwest and the nation as a whole. Straddled between Milwaukee to its north and Chicago to its south, Kenosha’s Black community bears the twin scars of deindustrialization and segregation. The disparity between white and Black families is seen by both the police and local racists out of uniform as “ghetto-like,” he told Liberation News. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/on-the-ground-with-kenosha-protesters-we-want-justice/

The catchy rhythmic beat of Washington, D.C.’s home-grown Go-Go music was cranked up loud outside U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s home in a protest against actions that weaken the post office. The August 23 protest was one of many around the country over the last several weeks as people come together to defend crucial delivery of mail. The U.S. post office, a target of privatization efforts for years, has been under a renewed attack by the Trump administration as the country heads into a contentious election with charges of fraud, voter suppression, and deliberate sabotage flying. The president selected DeJoy, a major Republican fundraiser with no Postal Service experience, as the new Postmaster General in spite of DeJoy’s having been on the Board of Directors of XPO Logistics, a large company that does business with USPS and other government agencies. DeJoy was allowed to keep $30 million or more in XPO stock while serving as postmaster general. DeJoy’s deep ties to private firms that could compete against the post office raised obvious concerns. This might have just been another all-too-frequent type of conflict of interest, similar to Trump’s owning private businesses. It received much more attention when DeJoy instituted organizational changes that appear designed to slow delivery and weaken the post office. This, combined with Trump’s repeated rants against mail-in voting, could easily create an electoral crisis as many people try to avoid crowded polling places during the pandemic. DeJoy moved quickly after taking office on June 15. Twenty-three executives were either reassigned to new positions or removed, strengthening his power in the organization while also erasing the important institutional memory that workers with decades of experience bring to the organization. He also eliminated overtime work, ordering that any excess undelivered mail should simply be held for later delivery. This, along with removal of on-street mailboxes and mail sorting machines from several post offices has brought charges that the Trump administration is attempting to sabotage the election. While media attention has focused on threats related to the upcoming election, DeJoy’s actions are part of a longer history of efforts to weaken the post office and realign it to work more as a for-profit business rather than a crucial public service. The ultimate aim, which Trump has called for, is to privatize the agency. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/workers-communities-rise-to-defend-the-postal-service/

With talks between Democrats and the White house having collapsed, lawmakers have been unable and unwilling to extend the national eviction moratorium, supplemental unemployment relief, and CARES Act money that has helped families scrape by through the pandemic and recession. As Portland, the biggest city in Oregon, heads towards its third month of nightly protests against racist police brutality, its residents stand on the brink of a devastating eviction crisis. Even before the pandemic hit, Portland was one of the most rent-burdened cities in the United States, with almost half of renters spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. While Oregon has an eviction moratorium in place until the end of September, its residents who decide to take advantage of it have only until March 2021 to pay back all past-due rent. At the end of next month, all tenants are expected to pay rent or face eviction. The moratorium is merely a bandaid for the larger problem, given that many Portlanders cannot afford their rent following mass layoffs and unemployment caused by the pandemic situation, and do not know how soon they will be able to get back to work. As calculated in June, Oregon’s unemployment rate was a staggering 11.2 percent, while the 1.43 million unemployment claims the week of July 19 are up from the earlier 1.3 million the week of July 5. The Oregon Housing Alliance has pointed to recent research showing that one in five renters in Oregon don’t feel confident they will be able to pay next month’s rent. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/eviction-crisis-looms-in-portland-or/

Marxist theory cannot sustain itself. If relegated to academia, it will lose its revolutionary vitality. Elementary Marxist conceptions, elementary in the sense that they were accepted by advanced working-class forces throughout the world for many decades, are now virtually unknown. The link or legacy of Marxist theory has been snapped, broken, and a new generation of activists and fighters are unfamiliar with the core features of the theory. According to Lenin, the success of Bolshevism was premised on two features: (1) the assimilation of Marxist theory as the “granite foundation” and (2) that the party and its cadres “went through fifteen years of practical history (1903-17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience.” (from “Left-Wing” Communist, an Infantile Disorder, quoted more extensively below) We cannot snap our fingers and create the varied succession of different forms of the movement, such as was experienced by the Bolsheviks during those 15 years. The stages and circumstances of struggle are created not by a vanguard organization, but by objective conditions outside of the control of any political organization. Our comrades are going through different experiences. They are learning. They are not simply involved in agitation or propaganda, but are in fact accumulating critically necessary organizational experiences and skills. But the period we have been living through inside the United States does not approximate the intensity that the Bolsheviks experienced between 1903 and 1917. Again, that is outside the control of any organization. What is in our control is our capacity to review, learn, and comprehensively understand and promote Marxist theory as it applies to the struggles that are taking place inside the United States and around the world. Many people underestimate the central significance of theory or think that the questions of theory should be left in the hands of a small number of people, but in the Leninist conception, and according to the organizational principles of Leninism, the role played by theory is central. Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolution. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/theory-and-revolution-addressing-the-break-of-ideological-continuity/