Archive for November, 2024
Happy American Thanksgiving!
Even though I live in Canada, there is no holiday more meaningful to me than American Thanksgiving, having been raised south of here. I always obey the name, and spend the day reflecting in gratitude.
Today will likely be the last time I teach a first-year class at Kwantlen. I was assigned this class by surprise right before this semester started. It was a fun challenge getting back up to speed! These students form such a delightfully keen and courteous group. I’m grateful for the opportunity to stand in front of them one last time.
The Trotskyist position
I have been immensely delighted to see the resurgence of activity over at The Spartacist and The Workers Vanguard, communist publications I’ve read with passionate interest for more than thirty years. In recent years their pages were filled more and more by obituaries of their original editors, writers, and other comrades. But after a bitter fight within the governing organization regarding responses to the Covid epidemic – the eventually victorious position was to oppose lockdowns as they curtailed and undermined union, organizing, and protest activities – a newly fertile and urgent editorial spirit and ambition have emerged, in North America and across the seas.
Its American-election debriefing ends this way:
In the immediate period, defensive struggles will no doubt be on the order of the day. As the liberals abandon the oppressed groups they claimed to champion—black people, Muslims, trans people, immigrants, women—communists must be in the vanguard of their struggles. But they must seek to build these movements on stronger foundations, away from the moralism and sentimentalism of the liberals and intricately linked to the material interests of all workers. Ultimately, the working class will be the deciding factor. To win its allegiance, communists must show, through the course of class struggle, that unlike the traitors leading them today, they have a program that can materially advance its interests and lead to its liberation.
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