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The LSSP leadership continued to transition away from Trotskyism and genuine Marxism in a reformist direction, starting to view language and citizenship issues as problem issues, brakes, and diversions in a society moving in a progressive direction. This was also linked to an increasingly electoral approach: fear of losing votes by raising anti-racism.

Sri Lanka || A Trotskyist Party Derailed — The National Question and Permanent Revolution

In those elections, a minority of the LSSP had split and joined the SLFP. There is a constant pressure from capitalist society against being organised in a revolutionary party. Also, the temptation to join a “bigger force” is a factor as well as individuals believing that they stand for socialist policies despite joining establishment forces.

Sri Lanka || A Trotskyist Party Derailed — The National Question and Permanent Revolution

As was the case 69 years later, in 2022, the masses showed enormous strength and willingness to fight, with the difference that in 1953 the movement had an organised political leadership.

Sri Lanka || A Trotskyist Party Derailed — The National Question and Permanent Revolution

The new youth leagues in a short time sank roots among the masses. They organised a campaign in support of a strike at Wellawatte, the biggest mill in Ceylon, and became de facto strike leaders while the Ceylon Labour Union leadership colluded in the strike-breaking efforts of the bosses. They also organised a mass campaign against malaria. There were 5 million malaria cases in 1935, causing the death of up to 100,000 people. The youth league’s slogan was “The reason is poverty”.

Sri Lanka || A Trotskyist Party Derailed — The National Question and Permanent Revolution

We’re already in a recession when it comes to real wages. Real average weekly earnings have been negative now for five months in a row, and six of the past seven. There’s over a 90% correlation between real spending and real incomes, and just a lag of a few months that separate the two. We have a proprietary late-cycle indicator that includes a variety of different market and macro variables. They’re telling us that we are more than 80% of the way through this cycle. That would put a recession starting sometime this summer — as early as June and as late as August. It’s going to be either a second-quarter or early third-quarter event.

Prepare for a recession this summer, a bear market in real estate and a drop in stock prices, warns strategist David Rosenberg

Why should we focus on the CRC and not the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Montgomery Improvement Association, the various grassroots organizations and networks that elected Harold Washington to the Chicago mayoralty in 1983, or for that matter, The Links, Incorporated? Let us be clear. The CRC emerged during a period of pervasive demobilization, amid the jetsam of Black Power, women’s liberation, and the New Left, literally on the eve of the Reagan revolution, and despite whatever interpretative value we might wring from their critique of U.S. society, there is no practical reason to afford the CRC with a privileged place in contemporary left strategic and tactical thinking.

Who’s Afraid of Left Populism? - New Politics

Moreover, the myth that Trump rode into office on a wave of resurgent white supremacy has only entrenched liberal anti-racist posturing, overgeneralizations about and demonization of white workers, and a prevailing sense that popular left politics are not only out of reach, but not even worth pursuing.

Who’s Afraid of Left Populism? - New Politics

Many left activists and academics continue to abide the notion of black exceptionalism, that there is something unique and incommensurable about the experiences of blacks that prohibits any substantive discussion of class position and interests whenever the black population is concerned. This posture is wrong and dangerous. It is not grounded in any close empirical sense of actually existing black life, but retreats toward the most unidimensional sense of the black population as noble, long-suffering victims of oppression and the moral conscience of a white-dominated nation, rather than a people possessing all the social contradictions, ideological diversity, foibles, heroism, and frailties found throughout the American populace. This failure to understand the complexities of black political life leaves intellectuals and activists unable to see the ways that particular segments of the black population, both elites and popular constituencies, have historically supported the carceral expansion and continue to play a crucial role in the reproduction of the highly unequal, unjust neoliberal urban order.

Who’s Afraid of Left Populism? - New Politics

“However, in June [2021], the month of the primary, NYPD’s own crime statistics showed that shootings and murders in New York City were down compared year-over-year. Shooting incidents in the city were down nearly 20%. Murder was down over 23%. And the number of shooting victims was down 26%. Although one could argue the exact number in the uptick in murders in the past year, which sits around an increase of 25%, one can in no uncertain terms lay the blame for this on “Defund the Police,” which had little to no concrete success in actually cutting police budgets. One may instead point to the once-in-a-century pandemic, and the economic fallout that followed, as a culprit for the rise in urban violence. The system does not prevent violence, and it surely doesn’t provide public safety. We have witnessed time and again the way that “law enforcement” enforces some of the laws for some of the people some of the time. The lack of economic opportunities and desperation are the major motivators for violent crime and theft.”

The Corporate Agenda and Toxic Identity Politics of Eric Adams

The demands from the movement for abolishing police, prisons, defunding police, and reparations reflect attempts to grapple with how to dismantle systemic racism and oppression. To redress the historical and contemporary denial of the humanity of Black people in the U.S. and reimagine the world anew, while fighting for immediate material gains for Black workers and youth, this has to be connected to working-class social struggle and the ideas of socialism and internationalism. This is the only pathway to Black liberation. At the same time, there will be no end to capitalist rule in the U.S. without building a mighty, multi-racial struggle against racism.

The State of Black America Today: Reparations, Capitalist Crisis, and the Path to Black Freedom

For our movement to maintain its vibrancy and challenge the system that oppresses us, it will have to cut the purse strings and links with big money grants that keep afloat a number of groups and individuals that are organizing against law enforcement terror and racial oppression. The key and historical role of these capitalist entities is to choke and control the movement’s message and to focus it into safe channels that don’t ideologically and organizationally challenge the system of capitalism and racism.

The State of Black America Today: Reparations, Capitalist Crisis, and the Path to Black Freedom

As Du Bois declared in Black Reconstruction: “In 1865, September, another address [this time to the American people as a whole] over the signature of Marx declared boldly: ‘Injustice against a fraction of your people having been followed by such dire consequences, put an end to it. Declare your fellow citizens from this day forth free and equal, without any reserve. If you refuse them citizens’ rights while you exact from them citizens’ duties, you will sooner or later face a new struggle which will once more drench your country in blood.'”

Monthly Review | Marx and Slavery

Point the Movement to the Streets, Not Towards a “Seat at the Table” The 2019 elections in themselves represented an opportunity to strike a blow against the Democratic establishment. Unfortunately the groundwork was not laid for a left mayoral candidate standing on a clear pro-working class program and pointing towards building a mass movement, and the opportunity will in large part be missed. Although there are 14 mayoral candidates, none represent a genuine break from the status quo. In the past few weeks the race has narrowed to a tightly-packed, low-polling group of establishment Democrats. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle holds a slim lead. Preckwinkle has portrayed herself as the “most progressive candidate in the race”. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) member alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and other major unions have backed Preckwinkle and encouraged working people to support her in order to earn a “seat at the table” where she can supposedly be won to bold demands. In reality, Preckwinkle is a clear-cut member of the pro-business establishment. Although she has attached herself to some progressive measures, and big business is leery of her union backing, her long career demonstrates that her allegiances do not lie with working people. As Cook County Board President, she implemented devastating cuts on hospitals and regressive tax increases, including the notorious “soda tax”, which was repealed due to mass opposition. She also signed Chicago’s bid for Amazon’s “HQ2” that promised to shower billions on one of the richest companies in the world. In addition, Preckwinkle holds a powerful position as Chair of the Cook County Democratic Party. Although she has not always walked in lockstep with the machine, she gained her position by operating well within its rules. Last year she took $116,000 in political donations raised at the home of Ed Burke, which she later returned under pressure. But it was also revealed that she had given Burke’s son a $100,000 a year job with the County. Beyond simple political favors, her allegiances have had devastating consequences for working people. In last year’s elections, she backed Cook County property tax assessor Joe Berrios against a self-described reform candidate, even after Berrios had been exposed as having systematically overtaxed working-class and poor people, especially people of color, in order to subsidize property tax breaks for big business and developers. Preckwinkle herself admits that she is not ready to stand with working people in all our fights. In response to attacks on her union ties made during a TV debate, she bragged about her record of cuts to county budgets and union jobs. And when asked if she would be able to say “no” to the CTU’s demands, she responded: “Of course. Of course.” If a more traditionally pro-business candidate like Bill Daley, the son and brother of two former Mayors Daley, or Susana Mendoza, a Burke protege, is elected it will be in large part because so many have been unconvinced and even put off by Preckwinkle’s attempt at a “progressive” rebranding. The CTU leadership and alderman Rosa have contributed to challenging the status quo over the past period – the two recent victorious CTU charter teachers’ strikes stand out. Had they used the years since the limited campaign of Chuy Garcia in the 2015 mayoral race to prepare the ground for a genuinely left, working-class campaign, the opening existed to deliver an enormous blow to the corporate establishment in the 2019 elections. Going back to 2014 and the excitement for a possible run by CTU President Karen Lewis – who was tragically sidelined by cancer – there has been a growing space for a working class alternative to the corporate Democratic establishment in Chicago elections. Yet, no systematic preparations were made and the unfortunate approach of CTU leaders, Rosa, and other major union leaders has been to cheerlead for Preckwinkle despite her record. The “seat at the table” strategy does not account for the inevitability under capitalism that big business will attempt to undermine any attempt to pass serious reforms. As working people we derive our power from our numbers in the streets and in our workplaces, not by sitting down to tables inevitably stacked with corporate politicians and business representatives. It’s crucial that we prepare our movements and workplace struggles in Chicago to fight based on this strength, refusing to limit ourselves to what more friendly-sounding establishment politicians like Toni Preckwinkle are willing to offer.

Corporate Chicago Democrats Rocked by Corruption Revelations, Build Mass Movements for Working Class Gains

Instead of suggesting that participation in movements is inferior to voting, people with influence should educate themselves and the public about the often hidden role of social movements in achieving change in this country. Movements led to the abolition of slavery, brought Jim Crow to its knees and won child labor laws, the minimum wage, the Clean Water Act and more. African-Americans and women wouldn’t even have the right to vote if it weren’t for people taking action.

Opinion | Don’t Believe the Lie That Voting Is All You Can Do

James Baldwin speaks for us and to us, now and into the future, when he wrote in the book No Name in the Street: “The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world’s present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.”

The Invention of Ibram X Kendi and the Ideological Crises of Our Time | Black Agenda Report

These figures are all the more improbable given that city hall and employers had a longstanding penchant for using divide-and-conquer to destroy labor solidarity and weaken the collective power of the working class as a whole. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries capitalists deftly seized upon inequalities among workers in order to pit them against one another and thereby defeat union drives and strikes. Philip Armour, the owner of the largest packinghouse in Chicago, explained it like this: “We change among different nationalities and languages . . . it prevents them from getting together. We have the thing systematized.” Black workers were treated the worst and were, as it is sometimes put, the “last hired and first fired.”

Learning from Multiracial Radical Organizing in 1930s Chicago | Rampant

A 2015 Gallup poll found that black adults who believed police treated black people unfairly were also more likely to desire a larger police presence in their local area than those who thought police treated black people fairly

How black people really feel about the police, explained

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