E03: War in Ukraine: A Step Towards WWIII

This is a recording from our recent forum about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It consists of two talks on imperialism. The first is a examination of the nature of imperialism, its roots in capitalist political economy, and background on the dogfight between US and Russia that led to the invasion of Ukraine. The second talk is a history of the Bolsheviks’ opposition to WWI, and how we might follow their example in transforming the intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry of our time into a class war to eliminate capitalism for good.

LINKS:

Das Kapital for Beginners: https://www.akpress.org/daskapitalforbeginners.html

Political Economy: A Communist Critique of the Wage System http://www.plp.org/leaflets-pamphlets/pamphlets/politecon.pdf

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

Killing Hope: https://williamblum.org/books/killing-hope

E02: Moving Beyond Economism: The St Vincent Nurses Strike

The courageous nurses of St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts went out on strike earlier this year over nurse to patient ratios and a declining level of care in the hospital. In mid-June, their strike passed the 100 day mark, making it the longest nurses’ strikes in over a decade and the second longest strike in Massachusetts history.

PLP stands in militant support of the strike, and members of PLP have been active on the picket line. This historic moment provides an opportunity and responsibility for communists to reflect on our role in labor struggles. Over the past century, communists have often fought alongside striking workers, and have worked to raise the consciousness of workers from economism and reformism to a revolutionary class consciousness. Part of that is uplifting a myriad of social and political grievances alongside important worker concerns like wages and benefits. We should seek to be guided by their actions.

I recorded the following interview with two PLP members who have been active with the St Vincent nurses. We discuss the strike and how their political work has been guided by these principles.

E01: Mass Work: PLP and SDS

In December of 2020, the Trotskyist party Socialist Alternative (SAlt) announced that it would be instructing some of its members to join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Members of the national leadership of DSA responded at the end of March in an op-ed warning of “factionalism” and referenced Progressive Labor Party’s history with SDS to bolster their argument aging SAlt. They lean on old, oft-repeated slanders about the behavior and aims of PLP members in the course of their mass work within SDS. The DSA leadership the chose to push this version of history to push a self-serving narrative; namely to suggest that principled political actors damage the overall movement by not adopting the opportunistic and revisionist politics of DSA.

Our guest is Comrade B, a member of SDS who later joined PLP. Comrade B was an eyewitness to many of the events that DSA has alluded to, and his experiences shed light on the nature of PLP’s mass work then and now.