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.
Continue reading “Lights for Liberty – Raleigh, NC and Washington, DC”Category: Reportbacks
#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.
Continue reading “#FreeRonnieLong”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.
#FreeMaxZirngast!
On December 12th, 2018, some of Struggle for a New World’s writers attended a solidarity event in New York City for Max Zirngast. Max Zirngast is an Austrian journalist, political scientist, and socialist who has been studying and organizing in Turkey for several years. While there, he has been heavily involved in participating in and reporting on the struggle of the peoples of Turkey for democracy and human rights. At the event were two speakers from Turkey, as well as a US speaker, all of whom knew Max Zirngast personally from his work on and in Turkey, and from his outreach to socialists in other countries. In their respective talks, a consistent thread emerged: the fact that Max’s cases is not about an individual socialist, but about the much broader trends they represent.
Guney Isikara, a PhD in Economics at the New School, spoke at length about the process of Max Zirngast being taken into custody by anti-terror police and imprisoned in a maximum security prison, without even a shred of evidence implying anything that might reasonably be considered “terrorist activity” being produced.
Instead, this academic and journalist working on Turkish politics was questioned at length on why he owned so many books on Turkish politics. Finally, he was accused of membership in the TKP/KIVILCIM, an organization which a 2012 Turkish court case determined did not even exist. The real reason for his arrest was Max Zirngast’s personal political activism, entirely of a legal and peaceful nature, and his writings of political analysis, written together with Guney Isikara, for Jacobin Magazine.
Isikara emphasized that his Jacobin co-writer’s case was receiving more international solidarity and attention because of Zirngast’s national origins, but that the arbitrariness and clear political motivations behind the imprisonment were the same as with the many other political prisoners in Turkey, from the HDP co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, to other journalists such as Adil Demirci.
The next two speakers, from the CUNY Graduate Center, Yasemin Yilmaz and Daniel Barry, spoke about the broader historical context in Turkey and the world. Yasemin Yilmaz emphasized that while foreign observers might consider that a crisis in democratic legitimacy had emerged during the post-Gezi crackdowns in Turkey, that the regime of censorship and repression under Erdogan had existed from the first days of his attempts to consolidate power, and indeed had roots stretching back decades through the many coups in Turkish history. Daniel Barry emphasized the importance of international solidarity due to the interconnectedness of the ruling classes and their victims in the capitalist world system. He noted that while an Austrian political prisoner in a Turkish prison might seem a foreign cause to many US readers, that current trends in the US and around the world mean that anyone who takes a similar principled stance against the system could one day soon be a victim of such repression, and the importance of unity and solidarity against this.
Struggle for a New World’s writers were glad to attend this event and learn more about Max Zirngast’s case, and to stand in solidarity with a socialist political prisoner. We demand his immediate release from his imprisonment by the Turkish state, and seek contact and collaboration with others who are inspired by his cause.
We are inspired by solidarity between writers, academics, and journalists, who speak out for truth against the ideological apparatus of the ruling classes. Max Zirngast is a shining example of this revolutionary stance that intellectuals can take, and an internationalist spirit that we were glad to see amplified in New York City, thousands of miles away. Let us all be a voice for Max Zirngast, and expose the bogus charges against him as nothing more than punishment for honest political activity as a journalist and a socialist.
As Max Zirngast stated simply and defiantly in court: “I am a socialist, I defend universal values.” His commitment to the defense of these universal values and his work as a journalist reporting on the realities that the Turkish state wants to keep concealed from the outside world are the clear reason for his imprisonment. Let us not abandon such heroes, but bravely take up their cause and expose those same realities that all ruling classes want concealed. We must see Max Zirngast free, and we call on our readers to join the campaign to support him, as his friends and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America did. The Free Max Zirngast Solidaritätskampagne website contains more information on his case and what you can do to support him, and we encourage everyone to be in touch with them today.
#FreeMaxZirngast! Free all political prisoners!
– Struggle for a New World editorial collective
Struggle for a New World 