USA/Canada

Supreme court upholds “partial birth abortion”ban

By Sofie Buckland In 2003, the Republican-controlled Congress voted to outlaw “partial-birth abortion”, an entirely made-up anti-choice term for the dilation and extraction (D&X) abortion procedure. At the end of April the Supreme Court voted five to four to uphold the ban; it is the first time the Court has made a decision which intervenes into a doctor’s choice of abortion procedure, a decision which is not just about the general legality of abortion. Dilation and extraction was previously only used after 12 weeks of pregnancy and only then for medical reason. Just 0.17% of abortions in the...

Why does the USA breed violence?

ON Monday 16 April a 23-year old South Korean student opened fire at Virginia Tech university, killing 33 and injuring at least 29. The latest in a string of shooting sprees going back as far as 1966, the massacre at Virginia Tech begs the question; why does this keep happening, and why particularly in the USA? The killer, Cho Seung-hui, was clearly mentally ill, but there are too many common trends in mass killings, particularly school shootings, for the phenomenon to be solely the product of a series of deranged individuals. Other factors — the class background of perpetrators, the easily...

Editorial: Save Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge has now signed Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death warrant. They plan to kill him on 17 August and thus barbourously to satisfy the racist cops who continue to campaign for his death and the blood lust of those who elected Tom Ridge as governor. Time is running out for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Time is short in which to lodge the protests and mount the pickets that may make the difference between life for Mumia-Abu Jama and a horrible death at the hands of the hired killers of the state of Pensylvania. Ridge is a man in a hurry. He is threatening to deliver on at least one of his...

Natalia Sedova Trotsky's Break with the Fourth International

To the Executive Committee of the Fourth International and the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (USA) May 9, 1951 Comrades: You know quite well that I have not been in political agreement with you for the past five or six years, since the end of the war and even earlier. The position you have taken on the important events of recent times shows me that, instead of correcting your earlier errors, you are persisting in them and deepening them. On the road you have taken, you have reached a point where it is no longer possible for me to remain silent or to confine myself to...

Class struggle in the USA

Kim Moody is a labour historian, teacher and activist in the United States. He is prominent in Labor Notes, a rank-and-file bulletin for working-class militants. He is the author of several books, including Workers in a Lean World. He spoke at the AWL's 2006 Ideas for Freedom event. There were two events of great importance recently. The first took place in the spring of this year, beginning on 25 April and reaching its culmination on 1 May. It amounted to a general strike of immigrant workers in the United States. At least five million workers were involved, probably the greatest event in...

Gangster Rap! Lenin and Joe Colombo

The story of Joe Colombo, the Mafia boss who briefly turned ethnic politician, is one of the most frightening stories I've come across. An instructive story, too. It says a lot about the “rebel” element in Trumpism. Perhaps significantly, the year is 1970. In the USA there is a huge anti-Vietnam-war movement. The USA has also experienced the black civil rights movement and the black ghetto uprisings. It is a highly political period in American history. When the gangster Joe Colombo, boss of one of the Mafia "Families" feels the pursuing FBI breathing down his neck, he reacts “politically”. He...

Electoral rout for Bush, but what's the alternative?

By a socialist activist in Chicago Few on the left could have failed to smile at the results of the US mid-term congressional elections on 7 November, which saw the Republicans lose control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the Bush administration left isolated. Almost immediately, Donald Rumsfeld - Bush’s far right commissar in the Department of Defence and the man who Reagan sent to Iraq to sell guns to Saddam Hussein - announced his resignation, to shouts of joy from anti-war activists around the world. Unfortunately but inevitably given the existing political set-up...

Pluto-democracy in America (2004)

In ancient Athens the citizens gathered in the agora, the market place, to debate the affairs of the city state and vote on them. They did that with every issue that arose, including the appointment of military commanders. It has been called the “classic” democracy. In fact, only a fraction of those living in Athens could debate and vote. Slaves, women and foreigners had neither voice nor vote. Those citizens who made up the Athenian democracy were therefore a narrow, privileged caste, consisting of, maybe, a fifth of the population, or less. Those who voted in the 2 November US elections have...

Cannon and Shachtman: The other history of American Trotskyism

Cassius: Stoop then, and wash. How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted o'er In states yet unborn and in accents yet unknown. Julius Caesar The photograph on this front page of Workers’ Liberty shows James P Cannon and Max Shachtman standing under the sign of the two angels (at the entrance to a cul-de-sac!). It was taken at the time of the founding conference of the Fourth International, in Paris, September 1938. It neatly, if unwittingly, pictures the two Trotskyist leaders in the role they would play in the “narrative” of its own origin promulgated by post-Trotsky “Orthodox...

Twenty Five Years of American Trotskyism

It is now twenty-five years since the Trotskyist movement was launched in the United States under circumstances which had already ceased to be unusual for that movement. The date was 27 October 1928. On that day, an enlarged session of the Political Committee of the Communist Party, upon hearing a statement by three members of the party’s Central Committee in which they aligned themselves with the then Russian (or Trotskyist) Opposition, voted to expel the three from the party: James P Cannon, Martin Abern, and Max Shachtman (an alternate member). This action, as the expelled knew before they...

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