Melissa Gira Grant and Chardine Taylor Stone join PTO to discuss police and male violence and the murder of Sarah Everard. We talked about the importance of not seeing Wayne Couzen's role as a police officer as merely incidental to the murder of Everard and we also talked about why carceral feminist approaches that seek to combat male violence through the police and the courts are doomed to fail.  We also talked about the social media reaction to the initial vigil for Sarah Everard on Clapham common and how the struggle against police violence and violence against women in general requires the building of a mass movement of collective struggle that cuts across different identities.

The entwinement of police and male violence w/ Melissa Gira Grant & Chardine Taylor Stone

This week’s podcast is a recording of an event Navalny and Next: Possibilities, Prognosis and Perceptions in Russia I hosted a few weeks ago. This event was sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Russia Matters, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. 

After a botched attempt to murder Alexei Navalny in August 2020, the Kremlin has decided to sentence him to over two years in prison upon the oppositionist’s return to Russia in January. Navalny responded with a bombshell video about the corruption around “Putin’s Palace.” Unsanctioned, mass protests in the two capitals and tens of provincial cities followed. The protesters were met with mass, indiscriminate arrests, and police violence. The political ante in this back-and-forth has certainly risen but to what end? 

Russia has experienced the ebbs and flows of protest on the federal and local level for years. And while each eruption quickly elicits a sense that Russia is at a turning point, more cautious and sober assessments follow in the weeks and months after. So, is what we’re now seeing something new or more of the same? What do the protests suggest about Russian society, politics, and the state of Putin’s power? Especially, as Russia will hold parliamentary elections in September.  

Guests:

Ilya Budraitskis is political and cultural writer. He currently teaches in the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences and the School of Design at the High School of Economics. Budraitskis is currently a member of the editorial board of Moscow Art Magazine and host of the Russian language podcast Political Diary. His book Dissidents among Dissidents was awarded the Andrey Belyi prize in 2017. His most recent book We All Live in the World Huntington Invented (2020) treats modern Russian conservatism. 

Svetlana Erpyleva is a sociologist, a researcher with Public Sociology Laboratory, Center for Independent Social Research in Russia, and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research is focused on protest movements and collective action, political involvement, political socialization, youth and children’s political participation and cognition in Russia and abroad. She’s written for a number of academic journals and Russian and international media. 

Greg Yudin is a Professor of Political Philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. His research focuses on the political theory of democracy with the special emphasis on public opinion polls as a technology of representation and governance in contemporary politics. His book Public Opinion: The Power of Numbers was published in Russian by European University Press in 2020. He is a regular contributor to several Russian media outlets.


Navalny and Next

12 points on the U.S. state and the necessity of revolution

1. The Party for Socialism and Liberation stands for the overthrow, dismantling and complete replacement of the core institutions of the capitalist state, which are the “special bodies of armed men,” namely the police, prisons, military and courts. This core of the capitalist state cannot be reformed into a neutral body. It must be abolished by means of a revolution.

2. The centrality of these violent institutions in capitalist governance is reflected in their gargantuan scale. Combined, the state institutions far outpace any other part of government spending. The sprawling U.S. prison system is the largest in the world, accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prisoners with only 5 percent of the world’s population. It includes 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, as well as military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and other institutions. There are more than 790,000 armed officers across local, state and federal police agencies. The U.S. military is one of the largest employers in the world and even in “peacetime” the United States maintains more than 2 million active-duty service members. The National Guard numbers around 450,000.

Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/how-will-the-police-be-abolished-a-marxist-perspective/

PSL Statement: How will the police be abolished? A Marxist perspective

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Z 024 - Bowing At Alex-San w/ Eli Yudin

This essay examines the theory and practice of the Leninist party from the time of Lenin until today. We turn to Lenin’s key writings and to the history of Bolshevism and the international communist movement to delineate the distinctiveness of the Leninist party. Throughout we pay careful attention to the differences between Lenin’s time and ours.

Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/the-leninist-party-in-history-and-the-present/

The Leninist party in history and the present

Historian David Broder on the right's multi-decade rise to power in Italian politics and his book "First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy" from Verso.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2974-first-they-took-rome

1217: How the right took Italy / David Broder

Note: This program was produced and aired in 2017. 

Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and president after declaring their independence on March 6, 1957…founding member of the Organization of African Unity, wrote in the preface of the 1969 second edition of his work titled Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization that: “Since the publication of the 1st edition of Consciencism in 1964, the African revolution has decisively entered a new phase, the phase of armed struggle. In every part of our continent, African revolutionaries are either preparing for armed struggle, or actively engaged in military operations against the forces of reaction and counter-revolution. The issues are now clearer than they have ever been. The succession of military...” [https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/consciencism-philosophy-and-ideology-de-colonization-kwame-nkrumah]. 

According to historian John Henrik Clarke in his 1974 article titled Kwame Nkrumah: His Years in America, "the influence of the ten years that he spent in the United States would have a lingering effect on the rest of his life."  Key to the maturation of his sociopolitical thought, it is during these 10 years, Kwame Nkrumah, along with Nnamdi Azikiwe the first president of Nigeria attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.   

Dr. Clarke goes on to suggest that “there is no way to understand the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, or any other man, without also understanding the country in which he was born and to what extent that country and the circumstances of his birth did influence the total of his life...”

Today, Africa World Now Project Radio will bring you a recent exploration into the Social and Political Philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah with Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere.  

Dr. Dompere is professor of economics at Howard University. He is author of many scientific and scholarly works in economics, philosophy, and decision theory. Some of this work includes his 2006, Polyrhythmicity; his 2017, The Theory of Philosophical Consciencism: Practice Foundations of Nkrumaism in Social Systemicity; 2006, African Union: Pan African Analytical Foundations; 2017, The Theory of Categorial Conversion: Rational Foundations of Nkrumaism in Socio-natural Systemicity and Complexity; 1995, Epistemics of Development Economics: Toward a Methodological Critique and Unity. 

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program…!

The Sociopolitical Philosophy of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah w/ Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere

The Korean War began 70 years ago and has still not ended even though North and South Korea want it to end. The key obstacle is not in Pyongyang or Seoul but in Washington DC. Brian takes an in-depth look at US-Korean relations as the Biden Administration prepares to take the helm. Hyun Lee and Gregory Elich are the featured expert guests in this fascinating analysis.

The Real Story: Why Not Have Peace with North Korea?

Why does the capitalist economy lurch into a recession every few years with massive unemployment and job losses? Why is the debate between the millionaires in Congress only about whether working families should get $600 or $2,000 in a one-time payment when the banks and corporations already received trillions in subsidies and loan guarantees?

Brian speaks with Richard Wolff, the co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work and the author of many books, the latest being "The System is the Sickness: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself."

Capitalism in Crisis: Why Do Recessions Happen?

Statement by the Party for Socialism and Liberation

The paralysis that gripped the U.S. capitalist establishment in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Trump-instigated, fascist-led assault on the U.S. Congress and the continuing threats from armed fascist organizations came to an abrupt halt on Jan. 12 with the public letter sent to all members of the U.S. military signed by the eight generals who comprise the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The statement read: “The violent riot in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol Building and our constitutional process … [and was the result of] sedition and insurrection.” 

The letter sent to more than 1.3 million members of the armed forces by the Pentagon top brass is a clear sign that they are worried that military forces were being drawn into or participated in the seditious conspiracy. This letter comes after the extraordinary Jan. 3 statement from all ten living Secretaries of Defense warning the officials in the Pentagon to not allow the military to be used to alter the 2020 election outcome.

Also on Jan. 12, leaders of the Republican Party began to defect from Trump. Rep. Liz Cheney, the 3rd ranking House Republican, announced that she would vote for impeachment and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell let it be known to the media that he thought Trump had committed impeachable offenses. This constitutes the first real break within the Republican leadership against Trump. Cheney said, “The President of the United States summoned the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” adding, “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of his oath of office and to the Constitution.” House Republican Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, said, “To allow the president of the United States to incite this attack without consequences is a direct threat to the future of our democracy.” 

Also on Jan. 12, the FBI organized the first press conference where Acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin declared they had initiated “a significant international counterintelligence or counterterrorism operation” whose “only marching orders from me are to build seditious and conspiracy charges”. Sherwin announced that 70 had already been charged, charges against 100 more people were being prepared, and noted “That number, I suspect, is going to grow into the hundreds”. Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, stated, “The brutality the American people watched with shock and disbelief on the 6th will not be tolerated by the FBI,” adding that “The FBI has a long memory and a broad reach”.  

Powerful tech companies have also come together to ban Trump from using social media platforms on the basis that he used these same networks to incite a violent assault against the seat of government. Trump is banned from Twitter, Facebook and now YouTube as well as many others.

On the same day, a large number of capitalist corporations, banks and other institutions took action to break from any association with Trump or his family-owned company. Deutsche Bank, which has been Trump’s primary lender for decades, announced their decision not to do business with Trump or his company in the future. The Trump Organization owes Deutsche Bank more than $400 million. The PGA said it would no longer hold the PGA Championship at Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey which had been set for May 2022. Universities stripped Trump of honorary degrees. Shopify, the company that serves e-commerce sites, closed to online stores tied to Trump. The online payment platform Stripe will no longer process payments for Trump’s campaign website. 


Read the full statement here:
https://www.liberationnews.org/the-paralysis-ends-trump-fascism-and-the-capitalist-state/

The Paralysis Ends: Trump, Fascism and the Capitalist State

Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara was born December 21, 1949 in Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso), which, at the time, was a West African French colony. Sankara, a fierce enemy of the global system of neocolonial, imperialist capitalism (as well as all forms of bigotry and oppression), was assassinated on October 15, 1987, just four years after the people lifted him up as the president of their new revolutionary nation-state.

Like other influential socialists of the twentieth century Sankara’s life and anti-colonial and decolonial legacy continue to inspire anti-imperialist and Pan-African youth movements across Africa and beyond. A charismatic yet notably humble figure, Sankara is often referred to as the Ché Guevara of Africa [1]. Sankara is considered to have been one of the world’s most notable pan-African socialist revolutionaries.

However, unlike most of his peers Sankara wrote no major works for revolutionaries to study and learn from. What is available is a handful of speeches laying out the basic contours of his radical analysis and non-dogmatic revolutionary vision crafted for a popular audience. Sankara’s major contributions today are not only the historical example he set and the part he payed in the liberation of his own country and others, but also to the way he primarily expressed his political practice pedagogically.

Read the full article:
https://liberationschool.org/thomas-sankara-71-years-later/

Thomas Sankara: Leadership and action that inspires 71 years later

Socialist news and analysis from the front lines of struggle. Project of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

PSL Statement: How will the police be abolished? A Marxist perspective

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