When The Revolution Comes by Gaither Stewart

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by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
Previously published August 8, 2011
June 22, 2017

The Historical Gastonia Textile Mill Strikes Are Not Forgotten

When in the early part of this millennium I was writing a rather surrealistic novel, ASHEVILLE, about the town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina where I started out my life, I ran into the story of the Asheville-based self-professed Communist writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, of whom I had never heard before. Visiting then her gravesite in the little known Green Hills Cemetery in West Asheville and researching her and her activities I fell into a gossamer review of early 19th century labor struggles in the good old U.S. South.

Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff and Kate Crehan at The Left Forum 2017: Gramsci’s Importance for the Left Today

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Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges, and Richard D. Wolff

OpenUnivoftheLeft on Jun 5, 2017

Left Forum 2017, Gramsci’s Importance for the Left Today, John Jay College, CUNY, 6-2-2017, New York City, Laura Flanders, Chair, The Laura Flanders Show, Chris Hedges, Truthdig, On Contact RT, Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work; Left Forum, Kate Crehan, College of Staten Island, Graduate Center, CUNY

Lukomorye: Poets Pave the Road to the Golden Age by Gaither Stewart

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by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
April 13, 2017

The recent death of the Russian poet with whom I was acquainted, Yevgheny Yevtushenko, prompted these considerations of the role of poets in social-cultural-political progress in general and in a particularly spectacular fashion in Russia. In few other countries have poets played a more significant than in Russia. Nonetheless, for centuries Russian poets have been harassed, persecuted, and punished for their songs. Dostoevsky imprisoned, Pushkin exiled, Yesenin, Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva suicides, Mandelshtam and others perished in the cultural events of 1937. Poets seldom lead easy lives anywhere. The poet sees the ideals but he must flee from the world in order to rejoice in them and he cannot remain unaffected by the caricatures of these ideals around him.

The Year of the Pig: Should Workers Support Police Strikes? (must-read)+ Caleb Maupin: Low Wages, Police Terror and the Necessity of Revolution

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Dandelion Salad
Originally posted Jan. 10, 2015

by Sam Marcy
Workers World, Jan. 8, 2015
January 18, 2017

This updated article first appeared in the Jan. 29, 1971, issue of Workers World newspaper.  The writer was a founding member and chairperson of Workers World Party.

Trump is Radicalizing the Masses by Larry Holmes

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Dandelion Salad

by Larry Holmes
Workers World
November 16, 2016

I want to speak about the big picture in terms of what happened last Tuesday, Nov. 8, with Trump’s election. That event is important for a party like ours, a revolutionary communist party at the center of world imperialism. Yes, U.S. imperialism is weakening, but it is still the center of world imperialism.

What Will A Socialist Society Be Like? by Jessica Hansen-Weaver

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Dandelion Salad

by Jessica Hansen-Weaver
socialistworker.org
September 17, 2016

THE 2016 presidential election has created an environment where millions of people who are sympathetic to socialism will be pressured to choose between the revolting and ridiculous Republican bigot Donald Trump and the supposed “lesser evil” Hillary Clinton.

John Bellamy Foster: The Anthropocene and Socialist Politics + Tariq Ali: The American Empire and its Discontents

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Dandelion Salad

swpTvUk on Jul 12, 2016

John Bellamy Foster discusses the theoretical and programmatic challenges that the Anthropocene, a dangerous new epoch in planetary history, poses for socialists in the 21st century.

Marxism in Noir By Alan Wald

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Dandelion Salad

By Alan Wald
International Socialist Review
July 11, 2016

The culture and politics of race and class struggle in the 1940s

No one knows better than socialist activists of the twenty-first century that each generation must face its own “crisis” of Marxism. But we don’t face this challenge to our theory and social movements just as we please. The way we remember our past governs our own dreams for the future. Above all, at a moment like today, when thousands of newly radicalizing young people know pretty much what they are fighting against, but are unclear about what they are fighting for, there is no point in simply pummeling the gates of history with one’s fists. Sooner or later, we look to the past for shared, or at least recognizable, political experiences that might be retrofitted and rebooted; tactics and strategies that have succeeded or failed; causes and explanations for economic and social trends that have persisted or morphed; and even role models, candidly reported, for how to live our chosen lives as Marxists. Marxism doesn’t embalm history; it seeks to join a living past to present changes.

Michael Lebowitz: What is Socialism in the 21st Century?

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Dandelion Salad

GreenLeftTV on Jun 14, 2016

At the ‘Socialism in the 21st Century’ Conference held in Sydney in May 2016 and organised by the Socialist Alliance, Michael Lebowitz, a world leading Marxist author who writes and researches the problems and possibilities of building a socialist alternative, here presents a paper on what Socialism might look like in this century and the differences with 20th Century Socialism as represented by the developments in the Soviet Union.

Chris Hedges and Richard D. Wolff at the Left Forum 2016: Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution?

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Dandelion Salad

Luxemburg Saw Reform as a Means and Revolution as the Goal

strugglevideomedia on May 26, 2016

“Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution?” Luxemburg scholar Sandra Rein is the first speaker at the Left Forum 2016 panel. She is introduced by panel moderator Laura Flanders. Rein is associate professor of Political Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada) and holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research grant to investigate the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman and Raya Dunayevskaya. She is also a member of the Editorial Board for the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

Lenin on State and Revolution by Gaither Stewart, Part 5

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by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
May 14, 2016

“The state is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another; its aim is the creation of ‘order’, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the collisions between the classes…”

The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution

Lenin on Imperialism and Capitalism by Gaither Stewart, Part 4

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by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
May 5, 2016

First published in 1917, Lenin’s “Imperialism. The Highest Stage of Capitalism”, his major theoretical work, shows imperialism as a “direct continuation of the fundamental properties of capitalism,” a primary manifestation of capitalism in its late stages.

Lenin: The Working Class as the Vanguard Fighter for Social Democracy by Gaither Stewart, Part 3

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by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
April 27, 2016

Above all, due to the grave obstacles it must overcome, the party of the working class must be a party of disciplined, professional revolutionaries…nothing short of this can succeed in acquiring and defending people’s power…

Lenin on Tactics of the Democratic Revolution by Gaither Stewart, Part 2

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by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
April 19, 2016

In his work “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, Lenin discusses a vexing Russian pre-revolutionary problem similar to the problem facing American left radicals today. For Russia of that epoch the question was one of timing and tactics: Was the classical Marxian bourgeois revolution leading to a democratic republic as a first step toward the Socialist Revolution necessary, and even possible, considering the pusillanimous nature of the Russian bourgeoisie at the time? Or could Russia bypass bourgeois capitalism altogether and leap directly from backwardness into advanced socialism? Today, more than a handful of people ask: What will be the nature of the long overdue Great American Revolution?

Lenin on Compromises by Gaither Stewart, Part 1

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by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
April 15, 2016

In Lenin’s “Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, written in 1920 as a polemic against Dutch and British groups in the new Third International meeting that year in its Second Congress in which strategy and tactics were debated. His target was the West European ultra-left communists who had come out against Marxists working in trade unions or running for public office and sitting in bourgeois parliaments.