The capitalist class and its well-paid intellectuals and pundits continue to argue that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 means that socialism and communism are impossible. A stereotyped and negative image of the Soviet Union and socialism has been relentlessly fed to the people of the United States ever since the Russian Revolution, which took place in 1917. It is extremely rare for the establishment to mention any of the truly remarkable achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the full name of the Soviet federation of 15 republics, and the other countries that subsequently set out to build socialism. The triumph of the Russian Revolution nearly a century ago was truly a world-historic event. It was the first time in history that the working class was able to seize and hold power, and to reorganize the economy and society on a socialist basis. It proved that the oppressed, with their own leadership and their own party, could create a new reality.

Explore the relationship between imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism. Learn about Marx's views on British capital accumulation through conquest and murder. Understand the transition from colonialism to imperialism and the definition of imperialism. Discover the dominance of monopolies in the global north and the concept of finance capital. Explore the challenge of imperialism and the need for proletarian internationalism.

The Bolsheviks were relatively weak in the countryside among the peasantry. They had always been in the cities; they spent most of their existence underground and going out into the country had been hard for them. They were mainly a workers’ party, but the peasants made up a huge majority of the population. The SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries) were the main party in the countryside. The relationship between the peasants (farmers and agricultural workers) to the workers in the cities was a key issue. Based on an analysis, for a long time, the Bolsheviks distinguished between the rich peasants, called “kulaks” in Russian, the middle peasants, the poor peasants and agricultural laborers. The kulaks employed labor, exploited labor and owned large plots of land. The middle peasants owned land and basically had enough to live on. And the poor peasants, the majority, lived on plots of land inherited from feudalism that were too small to live on. They were constantly going under, starving to death, had their children starve and lived in destitute. Agricultural laborers were a growing sector in the countryside. They were poor peasants who had lost their land altogether and were really proletarians in the countryside. The Bolsheviks distinguished between these different layers and their strategy was to fight the kulaks, neutralize the middle strata, and win over the poor peasants and agricultural laborers. Even though they were not supposed to be the peasant party, the Bolsheviks were the only ones who, all through the revolution, from the beginning, openly supported the peasants’ seizing the big estates without compensation. Even the SRs took a position against the land seizures, stating that they would have to wait until there is a constituent assembly, draw up the proper legislation and assure the land owners of how much they would be compensated. The Bolshevik stated that it was the right of the poor peasants to take the land, the big estates. But the SR leadership, while claiming to represent all the peasants, really represented the interests of the better off layers – the capitalist farmers and aspiring capitalist farmers. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/milestones-in-communist-history-the-october-revolution/3/

On April 3, 1917, Lenin, Zinoviev and other leaders arrived in a sealed car on a train. The German government allowed them to return to Russia across Germany and through German-held territory because it hoped that they would take Russia out of the war and relieve the pressure on Germany – that was explicitly the German government’s reason. E. H. Carr, an English historian wrote a tremendous 14-volume history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Here is how Carr describes the scene of Lenin’s return: Alexander Kollontai produced a bouquet which Lenin carried awkwardly: and the party proceeded to the former imperial waiting room. Here, Lenin was officially welcomed by Chkheidze, the president of the Petrograd soviet, who, in a few carefully chosen words, expressed his hopes for ‘a closing of the ranks of democracy’ in defense of ‘our revolution.’ Lenin, turning vaguely away from the official party towards the assembled crowds outside, addressed them as ‘dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers,’ greeted in their persons ‘the victorious Russian revolution,’ declared that the ‘robber imperialist war’ was the beginning of civil war all over Europe, and concluded:‘Any day, if not today or tomorrow, the crash of the whole of European imperialism may come. The Russian revolution, made by you, has begun it and opened a new epoch. Hail the worldwide socialist revolution.’ As Sukhanov notes, it was not a reply to Chkheidze. It did not even fit ‘the context’ of the Russian revolution as understood by all without exception who had witnessed it or taken part in it.’ Lenin had spoken; and his first words had been not of the bourgeois, but of the socialist, revolution. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/milestones-in-communist-history-the-october-revolution/2/

The Russian Revolution is a vast subject. An exhaustive analysis of it is beyond the scope of this writing. But below, some of the key points will be highlighted. The Russian Revolution took place in the background of World War I, a war between imperialist powers over control of territories and colonies. The war caused a split in the international socialist movement. Right up to the outbreak of the war, the parties of the Second International had vowed to fight against the war once it started. Socialist parties had pledged to oppose sending workers of the warring countries to kill each other and die for their respective bourgeoisies, the capitalist class. But when the war started, nearly all of these parties collapsed in the face of the war hysteria in their respective countries and ended up supporting the war. Only the Bolshevik party, one of the socialist parties in Russia, and a small party in Serbia took a strong position against the war. The five Bolshevik members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, were sent into exile in Serbia for their position. The Bolsheviks were forced to go completely underground, and faced a new period of isolation and persecution when the war started. Rather than capitulating to the war hysteria, the Bolsheviks called for “revolutionary defeatism.” Their position was that the workers of every belligerent country should call for the defeat of their own ruling class. They called for socialist agitators in the armies to encourage fraternization between the soldiers of warring sides to discuss their common interest in ending the war and stopping killing each other. Lenin also called for turning the imperialist war into a civil war; in other words to turn this imperialist war between nations into a war between classes and against the capitalists. These positions were considered quite bold, to put it mildly, even by other anti-war socialists, or internationalists as they were known. Lenin was considered to be the extreme of the extreme at the time. Over the following two and a half years, millions of soldiers and civilians died in the bloodiest and most destructive war in history up to that point. The Russian Empire suffered huge casualties. Its army was made up mainly of peasants, as was the population as a whole – nearly 90% peasants. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in single battles. Famines and epidemics spread. On Feb. 23, 1917 (on the old calendar still used in Russia), March 8 on the modern calendar, International Women’s Day, a strike of woman textile workers in Petrograd was called. Petrograd, later named Leningrad and today called St. Petersburg, was the capital and the center of industry. The strike spread like wildfire. The war years of death, disease and deprivation for the workers and peasants, while the czar, the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie lived in almost indescribable luxury, now brought forth an explosion of revolutionary anger that was unstoppable. It was a spontaneous uprising – no organization or party had planned or organized it. But it was strongly influenced by decades of revolutionary work and experiences, especially the experience of the working class in the 1905-06 revolution. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/milestones-in-communist-history-the-october-revolution/

As the Party for Socialism and Liberation, we condemn in the harshest terms the brutal military coup that took place on October 25 in Sudan and the subsequent repression and arrests by the Sudanese military forces. We stand in full solidarity with the people of Sudan and the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) in their resistance against the coup. We fully support the call by the SCP and the Sudanese Professional Association for a political strike and for the people to take to the streets in civil disobedience to stand against this power grab by the military forces opposed to the movement for change that began in 2018. This coup is a desperate effort to stop the process of transition of power to the people of Sudan and their legitimate representatives. We are confident that the mass protest movement which SCP is a crucial part of will emerge victorious against this reactionary coup. Long live the people of Sudan and their resistance! Long live the Sudanese Communist Party Hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan are in the streets courageously resisting the coup staged by the military on Monday. The country’s top armed forces leader Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan announced the take over and declared a state of emergency. As part of the coup, soldiers arrested Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and other high ranking civilian officials, and it was revealed today that Hamdok was being held captive at al-Burhan’s personal residence. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/sudan-massive-resistance-defends-december-revolution-vs-military-coup/

Three years before the 1969 Stonewall Uprising that galvanized a generation of LGBTQ activists, and more than a decade before Harvey Milk led the fight against the Briggs Initiative as San Francisco’s first gay city supervisor, a group of trans women and drag queens revolted against bigoted police violence in San Francisco’s heavily oppressed Tenderloin district. These courageous fighters turned the tables on their oppressors and ushered in a new wave of class-conscious organizing by queer youth, especially from working class and oppressed communities. Although it was almost forgotten, the uprising at Compton’s Cafeteria is part of our revolutionary history, demonstrating that militant resistance is nothing new. The uprising reminds us that our struggles today both build on our ancestors’ fights and shape those to come. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/compton-cafeteria-riot/

Toward the end of our earlier introduction to surplus value, the heart and motor of the class struggle, we wrote that: “The rate of surplus value for the capitalist is the rate of exploitation for the worker. By merely prolonging the working day, the capitalist accrues more (absolute) surplus value. Increasing the working day from eight to 10 hours results in two more hours of surplus value for the capitalist and of exploitation for the worker”. For any working period—whether it be a day, an hour, or five minutes—part of the period is “necessary labor” and another part is “surplus labor.” The former is when the worker produces the value of their own wage, and the latter is when the worker produces surplus value for the capitalist. The ratio between the two is the rate of surplus value for the capitalist and the rate of exploitation for the worker. Absolute surplus value, Marx says, is “produced by prolongation of the working-day” [2]. In other words, if the ratio between necessary and surplus labor is fixed, then prolonging the working day will result in more surplus value for the capitalist and a greater degree of exploitation for the worker. Capital’s entire reason for being is to produce surplus value, to increase the exploitation of the working class. As a result, there’s a logical impulse for each capitalist to extend the working day as much as possible. Yet not only might this produce problems for capitalism as a whole (in that it could exhaust the supply of labor-power available), but the working class fights back against exploitation, and at times is able to force limits to the length of the working day. What happens, then, when political legislation limits the working day to, say, eight hours? This is obviously a limit to capitalist accumulation. For capital, however, “every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome”. Relative surplus value is capital’s strategy for overcoming this limit. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/relative-surplus-value-the-class-struggle-intensifies/

As this statement was being prepared, a Texas state judge issued a stay temporarily blocking an anti-abortion group from enforcing SB 8 against Planned Parenthood, giving some relief to health care providers and abortion rights advocates. The Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on the Texas Senate Bill 8 and demonstrated its unwillingness to protect the rights of women late Wednesday evening when they voted 5 to 4 allowing the Texas “heartbeat bill” to go into effect. Purposefully written with obfuscatory procedures and language designed to circumvent Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court relinquished its duty to uphold the legal right to abortion by allowing this bill to go into effect in the state of Texas. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-block-senate-bill-8-legalize-and-expand-abortion-access-now/

In the battle against COVID-19, Cuba has been a country of firsts. It is the only country in all Latin America to produce its own vaccines. Cuba has sent more than 5,000 doctors to help treat COVID patients in 57 brigades to 40 countries around the world since the pandemic began. No other country has come close. Now, in a major new development, babies and children two years old and up will be massively vaccinated starting in 10 days. Cuba is the first country in the world to vaccinate babies and children under 12. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/cuba-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-vaccinate-children-under-12/