The formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922 brought together more than 120 distinct peoples, each with their own language and culture, who had been oppressed under the former Russian Czarist empire. This great achievement grew out of the Russian...
Acquittal of Zimmerman smashes myth of a ’post-racial society’
The Trayvon Martin movement and the national question George Zimmerman’s acquittal has resulted in waves of mass outrage among Black people and all anti-racists. The verdict should, once and for all, puncture the myth of a “post-racial” or “color-blind” America. The...
Re-segregation, Black liberation and revolutionary unity
Fighting and defeating racist oppression 2014 is a significant year for civil rights anniversaries: The 60th for Brown v. Board of Education, and 50th for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Anniversaries like these are bound to inspire significant discussion on how to...
Harry Haywood’s contributions to the National Question and the fight for class unity
Harry Haywood was a long time member and leader of the Communist Party-USA and other communist organizations from the 1920’s until his death in 1985. He was the key figure in developing and popularizing the concept that Blacks represented a separate “nation” inside...
Civil rights and the U.S. revolution
The modern Civil Rights movement burst onto the scene with the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama that began Dec. 5, 1955. Nine years later, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. The Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, one year later. Legal apartheid...
Is the United States one nation?
MOST people outside Chicago had never heard of Barack Obama before July 2004. Since his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, this young, Black politician from Illinois has been widely touted in the bourgeois media as a "rising star" in the Democratic...
What is national oppression?
Oppression and exploitation are basic features of capitalist society. Workers are paid wages while the capitalist owners make profits from the products created by those who work. This is the essence of economic exploitation. Almost every worker, even if they do not...
Eradicating the scourge of racism from U.S. society
It will take a revolution In August 2006, an African American student in Jena, La., asked his school principal for permission to sit under what had been known as a “whites only” tree in the center of the school’s courtyard. The following day, three nooses in the...
Oil, imperialism and national conflict in the Caucasus
The September 3 massacre of at least 360 children and adults in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, in the Caucasus region of Russia, shocked the world and brought the conflict in the area into the public eye again. The Caucasus is the area between the Black and...