PATRICE LUMUMBA—Neither brutality, nor cruelty nor torture will ever bring me to ask for mercy, for I prefer to die with my head unbowed, my faith unshakable and with profound trust in the destiny of my country, rather than live under subjection and disregarding sacred principles. History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations, but the history which will be taught in the countries freed from imperialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and to the north and south of the Sahara, it will be a glorious and dignified history.
READ ONCategory: CLASS STRUGGLE
The death of reformism: Corbyn and the “broad left”
CHRIS MARSDEN—The Blairite think-tank, Prospect, proclaims, “Social democracy, the most influential force in European politics for decades, is dying.” They should know, because the party they dubbed “New Labour” was in the vanguard of the political shift to a nakedly pro-business, pro-privatisation, pro-austerity and pro-war agenda that has ended in electoral meltdown. The working class, particularly the younger generation, has abandoned the old parties in disgust at what they have done.
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Critic of Capitalism: Martin Luther King
FRANK SCOTT—“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”- Report to SCLC Staff, May 1967.
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MIKE FAULKNER: Musings on the state of the Left, Marxian dogmatism, and the meanderings of history
MIKE FAULKNER—What was particularly disturbing was the way in which most of those who regarded themselves as Marxist-Leninists made no attempt to apply Marxism in any meaningful way to what was happening. They seemed happy to accept whatever issued from Beijing as the truth. In fact, a prominent member of the editorial board of a publication with which I was connected told me that he thought it was our job to be clear about what the Chinese were saying and to repeat it in language more suited to an English readership. They often acted more like followers of a religious faith, accepting edicts from an infallible priesthood. This became impossible to accept when the Chinese leadership, on the basis of what was claimed to be the application of Mao’s theory of contradiction, came to the conclusion that the principal contradiction in the world was no longer the contradiction between the peoples of the world and imperialism, led by U.S. imperialism, but rather that between the peoples of the world and what they had now come to call “Soviet-Social Imperialism”.
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Left Anticommunism: the unkindest cut (CLASSICAL ESSAY—REPOST)
MICHAEL PARENTI— Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don’t get it.
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Violence, Revolution, and Structural Change in Latin America (Revised and expanded)
JOHN GERASSI—The basic difference between American imperialism today and American imperialism a century ago is that it is more violent, more far-reaching, and more carefully planned today. But American foreign policy, at least since 1823, has always been assertive, always expansionist, always imperialist. Of course, it has rarely been pushed beyond America’s capabilities. Thus, when the United States was weak, its interventions abroad were mild. When its strength grew, so did its daring.
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Populism from the Left and the Militarization of Europe
JOSEF SKALA—To this day the left remains the victim of the so-called “new” thinking invented by Gorbachev and his associates. This, of course, is a serious distortion of left thought. But many modern theoreticians are still under the pressure of the stereotypes propagated by this “new” thinking. After all, this thought was nothing new!
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