Struggle for a New World

On the “Deal of the Century” and the Oslo Accords

On Tuesday, January 28th, the United States announced its latest “peace plan” for the Palestinian people in a characteristic display of arrogant imperialist hubris. Like all such “peace plans” put forth by the US, the plan offered no meaningful concessions from the Israeli side. Yet the Trump administration, in typical shady salesman style, has pushed it as “the Deal of the Century”, even having the chutzpah to mock and insult the entire Palestinian people prior to their even having a chance to reject this latest non-solution.

All of this in spite of the fact that the entire conflict is the result of the Zionist state being built via settler-colonial violence against the Indigenous Palestinian population, and in spite of the fact that an apartheid state of affairs persists on their land to this day. The Palestinian people are expected to jump with joy every time the head imperialist power “offers” them “peace” in the form of total surrender to Zionist colonization, and of course are vilified for any resistance, including non-violent resistance which they are not obligated to restrain themselves to.

Hands Off Iran! US Imperialism Out Of Iraq!

We condemn the U.S. assassination of General Qasem Soleimani and PMU commander Abu Mehdi al Muhendis in Baghdad. The targeting of senior military officials in this way is a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty and a brazen act of war against Iran. As the United States approaches an election year, Trump is using this act of aggression to consolidate his support— just as Bill Clinton bombed Iraq during his impeachment, and George Bush launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after losing the popular vote in the 2000 election.

We cannot understand this escalation without understanding how the people of both Iraq and Iran have suffered violence, repression, and economic deprivation for decades because of U.S. attacks and intervention. From overthrowing an elected Iranian government and installing a monarchy in order to maintain Western economic interests in the country and arming Saddam Hussein and defending his atrocities throughout the Iran-Iraq war, to the years of devastating sanctions imposed on both countries, to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, U.S. actions have already lead to the deaths and suffering of millions. A new war in both countries would devastate the lives of millions more, at a time when people are still rebuilding from the aftermath of previous conflicts, and while popular movements in both countries face repression for making demands of their own governments.

Within the United States, war with Iran will lead to greater surveillance and criminalization of already-targeted Muslim and immigrant communities, just as previous wars in the region have. Police in large American cities including Los Angeles and Boston have already issued threats, asking people to report supposed ‘suspicious activity.’

It is our responsibility to stand with the working and oppressed people of Iraq and Iran, oppose any attempts to start a new war, and support an end to U.S. military involvement in the region.

Lights for Liberty – Raleigh, NC and Washington, DC

On Friday, July 12, thousands of people participated in over 750 events around the country (and around the world) to protest the racist, inhumane, and fascistic US border regime, specifically the policies of the Trump administration. Two such events, in Raleigh, NC and Washington, DC were attended by Struggle for a New World writers.

Juneteenth 2019 Statement

On this Juneteenth, the holiday that celebrates the end of American chattel slavery, Struggle for a New World stands with the oppressed Afro-American nation in their continued struggle for freedom. The US Empire was built using the stolen labor of African slaves, and to this day the foundations of this country rest on the backs of the oppressed Afro-American nation formed through the processes of slavery and Reconstruction. Following the failure of reconstruction, the Republican Party abandoned its radical left wing in favor of defending US imperialism against all oppressed peoples who stood in their way.

Thus, while the Republican Party and the US Empire of which it is part may hypocritically celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth stands for the history from below of the Afro-American people, who still struggle for freedom from the powers that enslaved and continue to oppress them to this day. The national liberation struggle of the Afro-American people remains an unfinished revolution on the lands they have tilled, the Achilles Heel of US imperialism.

May Day 2019

Struggle for a New World greets the working and oppressed peoples of the world on May 1st, with whom we celebrate this International Workers’ Day. Today is the working class’s own holiday, a day that belongs to all the exploited and oppressed; today is the day we raise our voices loudest in our struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and fascism, and for socialism, peace, and democracy. From the U.S. to Uruguay, from the Philippines to Poland, from Italy to India, from South Africa to South Korea, from the Congo to Cuba, indeed, in every corner of the world, our class and our movement is celebrating and struggling. Greetings comrades!

#FreeRonnieLong

On March 6th, 2019 a group of students and faculty from Winston-Salem State University, a local HBCU, as well as pastors and other community activists (including a writer from Struggle for a New World), traveled an hour and a half to the state capitol to protest the continued incarceration of Ronnie Long by the state of North Carolina. The recently elected Attorney General is the son of a longtime civil rights lawyer, and many people had hoped his election would lead to a long-overdue reevaluation of the Ronnie Long case. However, in a case coming up later this month, the state will argue against the introduction of new evidence that the defense believes will definitively prove his innocence.

In 1976, then 21-year-old Ronnie Long, an Afro-American man, was arrested and charged with raping the wealthy white widow of an executive at Cannon Mills, a textile company that had bought an old plantation to build its plant into what was still effectively a company town. The prosecution’s evidence was his identification by the victim based solely on a leather jacket, a footprint that “could” have matched his shoes and the testimony of the lead detective (who was later found to have lied under oath). The defense presented numerous alibis for his activities the night of the crime and pointed out inconsistencies in the scant physical evidence the prosecution provided. An all-white jury, four of whom either worked for Cannon Mills or had a spouse who did, deliberated for approximately half an hour and delivered a guilty verdict to a racially segregated courtroom, which nearly sparked a riot. Ronnie Long has spent the 43 years since in prison, maintaining his innocence, and after decades of legal effort and periods of street protests on his behalf, his lawyers have forced the state to slowly release forensic evidence that had been hidden from the defense during the initial trial. This new evidence, collected by the SBI, shows there were no DNA matches, no hair matches, no fingerprints – in a word, no physical evidence implicating Ronnie Long.

International Working Women’s Day 2019 Statement

On this International Working Women’s Day, Struggle for a New World sends our greetings to all the militant women of the world in their struggle against patriarchy and gender oppression. This International Working Women’s Day comes in a time of fierce reactionary assaults on women’s rights and equally fierce, if not greater resistance and fight back on the part of women. While figures such as Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and their counterparts spew misogynistic and sexist filth, the women of the US, the Philippines, Turkey, and the entirety of the world resist. In every country, working women continue their centuries long fight against oppression and for social justice.

“Green New Deal” or Planned Green Economy?

by Güney Işıkara

The report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in September 2018, immediately followed by the UN COP24 climate change conference in December of the same year, immediately resulted in a flurry of discussion around the world, including within the United States. As the environmental crisis looms ever more as an existential crisis in the popular imagination, it is increasingly reflected in policy proposals. The “Green New Deal” proposed by the Green Party in the US has been taken up by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), including some, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sit in prominent offices through the Democratic Party. The fact that corporate greenwashing, along with the propagation of a “green capitalism,” has been organized around the concept of sustainability should not drive the left. The main task is to frame the question in correct terms, putting our fingers on the systemic aspect of the crisis— namely capitalism as a totality.

However, this does not simply mean providing an abstract criticism of capitalism as responsible for the crisis, while standing aloof from the specifics of the environmental crisis. The initial consciousness of the system as the source of the crisis cannot be equated with the posing a concrete solution. On what grounds can Marxists analyze the environmental crisis, and what distinctive political prescriptions follow from this, that might differ from social-democratic reforms?

In this short piece, we will mainly focus on the deadlock which solution proposals that do not problematize the capitalist market mechanism find themselves in, and suggest the blueprints of a radical, socialist response that the crisis itself is calling for. Particularly taking up the question of growth vs. degrowth, we are aware that the piece leaves many important issues untouched.

Against Bolsonaro, Against Trump

On January 24th, 2019, representatives of the Brazilian Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) joined the DSA at the Verso Books loft in New York City for an event titled “Against Bolsonaro, Against Trump.” One of Struggle for a New World’s writers was in the audience and wrote this report.

One DSA representative, the New York State Senator Julia Salazar, spoke first. The audience could not help but be struck by the shift in tone between the initial speech by Salazar and the women of the PSOL. Salazar spoke in relatively simple terms about how she represented people rather than profits, but defended the Democratic Party and even the Republicans as being “tolerant” of her because of the popularity of her positions. Scarcely a word was uttered about the dangerous direction the imperialist United States is heading as indicated (but by no means caused by) Trump. Indeed, all serious analysis of Trump was left to the analogies drawn by the Brazilians, displaying once again the backwardness of the more popular and politically capable elements of the US left relative to their equivalents in other countries.

Fernanda Melchionna spoke first and with the most explicit internationalist focus. Like Sâmia Bomfim, who spoke after her, she judged the Trump regime to be the result of failures of the socialist left to respond to the crisis and pose an alternative to the masses. Further, Melchionna emphasized that Clinton’s victory over Sanders likely strengthened Trump’s hand. Underlining that the struggle against capital in all its forms was international, so too must the movement against it be, she urged the US audience to draw a lesson from the rise of fascism in Brazil. Unfortunately, beyond insisting on a democratic and socialist politics distinct from the deal-making with which she characterized the PT’s pre-coup governance, she did not outline any meaningful strategy for how the PSOL would replace the PT as the leading left force in the eyes of the masses themselves, or what strategies outside of protesting fascism and running for office could actually be employed.

Sâmia Bomfim, who followed Melchionna, moved the discussion more towards the specifics of Brazilian life under Bolsonaro. Emphasizing, as did Melchionna, that corruption is endemic in Brazil even preceding PT rule, but that the PT weakened the stance of the socialist left by engaging in compromises with corrupt businesses and religious reactionaries who today work hand in glove with the Bolsonaro regime. In a striking note for the US audience, Bomfim condemned Bolsonaro’s push for gun control, stating that this would not lessen violence, since it would leave guns in the hands of the (heavily militarized) police and criminals. Beyond a Brazilian particularity, Bomfim emphasized that gun control had been shown, in its examples from other countries, to not work for the stated goal of decreasing gun violence.

Additionally, and recalling Melchionna’s argument that the Trump campaign had succeeded because of the failure of the Sanders campaign, Bomfim dwelled for some time on the point that those who voted for Bolsonaro, like those who voted for Trump, were likely overwhelmingly not any richer or more privileged for their candidate’s victory. Most of them voted for a fascist candidate out of desperation with the current state of the capitalist system in their lived experience, and are shocked to find that despite his anti-system rhetoric, Bolsonaro serves the same system in Brazil, with all its blood and corruption.

A political history was also invoked by Bomfim, as a cause for the descent of Brazil back into fascism. Bomfim emphasized that Brazil’s history includes slavery and military dictatorship, neither of which really reached a definite end, and thus were not actually overcome. The process of reemergence of the ugliest, unfinished business of Brazil’s history, Bomfim cautioned, could be seen in many other countries as well.

Finally Talíria Petrone, an Afro-Brazilian activist, took the microphone. Her impassioned speech, while seemingly the most particularly Brazilian at all, should resonate with US readers. Repeating that Brazil was the last country in the region to formally outlaw slavery, and that the relations of slavery inherited from Portuguese colonialism had not been overcome, she repeatedly called the audience’s attention to the fact that of the famous gun violence which wracks Brazil, of the murders and rapes of women and LGBT people which are the ugly reality Brazilians know from their news, the overwhelming majority take place in the favelas and other areas dominated by Afro-Brazilians. Of the Brazilian working class, it is the clear descendants of slaves who are still treated as slaves and subjected to slavery-esque exploitation and the violence that slaves were subjected to.

Petrone made the point that the majority of the Brazilian working class and people are women, and are black, and thus to stand up for black people and women is to stand up for the majority. The Afro-Brazilian poor and their neighborhoods are disproportionately the target of the violence of the militias and militarized police which Bolsonaro praises. The war on the impoverished and oppressed does not, however, merely target the urban majority, but also the Indigenous and their previously semi-protected land. Emphasizing that capitalism’s obsession with production for the profit motive meant the squandering of resources which are in a very real sense finite, Petrone warned that in addition to attacking these communities which Bolsonaro warns are not “integrated” into Brazilian society, the attack on Indigenous land for profits also threatens to make life unlivable for all Brazilians through environmental destruction, just as capitalist development on a global scale threatens the future of the planet.

Like all the speakers, Petrone emphasized the relative continuity between the years of military dictatorship and the current Bolsonaro regime. Their criticisms of the PT aside, they acknowledged that there was a period of relative democracy, but that the democracy did not really reach into the favelas, hence the ease of restoring police terror on the descendants of slaves, who never reaped the benefits of even the most “democratic” and “modern” periods of Brazil’s modernization. In a country where femicide is the fifth highest in the world, Petrone said, the victims overwhelmingly came from black neighborhoods and are coded as black. To them, the experience has been passing more or less directly from Portuguese colonialism under the banner of the Roman Catholic Church, to a neo-colonial existence sponsored by US imperialism, which imports arch-reactionary neo-pentacostal ideology to justify the violent “correction” of homosexuals (including the rape of lesbians), the murder of trans people, and the subjugation of women.

Surprisingly, given the current coup attempt in Venezuela, backed by Brazilian president Bolsonaro and US imperialism (including both the Democratic and Republican parties), it took a question during the question and answer period to even bring up what is assumed to have been on everyone’s mind: how did Brazil’s socialist left appraise events in Venezuela? Both Petrone and Melchionna answered the question, but Melchionna did so with a more specific appraisal of the PSUV and Venezuela: it was their view that Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution was right and correct under Chavez, but had “degenerated” under Maduro. Detail was not offered as to the source and form of this “degeneration”, but in spite of this, the PSOL representatives made clear that they completely opposed imperialist intervention to install yet another fascist leader in the Americas.

Other than their own word, quite left out of the discussion was the question of how, if they were to achieve more electoral support, the PSOL would avoid the compromises the PT made which are blamed for the latter’s downfall. However, the event was all in all a sober reminder of the pressing and universal need to organize all poor and oppressed against their marginalization, unite their struggles, and bring down forces of capital for whom fascism is an acceptable alternative to scaling back its rapacious development.

MLK Day Statement

On MLK Day, Struggle for a New World wishes to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and legacy. The Dr. King we commemorate today is not the sanitized King taught in bourgeois history books and celebrated by liberals as a man who wanted nothing more than nonviolence and integration. The King we commemorate is the militant struggler for the rights of the Afro-American people and all oppressed peoples, the fighter for justice for all of the oppressed and exploited.

Although he started his career as a civil rights leader as a heroic but ordinary representative of the Afro-American petty bourgeoisie within the Black Belt and pursued tactics and aims in consistency with this background, as the Afro-American masses moved from a nonviolent struggle for integration to a militant struggle for Black power, King advanced with them. In consistency with his pacifist beliefs, he opposed US imperialism’s bloody and genocidal war in Vietnam and condemned the US empire as “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.” He denounced the ills of poverty at home and at the time of his death he was organizing a countrywide Poor People’s Campaign. Indeed, King was assassinated while he was in Memphis showing solidarity with an illegal strike of mostly Afro-American sanitation workers. He denounced the ills of capitalism and posed a growing threat to the stability of the US state. He even denounced the time US imperialism swindled the Afro-American people out of their 40 acres and a mule in the aftermath of the Civil War while giving out free, stolen land to white settlers in the West. And so, for all of this, he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, by a conspiracy of the US state.

Dr. King was assassinated for two reasons. The first was to rid the US state of a dangerous enemy, and the second was to get him out of the way so he could be transformed into the sanitized memory he is today, the peaceful sycophant brought out whenever necessary to attack those strugglers who continue in his footsteps. To quote Vladimir Lenin,

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” (The State and the Revolution, chapter 1).

This is the sort of treatment Dr. King has received and the sort of King that is celebrated in death in tweets from the FBI, the very same organization that in life tried to hound him into committing suicide and probably shot him. That is also the King whose memory we reject.

After Dr. King’s assassination, the Afro-American people rose up rebellion. Ghettoes across the US burned with the rage and the fury of the masses who sought revenge for his murder. They found their vengeance and are still finding it as they continue Dr. King’s struggle for Black freedom and freedom and justice for all oppressed peoples. It is to that struggle that we, on MLK day, commit to and the legacy we continue.