International Socialism Project

Just as slavery did not end because plantation owners suddenly developed a conscience, today’s ruling class will fight tooth and nail against making concessions to workers and the oppressed until they are forced to, from below.

Union revitalization will happen when unions make themselves relevant for both highly-skilled employees and solo self-employed workers (often working from home) and expand their presence among the growing army of mostly young platform workers, migrants and employees with part-time and fixed-term contracts.

The previous installment of this two-part series covered the emergence of independent working-class politics in the era of Marx and Engels. This article takes the history up to contemporary times to show how different conceptions of a working-class party reflect different conceptions of its ultimate aim.

When we say that the Democratic Party is a bourgeois party, it’s because no matter who votes for it—and the majority of Democratic voters are workers—the party apparatus itself is set up to reflect, and to some extent, organize, the political interests of the capitalist class.

In a period of 8 years, Eric Blanc moved from being a keen critique of labor’s “suicidal subordination to the parties of the bosses” (2014) to the idea that the labor movement should engage in “some form of electoral alliance” with liberal Democrats (2022).

We are not living through a Second Gilded Age, but a Second Redemption—what white supremacists proudly called their crushing of Reconstruction.

Here we republish the second part of an article the late Tom Lewis wrote for the International Socialist Review (Issue 14, October-November 2000), a publication for which he wrote frequently.

Here we republish an article the late Tom Lewis wrote for the International Socialist Review. Though written more than 20 years ago, Lewis’ insights on the right of oppressed nations to self-determination has renewed relevance during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

We don’t see the children dying in Yemen, victims of a nearly decade-long war by a regime just as brutal as Putin’s, because the Saudi autocrats are Western allies. And the Yemeni children? They are from the Middle East.

By Rolando Astarita, a Marxist economist at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, published this article on his blog, reprinted in Correspondencia de Prensa. The ISP translated it to English.

We reprint an article by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky about Ukraine’s right to self-determination, while it remained under the rule of Stalinism, written in 1939, when the outbreak of the Second World War was imminent – which demonstrates why the right to self-determination is key to revolutionary socialism.

We are opposed to national enmity and discord, to national exclusiveness. We are internationalists. We stand for the close union and the complete amalgamation of the workers and peasants of all nations in a single world Soviet republic.

Paul D’Amato, author of The Meaning of Marxism, explains how the Russian revolutionary Lenin approached the question of imperialism and national liberation.

The classical empires of Greece and Rome were based on slave labor. But ancient slavery was not viewed in racial terms. Slaves were most often captives in wars or conquered peoples. If we understand white people as originating in what is today Europe, then most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were white.