America never was America to me.

In recognition of the Forth of July, I’m posting the following poem by the great revolutionary African American poet, Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”. I encourage my readers to read some of Langston Hughes’ other radical poems, such as “Good Morning, Revolution”, “Put One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.” and “Goodbye, Christ”:

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

CPGB-ML Statement: Hands Off Honduras

The following statement is from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist):

In the early hours of Sunday 28 June 2009, some 200 soldiers, under the command of a general trained at the School of the Americas, a notorious US military facility long used to train its Latin American hirelings in subversion and torture, seized the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, placed him under arrest and forcibly bundled him out of the country, still in his pyjamas.

North Carolina: A Victory Won in Struggle Against White Supremacists at UNC

Haley Koch, one of the defendants, speaks at a rally outside the courthouse

The following article is from Fight Back! News:

North Carolina
A Victory Won in Struggle Against White Supremacists at UNC

By Carlyn Cowen

Chapel Hill, NC - Haley Koch and six community activists had their first court date June 1, for their participation in the Tom Tancredo and Virgil Goode protests that took place in April. These protests were in response to a far right-wing organization, Youth for Western Civilization, that brought two anti-immigration speakers, Tom Tancredo and Virgil Goode, to the University of North Carolina campus within a week of each other. Hundreds of students and activists protested the racism, xenophobia and white supremacy that these speakers promoted and seven demonstrators were arrested by campus police in response. They all pleaded not guilty, even after being offered a deal by the district attorney which would lighten their sentence in return for admission of guilt. The seven are standing strong in their belief that they did no wrong in protesting racism and white supremacy on UNC’s campus and will represent themselves in their next court date, Sept. 14.

Michael Parenti on the DPRK: “Sanity” at the Brink

The following article by Michael Parenti is from www.michaelparenti.org

North Korea: “Sanity” at the Brink

Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation. Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has been the case at one time or another with Castro, Noriega, Ortega, Qaddafi, Aristide, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and others.

Pyongyang Mass Rally Marks Day of Struggle against U.S. Imperialism

The following is from the DPRK’s Korean Central News Agency:

Pyongyang, June 25 (KCNA) – A Pyongyang mass rally was held at Kim Il Sung Square Thursday on the occasion of “June 25, the day of the struggle against U.S. imperialism.”

Ri Yong Mu, Kim Il Chol, Kim Ki Nam, Yang Hyong Sop and others and the chairman of a friendly party were among more than 100,000 people from all walks of life and youth and students and overseas compatriots present at the mass rally.

Imperialism and Iran’s Elections

The following is from Fight Back! News:

Commentary by Kosta Harlan 

A struggle has broken out over the results of Iran’s presidential elections, held Friday June 12, which resulted in the apparent landslide victory of incumbent President Ahmadinejad. On Friday night, before the results had been announced, the main opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, declared himself the winner. The following day, Iran’s election commission announced that Ahmadinejad had won with 62% of the vote. Mousavi responded with allegations of vote-rigging. This set into motion a chain of events that has resulted in hundreds of thousands coming out to the streets in protest. Some of the protests turned into riots, with protesters attacking police, government offices and banks and burning cars. 19 people are reported to have died in clashes with the government. 

Solidarity needed now: Ahmad Sa’adat enters second week of hunger strike

The following is from the Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa’adat

http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/

June 11, 2009

Ahmad Sa’adat, the imprisoned General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has entered the second week of his hunger strike to protest the policy of isolation and solitary confinement practiced by the Israeli prison administration against Palestinian prisoners.

On the Student Movement in the United States

The following is the contribution to the 18th International Communist Seminar by Josh Sykes, Freedom Road Socialist Organization

“The youth – the current situation of the youth, the work of the communists among the youth, and the incorporation of new generations in the communist parties”

Brussels, 15-17 May 2009

Freedom Road Socialist Organization has a rich history of work among youth and students. Many of the veteran cadres of our organization were active with the youth of the Black Panther Party, Brown Berets and the Students for a Democratic Society of the 1960s, the Revolutionary Student Brigades in the 1970s, or the Progressive Student Network in the 1980s. Others worked on campuses to organize against South African Apartheid, in the historic Jesse Jackson campaign, or in solidarity with the Central American revolutionary movements. Many also organized Asian American and Pilipino (1) students, or worked in mostly oppressed nationality student formations like the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM) in New York. Today, students and youth in Freedom Road continue to do mass student organizing, mainly in the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) formed in 2006.

FMLN Takes Power in El Salvador

The following article is from Fight Back! News

El Salvador's new Vice President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, with former CISPES Executive Director Cherrene Horazuk and solidarity activist and Fight Back! reporter, Brad Sigal

FMLN Takes Power in El Salvador

By Brad Sigal

San Salvador, El Salvador – In an historic day here, June 1, Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez Ceren were sworn in as the new president and vice-president of El Salvador. Funes and Sanchez Ceren are members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a leftist political party which was formerly a guerrilla movement that fought against the U.S.-backed right wing dictatorship in El Salvador in the 1980s. Funes and Sanchez Ceren won election on March 15, marking the first time there will be a leftist government in El Salvador’s history.

Continuing the Revolution is Not a Dinner Party: Looking Back at Tiananmen Square, the Defeat of Counter-Revolution in China

The following is from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization:

We are publishing the paper, Continuing the Revolution is Not a Dinner Party written 20 years ago during the 1989 turmoil in China. Authored by Mick Kelly, a leading member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, this paper was produced in the context of a major two-line debate in our organization on socialism and China.

We are publishing it now, because with the 20th anniversary of the events at Tiananmen Square upon us, there are already attempts underway to attack socialism, the Chinese revolution, and those that defend it. We do not see this paper as a definitive statement of our organization on the many political movements and great debates that occurred in China since 1949. Rather we think the paper stands as a rigorous effort to use Marxism to understand the near defeat of the Chinese revolution that took place some 20 years ago.

In Continuing the Revolution is Not a Dinner Party, Mick Kelly does a good job of explaining the origins, development, and reactionary reality of the Chinese student movement, as well as its relationship to Chinese society and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1980s. The paper supports Marxism-Leninism and the Chinese revolution while investigating and evaluating the problems faced and errors made by the CCP. The paper is provocative reading for Marxists because it challenges both social-democratic and ultra-left views regarding socialism and continuing the class struggle within socialist countries.

The author defends the leading party’s attempts to develop a modern socialist society, the need to combat revisionism within the party and society, and to beat back counter-revolution and the restoration of capitalism. On the down side the paper was overly hopeful about the outcome of the struggle against revisionism and capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe, and underestimated the growth of the capitalist sector of the Chinese economy in the years to come.

Many issues raised in Continuing the Revolution Is Not A Dinner Party were settled in the early 1990s. For example, some western leftists back then held that the overthrow of existing socialism would lead to a new improved socialism. Those who held this view were soon proved wrong by the counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe and the USSR, where restored capitalism led to mass unemployment, societal decay and wars that continue to this day. As the U.S. ruling class celebrated this, many of the counter-revolutionary Chinese students, hyped as heroes by U.S. corporate media, were able to escape justice, reappearing to make their fortunes in the west. These pro-imperialist reactionaries praised the armed attacks on the People’s Liberation Army and openly expressed their dreams of bringing capitalism to China.

We hope that those interested in revolutionary change today can learn something from this paper. We are now in a situation where Marxism-Leninism is gaining strength and popularity around the world and the socialist countries are modernizing. Proletarian revolutionaries in many countries can make advances while the U.S. economic crisis deepens. Our hope is this paper will help to further the understanding of why supporting socialism and China is important to everyone who is fighting imperialism and to everyone who wants a better way of life.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization

Follow this link to read Continuing the Revolution is Not a Dinner Party

Click here for a PDF

Comrade Joe: A U.S. defector in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Israel’s new government, the ugly face of racism

The following is from Fight Back! News:

Commentary by Hatem Abudayyeh

Israeli right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu, who stated that Israel did not “go far enough” in its 22-day invasion and massacre of 1400 Palestinians in Gaza earlier this year and who has never accepted even the possibility of an independent state for the Palestinians, is now the new prime minister. He was sworn in on April 1, after being asked in February by President Shimon Peres to form a coalition government.