#workers world

[queersatanic]

DID YOU KNOW: The horror icon Bela Lugosi was an ardent socialist and antifascist who was later tracked by the OSS then FBI in the 1940s and '50s

[ID: edited image of actor Bela Lugosi as Dracula with a black bandana and red star of the Hungarian Communist Party added in. Behind his outstretched arm is headline "Bela Lugiosi, actor, union leader, anti-fascist” and start of Workers World article /ID]

Despite the rhetoric sometimes used for the sake of liberals and centrists, the U.S. government has always been a lot more worried about antifascists than fascists. Lugosi helped form the Hungarian-American Council for Democracy, calling for “Nazism to be wiped out everywhere,” and therefore was considered suspect.

Parallax Views did a full episode about that history including Lugosi's early work in Hungary overseeing the theater industry as part of the nascent Communist government there ultimately overthrown by reactionaries after the First World War. They also cover his time in the United States organizing workers and *thinking* he was working for FDR's government to spy on Hungarian fascists in the U.S. when really, those people were reporting on him back to Hoover, filling up Lugosi's files.

Read the Workers World article for a quick summary, then go listen to the whole podcast.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Liberation & Marxism: Vince Copeland Memorial Issue

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In honor of the 25th anniversary of Workers World Party co-founder Vince Copeland’s death on June 7, 1993.

Copeland was a leader of workers at Bethlehem Steel in Buffalo, New York, during the 1940s. His firing at the height of the Cold War anti-communist witch hunt in October 1950 culminated in a strike by 16,000 steelworkers demanding his reinstatement.

In 1959, along with Sam Marcy and Dorothy Ballan, Copeland co-founded Workers World Party and became the founding editor of Workers World newspaper.

This issue of Liberation & Marxism includes a selection of articles by Copeland spanning the length and breadth of his career as a revolutionary historian and theoretician, including:

“Modern welding and the welder,” a master class in the Marxist dialectical method, first published in 1945.

Excerpts from “The Unfinished Revolution,” one of Copeland’s most important works, on the Civil War and Black liberation struggle;

“Lenin on Tolstoy,” an essay written in 1990, response to the anti-Soviet author Richard Pipes, and published here for the first time.

[josieandthepussycatsofficial]

i see workers world has decided to join in the thinly veiled antisemitism

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Pennsylvania prison system threatens to ban Workers World newspaper for reporting on Florida prison strike

By Joe Piette 

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is threatening to censor Workers World newspaper from being read by over 300 prisoners in the state system.

The immediate reason given in the DOC’s Jan. 29 letter is that “information contained on pages 1 and 6 calls for action that may advocate criminal activity within the correctional facility.” The title of the offending article by J. White in the Jan. 18 Workers World issue was “Fla. prisoners launch strike against slave labor.” 

Four issues of WW were denied to Pennsylvania prisoners in 2017. This time, the DOC is escalating its threat by planning to ban all issues of Workers World to all prisoners.

The DOC was forced to overturn its decision to ban the Aug. 31, 2017, issue of WW after a social media and press campaign urged readers to send letters and make phone calls to the DOC.

WW urges all readers, activists, writers and reporters to send complaints to Department of Corrections, 1920 Technology Parkway, Mechanicsburg, PA  17050, as well as 717-728-2573 and [email protected].

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

100th anniversary of October Revolution: The 0.001 percent are cheering too soon

100th anniversary of October Revolution: The 0.001 percent are cheering too soon

By Deirdre Griswold

The world bourgeoisie, in their evaluations of the Russian Revolution, say it “failed,” and this proves socialism can never be achieved — certainly not through a revolution of the workers and the oppressed.

Maybe a little bit of “socialism” is OK in the eyes of some of them. By that they mean giving in to mass pressure for the capitalist state to play a larger role in…

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[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Soviet socialism: Utopian or scientific?

Soviet socialism: Utopian or scientific?

Was the Russian Revolution utopian?

Now that the counterrevolution is fully in the saddle in the USSR, and its wrecking crews are breaking down every progressive and revolutionary reform shall we say that this too was a form of utopianism Was not the Soviet Union in reality as isolated as was New Harmony? Was it not an attempt to build an oasis within a world imperialist environment that was rent…

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[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Social gains in early years of Soviet power

Social gains in early years of Soviet power

100th anniversary of October Revolution, part 2

By Deirdre Griswold

As we described in the first article in this series, the workers’ revolution that started in Russia in 1917 and spread to all the nationalities brutally oppressed by the czarist empire took place in one of the most underdeveloped countries of Europe, only recently emerged from feudalism. The majority of the people were…

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[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

The Russian Revolution and the Communist Manifesto

The Russian Revolution and the Communist Manifesto

By Greg Butterfield

It is often forgotten — and sometimes deliberately overlooked — that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto” was originally called “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.”

The famous pamphlet was written 150 years ago, not only as the world view of two individuals but as a program of action for a revolutionary organization — the Communist League, which…

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