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By Fred Mazelis 26 June 2020

This week marks 25 years since the death of Ed Winn, a longtime member of the Workers League, forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party in the US, and twice the Workers Leagues presidential candidate. This obituary, commemorating Ed Winns life and work, appeared in the International Workers Bulletin , a forerunner of the World Socialist Web Site . It has been slightly edited for republication.

Ed Winn, a leader of the Workers League and the partys candidate for US President in 1984 and 1988, died in Wilmington, North Carolina on June 20, 1995. He was 58 years old.

Comrade Winn had suffered for some years from kidney disease and had been on a waiting list for a kidney transplant. However, his death from an apparent heart attack was sudden and unexpected. It is a great loss for the working class and the revolutionary movement.

For nearly two decades, Ed Winn was a member of the Workers League and a political supporter of the Fourth International. His history of struggle, as a transit worker in New York City and, above all, as a leader of the Trotskyist movement, is bound up with the great political issues of our time.

Ed was born on February 12, 1937 in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father, Richard, was a bricklayer, and his mother, Anna, a homemaker. His family, like millions of others, struggled to sustain itself during a period of mass unemployment and poverty.

The Jim Crow system of racial apartheid was firmly entrenched in North Carolina during his childhood. Eds political awareness as he matured in the 1950s was shaped by the growing civil rights struggle. He recalled the threats from the police and white racists and the whole system of segregation: the separate drinking fountains set up for white people, the separate public facilities that were set up by the racist laws of Southern states from Maryland, where I had relatives, all the way to Mississippi, where I visited and stayed for a while.

Ed was 18 years old when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, was beaten and lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in Sumner, Mississippi in the fall of 1955. Till, a Chicago youth who was visiting relatives, was slain for the crime of allegedly whistling at a white woman. His murderers were acquitted.

When Ed Winn arrived in New York City in 1958 he already knew a great deal about the struggle for equal rights. He soon found out about the struggles of workers on the job. He obtained work at a clothing store and became for a period a member of the clothing workers union. ln late 1965 he was hired by the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked for the next 22 years.

Only a few months after becoming a transit worker, Ed joined thousands of others in a militant strike which shut down the System. The 1966 transit strike was among the bitter struggles, including those in auto, the mines and other sections of basic industry, which erupted as the post-World War II boom was coming to an end. Transport Workers Union President Mike Quill, the unions founder, was forced to call the walkout and defy the capitalist politicians and the courts. Quill, who suffered from a serious heart ailment, had a fatal heart attack after being jailed.

The strike ended in a victory for the transit workers, although the gains made in wages and benefits have since been largely destroyed by years of concessionary contracts. Ed was elected as a shop steward at a car maintenance yard during his first year on the job.

Several years later, Ed joined an opposition caucus in Local 100, the Rank and File Committee, which was dominated by a black nationalist outlook. The Opposition challenged the right-wing union leadership on racial grounds, claiming that attacks on workers were the result of discrimination and arguing that the increasing number of black workers in the transit system made possible a change to black leadership of Local 100.

As Ed Winn later explained, We did not understand the class issues that were involved, that the problems that were developing in work locations were problems affecting both black and white workers, that these were problems affecting the working class itself. Our narrow nationalist outlook prevented us from bringing black and white workers together in order to take up a common struggle against those, namely, the bankers and businessmen, who wanted to place the burden of the crisis in transit onto the backs of the workers.

The Rank and File Committee disintegrated in 1972. Ed, along with most of its other active supporters, turned away for a time from political and union activity.

In the mid-1970s, world capitalism was shaken by a series of economic and political convulsions. In the US, the Watergate crisis precipitated the resignation of Richard Nixon, which was followed by the defeat of the American war against Vietnam. In 1975 New York City teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, and a state Emergency Financial Control Board was established to tear up union contracts and force city workers to pay for the crisis.

Ed was by now working as a bus maintainer at the East New York surface maintenance shop in Brooklyn. It was here that he came into contact with the Workers League. He heard about the partys campaign on behalf of Gary Tyler, a youth who had been framed up and imprisoned in Louisiana for a crime he did not commit.

Tom Henehan, a young leader of the Workers League and its youth movement, the Young Socialists, played the key role in recruiting Ed Winn into the Workers League.

Tom discussed the Workers League pamphlet Black Nationalism and Marxist Theory with Ed, arguing that the fundamental issue facing every section of workers was the class struggle and not struggles based on race. Tom also stressed the importance of taking up a fight inside the transit union against its pro-capitalist leadership and of fighting to build a labor party to establish a workers government.[1]

As a result of these discussions and his reading of the Bulletin, as the newspaper of the Workers League was then called, Ed joined the Workers League in early 1976.

He later said that the very first work by Leon Trotsky that I read was Marxism and the Trade Unions, in which he dealt with the economic decay of capitalism and the necessity for transforming the trade unions into revolutionary organizations. This, in turn, meant replacing the reformist union leadership with a revolutionary leadership. At the same time Trotsky warned that the trade unions could not replace the revolutionary party: that the revolutionary leadership could only come through the building of a party trained in the Marxist world outlook and a scientific perspective.

One of the crucial political experiences through which Ed and other members of the Workers League passed came less than two years later, when Tom Henehan, then 26 years old, was shot and killed at a Young Socialists dance in support of Gary Tyler in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

Along with other members and supporters of the Workers League, Ed Winn responded strongly to this political murder, gathering the support of thousands of transit workers and others on petitions demanding an investigation of the killing and action to bring the assassins to trial. After more than three years, the two gunmen were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to maximum prison terms.

In December 1977, Ed Winn was elected to the executive board of TWU Local 100, representing more than 1,000 workers in the Surface Maintenance division of the union. He ran on a program calling for the building of a labor party and socialist policies. He was reelected in 1979.

During these years Ed developed as a Marxist fighter in the working class. When the transit workers struck once again in 1980, he was on the executive board and fought against the moves of the bureaucracy, then headed by John Lawe, to isolate and betray the strike.

Ed fought for transit workers to turn to the entire working class against the union-busting Democratic Mayor Ed Koch. Lawes other opponents on the Local 100 executive board, however, based themselves simply on trade union militancy and ignored the political issues in the struggle against the union bureaucracy. They themselves refused to break from the capitalist Democratic Party and challenge the so-called right of a few billionaire bankers to dictate wage concessions, layoffs and cuts in social services, Ed stated. Therefore, they could offer no viable alternative to the capitulatory policy of the Lawe leadership.

The defeat of the transit workers in 1980 foreshadowed the betrayal of the PATCO air traffic controllers struggle one year later and the ensuing decade of betrayed and broken strikes. The next stage of Ed Winns activity as a transit worker and a leader of the Workers League was bound up with the struggle against these betrayals. In 1984 Ed applied for and was granted a leave of absence from his transit job in order to run as the presidential candidate of the Workers League in its first-ever national campaign.

This was a period of wholesale wage-cutting, concessions, plant closures and union-busting. The assault on the working class was carried out by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Jesse Jackson pursued his own campaign as a Democrat in order to keep workers tied to that big business party. Ed and his running mate Helen Halyard were placed on the ballot in six industrial states, and they received 14,363 votes. He spoke to thousands of workers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota.

In 1988, Ed was again the Workers League candidate for President, joined this time by Barry Porster as the vice-presidential candidate. The Workers League campaign exposed the deterioration in the social conditions of millions following eight years of the Reagan presidency and the huge transfer of wealth to the rich, as well as the crisis facing the labor movement.

The union-busting onslaught, aided and abetted by the AFL-CIO leadership itself, had deepened during the 1980s. The defeat of the Hormel meatpacking strike was followed by the frame-up of the four coal miners involved in the 1984-85 strike against A.T. Massey in Kentucky. During this period trade union membership continued to decline rapidly.

One of the high points of the 1988 campaign was Ed Winns appearance before one thousand paperworkers and their supporters at a rally in Lock Haven, Pa., marking the first anniversary of the struggle against International Paper. In that speech, listened to intently by locked-out workers and strikers from several States, Winn analyzed the defeats suffered in the 1980s and explained their source.

No one can claim, he concluded, that American workers did not want to fight the corporate union-busters or that they were too weak to defeat them. The weakness is not in the ranks of labor, but in the cowardice and treachery of the bureaucrats. With a revolutionary leadership, a leadership which fights for socialist policies, and a revolutionary strategy, the working class can defeat its enemies and open up a new road for society, throughout the United States and internationally. This is what I call upon you to do.

In the 1988 campaign the Workers League placed its candidates on the ballot in eight states and the District of Columbia. Ed Winn received 18,662 votes.

The period between the 1984 and 1988 campaigns also witnessed a historic struggle against opportunism inside the Fourth International. The Workers League and its co-thinkers internationally defeated the opportunist leadership of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, which reacted to the protracted degeneration of Stalinism, Social Democracy and the trade union bureaucracy by abandoning the fight for revolutionary leadership. The struggle between the majority of the International Committee and the WRP leadership, which began in the early 1980s, culminated in a split in 1985-86.

In 1984, Ed had a chance to witness the degeneration of the WRP first-hand, when he visited Britain as the presidential candidate of the American Trotskyists. At a public meeting his hosts introduced him simply as a transit worker, omitting all mention of the Workers League election campaign. In fact, at this point the WRP was providing Jesse Jackson with favorable coverage in its press.

Ed retired from his transit job in order to devote himself fully to the 1988 election campaign and other political work. Soon after the campaign, however, he was diagnosed as suffering from polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary disorder leading to progressive loss of kidney function. He began receiving kidney dialysis treatments and prepared for an eventual transplant, which would enable him once again to lead a normal and active life.

During this period Ed continued to participate in political work to the best of his ability. He met with his fellow transit workers, spoke at public meetings of the Workers League, and wrote articles and columns for the Bulletin on the struggle in transit, as well as on other subjects.

In 1990 and 1991 New York City was the scene of several bitter struggles, including the Daily News and the Greyhound strikes. In November 1990, police, with the collaboration of Newspaper Guild union officials, arrested Ed on the Daily News picket line on a phony charge of disorderly conduct. A campaign by the Workers League forced the Guild to come to Eds defense, and the charges were dropped.

The fear which Ed Winn continued to evoke within the TWU bureaucracy, three years after his retirement, was demonstrated in March 1991, when Local 100 President Sonny Hall wrote Winn a hysterical and threatening letter in response to a column in the Bulletin which exposed Halls fraudulent claim to support the Daily News strikers. Hall wrote, what you ... wanted was a Mass Strike, not to win wages, but to bring down the government. In Winns reply, he wrote: Whats so terrible about that? If thats what it takes to defend the jobs and living standards of transit workers, then so be it!

Ed was always proudest of his collaboration with his international comrades in the Trotskyist movement in Europe, Asia and Australia. In November 1991 he was able to travel as part of the US delegation to the World Conference Against Imperialist War and Colonialism, held in Berlin, where he met with workers from many parts of the world and participated in its proceedings.

Comrade Winn moved back to Wilmington in 1993 after his fathers death and remained on a waiting list for a kidney transplant. He continued to participate in the political life of the Workers League, meeting with other party members and discussing political developments.

Ed is survived by his three children, Ed Jr., Adrienne and Debbie, and by ten grandchildren. A funeral took place in Wilmington on June 25. The Workers League will soon announce the date for a memorial meeting to be held in New York City.

Anyone who knew Ed Winn would be willing to testify to his integrity and honesty. He was universally respected by his fellow workers, even those who disagreed with his political views, and by his neighbors in Brooklyn. A calm and dignified man, he would seethe with scarcely concealed emotion when fundamental questions of principle were at stake. He had an intellectual and moral impact on those who encountered him.

Eds political legacy has to be set against the degeneration and collapse of the old leaderships of the working class all over the world.

He never wavered in his dedication to the struggles of workers, his confidence that a new period of revolutionary struggle was approaching, and his scientific conviction of the necessity for the socialist transformation of society. That is why so many workers will learn from and honor the example that he set.

[1] During this period, the Workers League fought for the building of a Labor Party, based on a socialist program, as the political form through which the American working class could establish its independence from capitalist politics. The bankruptcy of the nationalist program of the unions, and their degeneration into direct instruments of the corporate financial elite to police the working class, led the Workers League to conclude in 1995 that the Labor Party demand was no longer viable. For more information, see The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality PartyPart 11 .

The author also recommends:

Tom Henehan: A revolutionary life [16 October 2017]

Why are trade unions hostile to socialism? [28 September 2019]

The rest is here:
Twenty-five years since the death of Ed Winn - World Socialist Web Site

By Sam Wayne 27 June 2020

Members of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) recently published a joint statement with the youth section of SYRIZA, the pseudo-left party that has implemented austerity and police repression in Greece.

In their statement, YDSA and SYRIZA Youth members write jointly on the global problems of police brutality and capitalism. The authors include Spyros Kasapis (member of both SYRIZA Youth and the YDSA chapter at the University of Michigan) and Vicky Tsefala (head of the SYRIZA Youth International Committee). Elias Khoury, also of the YDSA at the University of Michigan, is listed as the editor of the piece.

The joint statement, which is published in YDSAs publication theActivist, focuses on the police murder of George Floyd and the mass protests that have broken out across the United States. The authors also cite a parallel development in Greece when large protests broke out in response to the killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos, who was shot dead in December of 2008 by Greek police on his 15th birthday. The shooting sparked one of the largest protests in Greece since the fall of the Papadopoulos dictatorship in 1974.

The authors note the similarities between the response of the Trump government and the Greek government: The government responded to our direct action as they usually dowith more violence. It was clear that the state was far more concerned with preserving its own power than meeting the needs of the Greek people.

The authors fail to mention, however, that SYRIZA, when it came to power in Greece in 2015, carried out violent attacks on protesters, including a violent assault on protesting pensioners.

In October of 2015, a small group of retirees marched through Athens city center to request a meeting with the SYRIZA Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Police blocked the street to the parliament building with police cars and forcibly dispersed the demonstration.

When angry pensioners tried to break through the blockade and overturn a police car, units of riot police tossed tear gas into the crowd at close range. Elderly men and women, some with crutches, had to retreat, gasping for breath. The protests were in opposition to drastic cuts introduced by the SYRIZA government that had been agreed as part of the most recent austerity package. Tens of thousands of retired Greek workers were affected by the cuts.

The crackdown on the elderly protesters came just months after another violent crackdown on protesters at the Technical University of Athens who were also opposing the massive austerity. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pledged publicly that the SYRIZA government would do what was required to maintain law and order.

These actions were an expression of the role of SYRIZA in enforcing the demands of the Greek and European ruling class. After campaigning against austerity and neoliberalism, only weeks after coming to power, SYRIZA betrayed its electoral promises and pushed through austerity policies despite overwhelming opposition. The hostility of workers and youth to this betrayal was ultimately expressed in the July 2019 election, when SYRIZA was defeated by the right-wing New Democracy Party.

Like the Democratic Socialists of America, SYRIZA is not opposed to capitalism and has no intention of leading or participating in any struggle of the working class against capitalist rule. For all the talk of rejecting shallow solutions and addressing the root causes of the issues, including police brutality, the statement provides no political program. While the authors of the statement repeatedly allude to a corrupt political system and systems of oppression, the word capitalism does not make a single appearance in the entire statement. This is no oversight.

The rise, reign and demise of SYRIZA has provided a critical strategic experience that must be studied by workers and youth. The World Socialist Web Site has carefully followed SYRIZA and provided prescient warnings and analysis of the organization. Going all the way back to 2012, the WSWS warned workers of SYRIZAs political function:

In the coming class struggles, SYRIZA will confront the workers as an enemy. Its aim, whether in or out of power, is to contain popular opposition to austerity policies and maintain the political domination of finance capital over the working class. Should SYRIZA be allowed to take power by the Greek ruling class, in an attempt to head off the radicalization of the population, this will produce only further disappointments and defeats for the working class.

The YDSA statement is a transparent attempt to cover over SYRIZAs political betrayals, with its authors hoping that workers and youth in the US are not familiar with the repression and austerity that was carried out by the party.

The statement ends with the following: We hope that SYRIZA Youth and the YDSA can use our shared goals to cultivate a stronger bond between the two of us going forward.

The fact that a YDSA chapter is seeking to collaborate and develop close ties with such an organization, without reservation or a breath of criticism, merely reflects the fact that the DSA serves a similar function within the United States.

In the 2020 elections, the role of the DSA and the YDSA has been to campaign for the Democrat Bernie Sanders, who, after dropping out of the race, has thrown his full support behind the right-wing campaign of Joe Biden. The DSA has no more to do with socialism than SYRIZA.

The outcome of the SYRIZA government is not an aberration within the international trend of pseudo-left and left-populist movements. Whether it is Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos in Spain, the Left Party in Germany or the Workers Party in Brazil, these are parties and individuals that utilize left slogans in the attempt to keep workers and young people trapped within the framework of bourgeois politics.

The way forward is a turn to the perspective of Marxism and Trotskyism: the revolutionary mobilization of the industrial and economic power of the international working class on the basis of a fight for genuine socialism. A new revolutionary leadership is needed within the working class. That leadership is the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality, the student movement of the Socialist Equality Party and the ICFI, fights for the revival of a socialist movement among young people, as part of an international socialist movement of the entire working class.

We urge students and young workers to join the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and the Socialist Equality Party, study the history of the ICFI and its fight to defend genuine Marxism and join the fight for real socialism.

More:
YDSA develops ties with SYRIZA youth, Greek party of austerity and police repression - World Socialist Web Site

For decades, progressives have attempted to use climate change to justify liberal policy changes. But their latest attempt a new proposal called the Great Reset is the most ambitious and radical plan the world has seen in more than a generation.

At a virtual meeting earlier in June hosted by the World Economic Forum, some of the planets most powerful business leaders, government officials and activists announced a proposal to reset the global economy. Instead of traditional capitalism, the high-profile group said the world should adopt more socialistic policies, such as wealth taxes, additional regulations and massive Green New Deal-like government programs.

Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed, wrote Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in an article published on WEFs website. In short, we need a Great Reset of capitalism.

Schwab also said that all aspects of our societies and economies must be revamped, from education to social contracts and working conditions.

Joining Schwab at the WEF event was Prince Charles, one of the primary proponents of the Great Reset; Gina Gopinath, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund; Antnio Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations; and CEOs and presidents of major international corporations, such as Microsoft and BP.

Activists from groups such as Greenpeace International and a variety of academics also attended the event or have expressed their support for the Great Reset.

Although many details about the Great Reset wont be rolled out until the World Economic Forum meets in Davos in January 2021, the general principles of the plan are clear: The world needs massive new government programs and far-reaching policies comparable to those offered by American socialists such as Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersOvernight Defense: Appeals court rules using Pentagon funding for border wall illegal | Esper visits NATO after Trump announces Germany drawdown | Russian intel unit reportedly offered bounties for killing coalition troops in Afghanistan Former Sanders aide slams new rollback of banking rules Nina Turner says progressive Democrats who won primaries need to 'keep up the pressure' MORE (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAlexandria Ocasio-CortezNetanyahu still has time to change his mind on annexation Nina Turner says progressive Democrats who won primaries need to 'keep up the pressure' Introducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy MORE (D-N.Y.) in their Green New Deal plan.

Or, put another way, we need a form of socialism a word the World Economic Forum has deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless socialist and progressive plans.

We need to design policies to align with investment in people and the environment, said the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow.But above all, the longer-term perspective is about rebalancing economies.

One of the main themes of the June meeting was that the coronavirus pandemic has created an important opportunity for many of the World Economic Forums members to enact their radical transformation of capitalism, which they acknowledged would likely not have been made possible without the pandemic.

We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change, said Prince Charles at the meeting, adding later, It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again.

You might be wondering how these leaders plan to convince the world to completely alter its economy over the long run, since the COVID-19 pandemic most assuredly wont remain a crisis forever. The answer is that theyve already identified another crisis that will require expansive government intervention: Climate change.

The threat of climate change has been more gradual [than COVID-19]but its devastating reality for many people and their livelihoods around the world, and its ever greater potential to disrupt, surpasses even that of Covid-19, Prince Charles said.

Of course, these government officials, activists and influencers cant impose a systemic change of this size on their own. Which is why they have already started to activate vast networks of left-wing activists from around the world, who will throughout 2021 demand changes in line with the Great Reset.

According to the World Economic Forum, its 2021 Davos summit will include thousands of members of the Global Shapers Community, youth activists located in 400 cities across the planet.

The Global Shapers program was involved in the widespread climate strikes of 2019, and more than 1,300 have already been trained by the Climate Reality Project, the highly influential, well-funded climate activist organization run by former Vice President Al GoreAlbert (Al) Arnold GoreIntroducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy The 'blue wall' is reforming in the Rust Belt CNN coronavirus townhall to featurescience author David Quammen,'Empire' actress Taraji Henson MORE, who serves on the World Economic Forums Board of Trustees.

For those of us who support free markets, the Great Reset is nothing short of terrifying. Our current crony capitalist system has many flaws, to be sure, but granting more power to the government agents who created that crony system and eroding property rights is not the best way forward. America is the worlds most powerful, prosperous nation precisely because of the very market principles the Great Reset supporters loathe, not in spite of them.

Making matters worse, the left has already proven throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that it can radically transform political realities in the midst of a crisis, so its not hard to see how the Great Reset could eventually come to fruition.

Can you imagine George W. Bush or Bill ClintonWilliam (Bill) Jefferson ClintonWhy Joe Biden should pledge to serve just one term Introducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy A new age of lies? MORE printing trillions of dollars and mailing it to millions of people who didnt lose their jobs? This would have been unthinkable just a couple of decades ago. Today,this policygarners bipartisan support.

Prince Charles was right: The present pandemic is a golden opportunity for radical change. And if Al Gore, Prince Charles and the rest of the World Economic Forum can convince enough people that attempting to stop climate change is also worth dramatically pushing humanity toward greater government control, then radical and catastrophic change is exactly what were going to get.

Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org)is the editorial director of the Heartland Institute. Follow him on Twitter@JustinTHaskins.

The rest is here:
Introducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy | TheHill - The Hill

25 June 2020

One month after the killing of George Floyd, the mass multi-racial demonstrations against police violence are in danger of being hijacked and misdirected by reactionary political forces who are attempting to promote racial divisions, sabotage the unity of working people and youth, and undermine the development of the class struggle against capitalism. This campaign is now concentrated on desecrating and destroying the statues of figures who led the American Revolution and the Civil War.

It is difficult to find words that adequately express the sense of revulsion produced by the monstrous attacks on memorials that honor the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the United States greatest president, who led the country during the Second American Revolution that destroyed the Slave Power and emancipated millions of enslaved African Americans.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, less than a week after the surrender of the main Confederate army, which brought the four-year Civil War to an end, Lincoln was shot in the head by the pro-slavery actor John Wilkes Booth. Nine hours later, at 7:22 on the morning of April 15, Lincoln died of the wound inflicted by the assassin. Standing beside Lincolns death bed, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously declared: Now he belongs to the ages.

Lincolns martyrdom produced an outpouring of grief throughout the United States and the world. The working class recognized that it had lost a great champion of democracy and human equality. Karl Marx, writing on behalf of the International Working Mens Association, wrote in the days after Lincolns assassination that he was one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good.

Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, escape history. Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. In the course of the brutal struggle, Lincoln gave expression to the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a new birth of freedom.

Every period of political upsurge in the United States has drawn inspiration from Lincolns life. Since its opening in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC has been the site of some of the most important moments in the struggle against racial oppression and for equality. In 1939, when Hitlers Nazis were on the march in Europe and fascism had many sympathizers among the American ruling elite, the famous African American contralto Marian Anderson was denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall. So instead she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of 75,000.

In 1963, at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at the same location as he delivered his I Have a Dream speech, calling for equality and racial integration before a crowd of 250,000. Later in that decade, tens of thousands of youth protesting the Vietnam War assembled at the monument.

It is not coincidental that the working-class upsurge of the 1930s was associated with many great artistic depictions of Lincoln, including the films Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). Aaron Coplands beloved orchestral-narrative masterpiece, Lincoln Portrait (1942), concludes with the declaration that the sixteenth president of the United States is ever-lasting in the memory of his countrymen.

But now, 155 years after the tragedy at Fords Theater, Lincoln is the subject of a second assassination. This one must not succeed.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DCs nonvoting delegate to Congress, said she will introduce a bill to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from the Lincoln Park in Washington, DC. The race-fixated protesters have declared their intention to tear down the monument, which was paid for by former slaves and movingly dedicated by black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1876.

The designers of the Emancipation Statue in Lincoln Park in DC didnt take into account the views of African Americans, Norton stated in a Tweet. Democrats assert that the statue demeans the black community because it depicts Lincoln freeing a slave crouched in a runners pose, which the sculptor intended to symbolize the liberation of the Civil War.

Nortons reactionary effort is being supported by Democratic Party officials in Boston, who will hold hearings in the coming weeks to entertain demands for the removal of a replica of the Emancipation Memorial in that city.

Lincoln is not the only leader of the anti-Confederate forces to be targeted. In San Francisco last week, a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the great general of the victorious Union army and later president of the United States, was torn down.

An even filthier example of the racialist campaign is the desecration of the Boston monument honoring the legendary 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The 54th Massachusetts, led by abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War. Protesters object to the fact that the 54th, famously depicted in the film Glory (1989), was commanded by a white officer, Shaw. Holland Cotter, the New York Times co-chief art critic, slandered the monument as a white supremacist visual for its depiction of Shaw leading his African American battalion.

Another Union monument, a statue of abolitionist Hans Christian Heg (18291863), was pulled down Tuesday night in Madison, Wisconsin. The statue was beheaded before being thrown into a nearby lake.

A Norwegian immigrant, Heg led the 15th Wisconsin regiment, known as the Scandinavian Regiment, against the Confederacy. Prior to the war, Heg, a member of the Free Soil Party, fiercely opposed slavery and headed an anti-slave catcher militia in Wisconsin. He was killed at the age of 33 at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863.

The Socialist Equality Party rejects all the lame liberal excuses and justifications that are offered to legitimize the desecration of these memorials. Actions, whatever the motivations ascribed to them, have objective significance and very real political consequences.

The assault on Lincoln monuments and other memorials honoring the leaders of the American Revolution and Civil War are political provocations aimed at whipping up racial animosities. Such provocations are well-known forms of communalist politics, which resemble the burning down of Muslim mosques by Hindu fanatics or Hindu temples by Muslim fanatics. Here in the United States, the statues are being attacked as examples of white rule.

The attacks on the statues are the outcome of a campaign by the two capitalist parties and various reactionary elements in the upper-middle class to racialize and communalize American politics. The growing intensity of this campaign is a response to the upsurge of working-class militancy, which is seen as a threat to capitalism. Far from welcoming the interracial unity displayed in the demonstrations against police brutality, the ruling elites and most affluent sections of the middle class are terrified by its political implications.

In the promotion of racial politics, there is a division of labor between the Democratic and Republican parties. Trump and the Republicans pitch their appeal to the most politically disoriented elements in American society, manipulating their economic insecurities in a manner intended to incite racial antagonism and deflect social anger away from the capitalist system.

The Democratic Party employs another variant of communalist politics, evaluating and explaining all social problems and conflicts in racial terms. Whatever the particular issue may bepoverty, police brutality, unemployment, low wages, deaths caused by the pandemicit is almost exclusively defined in racial terms. In this racialized fantasy world, whites are endowed with an innate privilege that exempts them from all hardship.

This grotesque distortion of present-day reality requires a no less grotesque distortion of the past. For contemporary America to be portrayed as a land of relentless racial warfare, it is necessary to create a historical narrative in the same terms. In place of the class struggle, the entire history of the United States is presented as the story of perpetual racial conflict.

Even before the outbreak of the pandemic, efforts to create racial foundations for contemporary communalist politics were well underway. The New York Times, the principal voice of corporate and financial patrons of the Democratic Party, concocted the insidious 1619 Project, the central purpose of which was to promote a racial narrative. The main argument of this project, which was unveiled in August 2019, was that the American Revolution was undertaken to protect North American slavery and that the Civil War, led by the racist Abraham Lincoln, had nothing to do with the ending of slavery. The slaves, so the new story went, liberated themselves.

The purpose of lies about history, as Trotsky explained, is to conceal real social contradictions. In this case, the contradictions are those embedded in the staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle, in which the working class fights consciously to put an end to capitalism and replaces it with socialism. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism.

Through the promotion of a racial version of communalism, all factions of the ruling class seek to divide the working class so as to better exploit it and ward off the threat of revolution. It is no coincidence that when American society is straining under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 120,000 people and sparked an economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression, the Democrats are ever-more ferociously seeking to make race the fundamental issue.

The alternative to the politics of racial communalism is the socialist politics of working-class unity. This is the program of the Socialist Equality Party, and those who agree with this perspective should join our party.

Niles Niemuth and David North

Read more here:
Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln - World Socialist Web Site

Utahs 4th Congressional District is a battleground for national Democrats and Republicans. The incumbent, Democratic Rep. Ben McAdams won the seat by just 0.2% in 2018 and his seat has become a high priority for national Republicans to flip.

Four Republican candidates are vying to be the nominee to go head-to-head against McAdams in November.

Since Burgess Owens left the NFL, he has been working in sales and started a nonprofit that mentors kids coming out of the juvenile justice system. He said that work inspired him to run for Congress.

The kids I work with, those that are at risk and those across the country, don't have a chance unless we get back the House, Owens said. The reason why our kids are at risk, with a lack of education, lack of job opportunities, lack of hope is because of policies put together by the Democratic Party.

Owens also said that work would translate into a focus on criminal justice reform in Congress.

Expungement is very, very important, Owens said, if youve shown yourself to be productive, youve shown yourself to be a positive to society.

Hes also written several books about what he sees as the dangers of liberalism and socialism and over the last five years has talked about that as a guest on Fox News.

Eight years of Obama did nothing but make things worse because he's a Marxist, he's a socialist, Owens said. His goal was to divide us, whether it be gender, color, size, wealth, age. That's what the Left does.

Owens said the name recognition hes gained from being on Fox has helped him in the 4th Congressional District race.

The comments I made, the passion I have was post politics, he said. It was just me up there like everybody else At that time, I was running a business initially and then running my not-for-profit. So it's real sincere.

If hes elected, Owens said one of his top priorities would be limiting abortions.

We need to stop all funding for abortion centers, he said. Planned Parenthood has been a plague on our nation for decades. It's been a disaster for the black community.

Owens said he would also push for things like waiting periods and ultrasounds before abortions.

A recent poll by UtahPolicy.com and KUTV put Owens in first place, with 36% of registered Republican likely voters saying they would vote for him.

The primary election is June 30 and will be conducted almost entirely by mail. The voter registration deadline is June 19.

To learn more about Owens positions and to compare them to his opponents check out KUERs voter guide.

Sonja Hutson covers politics for KUER. Follow her on Twitter @SonjaHutson

See the original post:
Election 2020: 4th Congressional Candidate Burgess Owens On Socialism And Criminal Justice Reform - KUER 90.1