Dérive

  By Luke Pickrell and Myra Janis. Originally published in Cosmonaut Magazine . Introduction  The Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2019 and signs would appear to augur well for the organization in the coming years. Recently, the party discussed running candidates for office. 1 Membership numbers are rising, 2 and the party credits itself and its allies for the “broad front” that defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. 3 Having abandoned the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization in a crisis of political direction, and gazed upon the desolate expanse that is revolutionary socialism in the United States, some comrades have turned away from the red rose toward the tried and true hammer, sickle, and gear. Unfortunately, these comrades will not have escaped the politics of class collaborationism by fleeing DSA and may find themselves in even hotter water.  The CPUSA marked its centena...

  Alexei Tkechev and Sergei Tkechev Between Battle (1958-60) Mike Macnair is a member of the CPGB-PCC and a frequent contributor to the Weekly Worker . In the three-part series written in 2011, he discusses the necessary electoral tactics for socialists maneuvering through bourgeois political bodies. The primary question he asks, is: What should be the principled boundaries and acceptable tactics of communists in relation to calls for electoral support to coalitions, alliances, other parties or individual candidates? The following is a summary of his series.  Part 1: The policies of the contemporary Trotskyist, Communist, and Maoist groups. Also, the policy of the RSDLP during the Duma elections. The CPGB desires left unity; that is, a United Communist Party formed from the merger of the existing Marxist tendencies. Here in the United States, the Marxist Unity Group in the DSA works to do the same. To this end, CPGB and MUG may find themselves working with less principled par...

  Kathe Kollwitz The Parents (1921-22) Rosa Luxemburg wrote The Junius Pamphlet while in prison in 1915. She had been arrested for speaking out against the war. The voting of war credits by the SPD and near unanimous support for the war by the other parties of the Second Internation (with the exception of Russia and the United States) was a devasting blow to the cause of the socialist revolution.  The pamphlet served as the guiding statement for the International Group, which later became the  Spartacus League  and, from 1919, the  Communist Party of Germany  (KPD). The following is a summary of important points from each chapter of the pamphlet.  Bourgeois society reveals its true colors in war: " Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the wi...

The following is an interview with John Reimann, a socialist activist (with roots in the union movement) and writer in Oakland, CA. I’ve known John for several years and wanted to learn more about his life. John touches on many topics, including his upbringing in New York, his participation in the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, his experiences as a union dissident, and his travels abroad. He concludes with a look at the present and future of capitalist society. Luke: I'm curious about your life as it relates to your politics and your organizing. Tell me about your upbringing and early years.  John: I was born into a non-religious Jewish family in New York in 1946. My father had been the economics page editor for the newspaper of the German Communist Party. Then he left the party over political differences. That was due to Stalin's takeover of the party. He was then involved in the anti-Nazi underground. (He told me that his group had a policy of worki...