Barry Grey is the US national editor of the World Socialist Web Site and a member of the national committee of the Socialist Equality Party. He has been active in the Trotskyist movement for more than 45 years. He writes extensively on US politics and history.
The State and Revolution was Lenin’s theoretical arming of the party and the working class as a whole for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the transfer of power to the soviets.
The State and Revolution was Lenin’s theoretical arming of the party and the working class as a whole for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the transfer of power to the soviets.
This lecture was delivered to the Socialist Equality Party (US) Summer School on July 24, 2019 by Barry Grey, US national editor of the World Socialist Web Site and leading member of the Socialist Equality Party in the US.
The WSWS is posting a three-part series originally published in July of 1987 under the title “Twenty years since the Detroit rebellion.”
WSWS National Editor Barry Grey delivered the following report to the Founding Congress of the Socialist Equality Party on August 9, 2008.
The International Socialist Organization is concerned that politically radicalized students and youth who are attracted to socialism are hostile to American military interventions in Syria and elsewhere.
The groundswell of support for Sanders indicates a growing interest in socialism, but workers will not find in his campaign an alternative to capitalism.
The central premise of the racialist narrative—the existence and all-pervasive role of “white privilege”—is contradicted by the realities of American society.
The rush to take down symbols of racism that the American political establishment has kept in place for decades is a defensive response to an outpouring of public horror over the Charleston killings and popular hostility to racism.
The Stalinist suppression of the Barcelona working class and ensuing blood purge broke the back of the revolution and ensured the victory of Franco’s fascist forces. Ramon Mercader, the GPU operative who murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico in August of 1940, cut his teeth as a Stalinist killer during the mass repression in Spain. None of this is even mentioned in the Jacobin article.
With the imposition of a state of siege in Boston, a historical threshold has been crossed.
Bennett’s vast audience, including new generations who first heard him in the 1990s, demonstrated there was a hunger in the population for music and lyrics of artistry and honesty, in contrast to the “gangster rap,” synthetic show tunes and banal “hits” by celebrity performers pumped out by the entertainment moguls.
The real problem of the opera, the irredeemable original sin of Porgy and Bess that every reviewer is duty-bound to point out, is the fact that its creators were white.
Given the generally deplorable state of culture and intellectual life in contemporary America, it was perhaps inevitable that this remarkable event would be tarnished by the purveyors of racialist conceptions of art.
British playwright Harold Pinter, this year’s Nobel laureate for literature, delivered a passionate, truthful and courageous acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy on Wednesday. The renowned author of such plays as The Homecoming and The Caretaker, Pinter has spoken out tirelessly and powerfully against the war in Iraq and the depredations of American imperialism in the Balkans, Central America and elsewhere that preceded it.
Sanders uses “left” rhetoric and demagogy to channel growing popular anger against Trump’s fascist policies back behind the Democratic Party.
In an effort to divert the mounting opposition from workers and young people to the fascistic policies of the Trump administration, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has launched a speaking tour urging them to lobby moderate Republicans.
Jacobin magazine, associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), published a politically backward and reactionary article last week titled “The Case for Social Drinking.” In it, writer Ryan Zickgraf railed against reports that Americans' alcohol use has significantly declined in recent years, a healthy trend.
There is nothing new in the efforts of Jacobin and the DSA to sow complacency and politically disarm the working class. This was their response to Trump’s attempted coup of January 6, 2021.
Over 150 people attended a meeting held by the pro-Palestinian Tahrir Coalition on Tuesday to oppose the escalating attacks on students protesting the US/Israeli genocide in Gaza by the University of Michigan. Members of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality spoke at the meeting, fighting for an independent working class-based socialist response to fascism, war and genocide.
The concert as a whole demonstrated the astonishing range of George Gershwin’s music—from the Broadway musical stage to the concert hall to the opera house (Porgy and Bess)—fusing blues and jazz rhythms with popular melodies and the late romantic classical tradition. It was music at once popular and uplifting, and profoundly democratic in its impulses and intentions.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at UM denounces the ban on Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and demands that it be immediately lifted and SAFE be allowed to function freely as a student organization on campus.
Promotion of the death penalty is a critical component of Trump’s bid to establish a presidential dictatorship. It is part of the anti-immigrant agitation that is central to his America-first, ultra-nationalistic ideological offensive and fascist incitement.
For the past several weeks, panicky reports and conspiracy theories have proliferated of “mystery” drones along the eastern seaboard of the US. They have been spearheaded by far-right political forces and social media influencers and facilitated by wall-to-wall coverage by the corporate media, including the broadcast networks and the cable news channels.
Woods repeats Trump’s fraudulent claims of being an anti-establishment figure while minimizing the dangers the working class faces from a Trump presidency.
There is one “justice” for the ruling class and something entirely different for workers and poor people.
On Thanksgiving Day 2024, the broad mass of the population has precious little to be thankful for. The crushing weight of inflated costs for all necessities—housing, food, healthcare, childcare, transport—continues to weigh on working class families. But there is an entirely different reality in the environs of the rich and the super-rich.
There should be no illusions that the withdrawal of former House member Matt Gaetz and his replacement by Pam Bondi as Trump’s pick for US attorney general will alter the fascist character of Trump’s cabinet or block Trump from obtaining Senate approval and Democratic Party acquiescence in his nominees.
Four days after the US elections, fascist President-Elect Donald Trump’s Republican Party is nearing control of all levers of federal governmental power.
The pre-election rush of these middle-class radical groups to coalesce behind Stein and the Greens exposes their reactionary role in opposing a political break by the working class with the Democratic Party and the capitalist two-party system.
The pro-imperialist “socialist” from Vermont argued there would be a “much better chance of changing US policy” under war criminal Kamala Harris.
As Kamala Harris crisscrossed battleground states with ultra-right warmonger Liz Cheney, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders appeared alongside Joe Biden in New Hampshire to tout the pro-corporate Inflation Reduction Act.
Declaring that her 1619 Project had been “borne out” by US political developments, Hannah-Jones employed its racialist falsifications of history to promote the campaign of Kamala Harris, while seeking to sow divisions on the basis of race within the growing movement of the working class.
The DSA Democrat is a stalwart supporter of the Biden administration, which has from the onset of the Israeli campaign of mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza last October 7 provided the Zionist regime with the arms and political and diplomatic support required for it to carry out its ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Republican groups are flooding the courts with suits designed to sow chaos, confusion and delay in the event of a Harris victory, while Trump and his fellow fascists in the GOP incite para-military violence on the basis of anti-immigrant agitation along the lines of their hysterical campaign against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
