Part 2 of Shvu's response to Lazare will deal with building a United Front Campaign of the Working Class in time for the 2024 US Presidential Elections. 

Special thanks to members and sympathizers of the Marxist Unity Group, Reform and Revolution, Tempest, and Socialist Alternative for helping compile some of the information here about the DSA and other socialist groups, as well as providing some resources to help build this article’s argument. 

Anton joins Robert Knox for a discussion of Marxist approaches to law, with a focus on international law. We discuss critical legal studies, international law and how it compares to other branches of law, its origins and how it has evolved through the years focusing on the cases of Haiti, the USSR and decolonization movement, and law and neocolonialism. We also discuss how Marxists can approach law in general through principled opportunism.

Harry Zehner analyzes the discourse and politics of the YIMBY-NIMBY divide and argues that socialists should reject this binary entirely.

Read By: Aliyah

Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix

Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.

Rudy, Carson, Eric and Rob sit down to talk about the only socialist state in the Arab peninsula, and arguably in the Arab world: The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, also known as South Yemen. We discuss its origins, the struggles of the left factions to pursue a socialist path, its economic policies and political turns, as well as the factors that led to its demise through reunification with the north. We also briefly talk about the revival of South Yemeni sentiment during the present war. 

References: Articles: Helen Lackner - Yemen’s Socialist Experiment Was a Political Landmark for the Arab World

Books: Anne-Linda Amira Augustin  - South Yemen's Independence Struggle: Generations of Resistance Noel Brehony - Yemen Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia Fred Halliday - Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen, 1967-1987 Joseph Kostiner - The Struggle For South Yemen Joseph Kostiner - South Yemen's Revolutionary Strategy, 1970 1985: From Insurgency To Bloc Politics Helen Lackner, Husayn Abd Allah Amri - P. D. R. Yemen: Outpost Of Socialist Development In Arabia Miriam M. Müller - A Spectre Is Haunting Arabia: How the Germans Brought Their Communism to Yemen

Isaac and Jackson join David Austin, author of Fear of a Black Nation and Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution, for a discussion of the Afro-Caribbean diasporic left, focusing on Montreal in the late 60s. They discuss the influence of the U.S. black power movement on the world, the black left in Montreal, and in particular the confluence between Caribbean nationalism and Quebec nationalism. They discuss the Congress of Black Writers, Walter Rodney's presence in it and how the development of the Afro-caribbean left literature creates a fertile ground for the development of politics.

Cliff and Isaac join Jesse Olsavsky, author of The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861, for a discussion on his book on the early abolitionist movement. They discuss the textbook history of abolition, and how this masks the role of runaways and other radicals substituting them for a white middle-class leadership, what Vigilance Committees were and how they acted, the exchange of ideas between different social groups in the abolitionist movement, the role runaway interviews had on the movement and its parallels today. They also talk about the Fugitive Slave Act and its effect on the Committees, the international dimension of abolitionism, the abolitionist view of the U.S. republic and the links between abolitionism and other movements. Prof. Olsavsky recommended these texts as good primary sources on revolutionary abolitionism. Thomas Smallwood (https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/smallwood/smallwood.html) Harriet Jacobs (https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html) Phillip Foner's edited collection of speeches by Frederick Douglass (https://archive.org/details/DouglassSelectionsWritings) Frances Ellen Walker's poems (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/frances-ellen-watkins-harper) Martin Delany's novel Blake (https://archive.org/details/blakeorhutsofame00dela) Harriet Beecher Stowe's second novel Dred (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55012)

Isaac KD and Jack L defend their critique of DSA’s dominant strategic orientation towards reform campaigns in a response to Sam Lewis’ “In Defense of Campaigns“. 

Read by: Allan Lanterman

James, Cliff, Chas and Rudy join for a discussion on the events that take place in Hungary in 1956. We discuss the origins of the revolt, talking about the short lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, the People's Democracy period under Rakosi, the New Course and the roots of discontent. We then discuss the events themselves, as well as the reactions of the USSR and the wider Eastern Bloc and those of the West. We also talk about the program of the uprising, and what possible consequences it could have had had it succeded, and how it reshaped Hungary after the Soviet intervention. 

References: Csaba Békés - Hungary's Cold War: International Relations from the End of World War II to the Fall of the Soviet Union Peter Fryer - Hungarian Tragedy Charles Gati - Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt Bennett Kovrig - Communism in Hungary: From Kun to Kádár William Lomax - Hungary 1956 Mark Pittaway - From the Vanguard to the Margins: Workers in Hungary, 1939 to the Present