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On January 1, 1916, just about 10 years before Mussolini’s fascist regime imprisoned him, Italian communist Antonio Gramsci published a short article in Avanti! (Forward!)–the Italian Socialist Party’s (PSI) daily newspaper–about why he “hates” New Year’s Day. Gramsci thought it was a forced celebration and said he “would like every hour of my life to be new.” Gramsci connected this desire with socialism, writing, “I await socialism for this reason too.”

This short article gets circulated on the left every year, which is much less frequently than his key political contributions get thrown around. Indeed, Gramsci’s political writings have a long and contested life. Struggles over the legacy of Gramsci began before his body was cold. An original thinker, Gramsci made substantial contributions to Marxist theory–from inside the Marxist movement–including the concepts of hegemony and the organic intellectual.

More than simply an theorist, then, Gramsci was an active participant in the class struggles of his time. As a member and crucial figure within first the PSI (which he joined in 1913) and, later, as a leader of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), Gramsci helped spur the occupation of factories in Turin, founded the PCI at Livorno, and represented the Italian section of the Communist International at several of its key meetings in the 1920s.

Capture by the fascist government of Mussolini put an end to his concrete involvement in the class struggle, but not to his theoretical contributions. The latter were especially concerning for the fascist government in the political showtrial, during which the state prosecutor said that, “For 20 years we must stop this brain from functioning.” Clearly the fascist prosecutors and judges understood that an idea can be a weapon for liberation as much as a rifle.

What was eventually published as the Prison Notebooks, scribbled in the incredibly desperate conditions of a fascist prison cell, are a testament to Gramsci’s strength of will. On April 27, 1937, that strength of will gave out. Gramsci died in prison; his Prison Notebooks unpublished, unfinished, and incomplete.

The incomplete nature of the Prison Notebooks represents a major problem for would-be scholars of Gramsci as well as revolutionaries looking to his work. As notebooks, they’re a compilation of essays–many of which are fragmentary–rather than a systematically developed line of thought. Moreover, Gramsci used deliberately difficult and non-Marxist terminology for the purpose of evading prison censors. All the troubles of translation and interpretation are exemplified in the confused application of Gramsci’s writing in practice. One of the great contradictions of Gramsci is that his thought has been consistently used to justify a rejection of revolutionary class struggle, despite having struggled in life so ferociously against reformist opportunism and ultra-left voluntarism as a long time member of the Communist Party.

This article is not an attempt to wrestle with the long legacy of debates over interpretations of Gramsci–some of which are more academic and others of which have had serious political consequences–but rather to serve as an introduction to Gramsci’s life, historical context, and key ideas for a new emerging layer of “organic intellectuals.” We’ll focus in particular on Gramsci’s involvement in the revolutionary struggles of Italy in order to situate two of his key concepts: hegemony and the organic intellectual. We begin, then, with the the historical context that informed these concepts.

Read the full article here:

https://liberationschool.org/antonio-gramsci/

2020 was a year of unprecedented crisis and mass movement. The impact of the pandemic, and massive loss of jobs, income, health care, housing and education has been greatly worsened by the capitalist system. The racist police murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor and so many others were met with the most massive wave of sustained protest in U.S. history.

Now, with tens of millions faced with foreclosure and eviction, and the criminal failure of the government to provide needed relief, it is clear that the only means of achieving real justice in 2021 will be by building a powerful, grassroots people’s movement.

Feat. Dr. Monica Gandhi, Infectious disease doctor & Professor, U.C. San Francisco. Dr. Gandhi has been a widely heard progressive voice in the national and local media on the pandemic.

Listen to Gloria La Riva in this special recorded forum on the fascist insurrection Trump incited against Congress. Recorded live on 9 Jan 2021.

Today, a fascist mob — called to action by Donald Trump and acting in obvious collusion with elements of the Capitol Police, the Department of Defense, and possibly other armed forces — stormed the U.S. Capitol building and dispersed Congress. Trump himself spoke at today’s main protest rally outside the White House as part of his campaign to desperately hang on to power. The extreme right wing that assaulted the Capitol today is united above all by the figure of Trump. Shortly before the mob marched on the Capitol he declared, “You’ll never take back the country with weakness. You have to show strength.” Trump more than anything else wants to avoid criminal prosecution once out of office, and retain his political control of the Republican Party.

The heavily armed Capitol Police put up almost no resistance as the fascists pushed over barriers, smashed windows and invaded the chamber of the Senate. One woman was shot and killed inside the Capitol Building. But at the end of the mayhem, after they had accomplished their goal, the mob was calmly escorted out of the building instead of being arrested. If an action remotely like the pro-Trump mob’s dispersal of Congress had been attempted by anti-racist protesters this summer, for instance, they would have undoubtedly been met with deadly and overwhelming force.

Today’s events could not possibly have transpired without some level of cooperation between the fascists and the police. It is inconceivable that the police were not monitoring the communications of the pro-Trump protesters traveling to D.C. and that they were simply unaware that there was any possibility that an assault on the Capitol Building was being discussed.

Read the full statement:

https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-trump-incites-fascist-insurrection-against-congress-what-comes-next/

Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is a classic work of anti-capitalist feminism. The book examines capitalism’s investment in sexism and racism, showing how the consolidation of the capitalist system depended on the subjugation of women, the enslavement of black and indigenous people, and the exploitation of the colonies. Federici demonstrates that unpaid labor–especially that of women confined to the domestic sphere and of enslaved workers–is a necessary support for waged labor.

Under capitalism, this productive capacity is oriented toward profit, the accumulation of capital in the hands of the capitalists, and divisions within the working class are intensified to serve these needs. Under socialism, workers’ creative and productive capacities will be oriented toward meeting the needs of the people and the planet so that all may flourish.

Williana Burroughs was a dynamic and dedicated communist in Depression-era Harlem. Bringing her radical politics into the struggles Black Harlemites faced, and vice versa, Burroughs helped establish trust between the Communist Party and the community. And she fought so that her own comrades would amplify the voices of Black working-class women.

Born Williana Jones in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1882, “Liane” grew up in poverty. Her mother, formerly enslaved and recently widowed, moved the family to New York City when Williana was still a young child. Williana’s mother found a job as a live-in domestic worker, but like many women in her position, she was forced to make hard concessions to keep that job. No children were allowed, so Williana and her siblings wound up spending several years in an orphanage, with occasional visits from their mother.

Throughout the years, Burroughs proved to be a top student, and in 1903 graduated from Hunter College (then New York City Normal College) with teaching credentials. She became politicized through teaching classes of mostly impoverished Black and immigrant students, and was eventually recruited into the communist wing of of the New York City Teachers Union. It was here that Burroughs began to develop radical organizing skills.

She joined the Communist Party in 1926, where she worked on issues ranging from housing to labor, writing for various communist and Black publications. At the time, Burroughs and other Black women communists felt that the Party was not placing the importance it should on organizing Black women. Together, they demanded a greater voice within the Party and greater attention to their struggles in Harlem and nationwide. From this initiative to recognize the specific oppressions Black women faced under capitalism, Burroughs, along with her comrades, built movements addressing the needs of Harlem’s most oppressed.

Read the full article:

https://liberationschool.org/williana-burroughs-communist-housing-organizer/

Anyone who aspires to be a real communist or to understand the theory of modern communism must study Lenin’s pamphlet The State and Revolution.

Lenin was able to nearly finish this monumental contribution to Marxism and revolution while on the run, living underground and hiding from the police from August to October 1917, just before the insurrection that seized power.

The State and Revolution has been published in practically every written language. It is considered the veritable manifesto for the Russian Revolution. However, the book played no role in the revolution itself given that it was not published until after the workers had seized power in October/November 1917.

The final version was written following the victorious October insurrection. If Lenin had written the book only as a guide to action for the revolution, it would have been unnecessary for him to devote so much time to finishing the book in the two months after the revolution. After all, at this time he and the other leading Bolsheviks were also confronted with the consuming crises and immediate life-and-death challenges facing the new government. The book’s primary objective was not simply to serve as a guide to action for the unfolding events. Nor was it to describe what form a future socialist state would take. The book and its contents were written to re-establish the original revolutionary teachings of Marx on the need to smash and destroy the existing state power rather than using its parliamentary apparatus as the path to achieving socialism.

The book’s primary objective was to rescue Marxism from its devolution into a doctrine of reform, to restore Marxism as a doctrine of revolution.

Read the full article:

https://liberationschool.org/the-state-and-revolution-changed-history/

The 2020 election broke the record for the most ballots cast and is set to be one of the largest percentage turnouts of eligible voters recorded. The massive vote total produced all sorts of contradictory results. In Florida, Trump won alongside a $15/hr minimum wage ballot measure. In California, Democrats won a thumping victory even while referendums for workers rights and rent control went down by large margins. Legal weed triumphed in “deep blue” New Jersey and “dark red” South Dakota. The Movement for Black Lives and QAnon have supporters in the incoming Congressional freshman class while Arizona, but not Illinois, voted to tax the rich.

The record participation — and record cost — seems totally incongruous to the main battle. President-elect Biden campaigned principally on character and competence rather than any particular policy. Biden infamously assured wealthy donors “nothing would fundamentally change.” He sold access to campaign policy advisors, trumpeted Wall Street support for his economic plan and constantly promoted cooperation with the right-wing. All this was packaged as a return to the “pre-Trump status quo.”

Ultimately, the election boiled down to a referendum on Trump and his program. But the results defy oversimplified narratives. A variety of journalists in the corporate media are attempting their own crude type of “class analysis,” trying to draw out larger political truths about the U.S. working class based on the results. These should be viewed with skepticism. Their analysis is skewed not only by their own individual class biases but distorted fundamentally by the main choices on offer in the election.

Put simply, no working class program was on the ballot when it came to the two main ruling class parties, while both presented themselves as better for working class households. Additionally, the corporate media uses totally flawed definitions of class and their reporting, as a rule, omits large sections of the poor and working people who did not vote.

With all that being said, there still is value for socialists in studying the election results and identifying significant trends within them. A few preliminary conclusions are: the “middle classes” continue to play a decisive role in electoral outcomes, national oppression retains a deep significance in U.S. politics, and the much-discussed “white working class” is not the homogeneous political subject that the corporate media asserts.

Read the full article:

https://www.liberationnews.org/what-can-we-learn-from-the-results-of-the-2020-election/

“Are we on the eve of Bolshevism?" December 2018 marked the 100-year anniversary of the slaughter of striking typographers and workers of Bucharest, Romania. More than 15,000 men, women and children — workers from all factories –– filled the streets on Dec. 13, 1918 in solidarity with the typographers. Their demands: an 8-hour work day, a living wage and recognition of the workers’ union.

Everywhere that class society has existed, people have organized and fought back. Romania has a rich history of struggle by socialists and unionists; a shining example of which is the struggle of the Typographers’ Revolt. Their dedication and sacrifices continue to inspire and teach us to this day.

Long live the revolutionaries of December 13! Long live the struggle for socialism!

Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/typographers-revolt-the-day-bucharest-stood-still/

Music: Corul Radio - 13 decembrie 1918, cântec revoluționar (1960)

The corporate-owned media reports frequently about environmental problems in China, from air pollution in Beijing to toxins in the soil and the water. These stories ultimately function as propaganda in order to present China as a unique environmental calamity–part of a multi-pronged effort to demonize the country and especially the Chinese Communist Party (CPC).

As socialists, we know that the great environmental perils we face today are generated by the capitalist system. That’s why we organize to create a world based on meeting the needs of the Earth and all of its inhabitants.

There are serious environmental problems in China, yet questions about their origins and nature, as well as China’s efforts to acknowledge and confront them are rarely, if ever, explored in the U.S. media. It’s important that we answer these questions not only to defend China from the growing threat of U.S. imperialism, but also because those answers can help provide real world solutions and models for addressing the catastrophe of climate change globally.

There’s a lot of complexity to this, and so we have to grasp the different historical, political, and economic factors that have been at play since the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949.

Read the full article:

https://liberationschool.org/chinas-environment-beyond-the-propaganda/