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Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241

Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241

Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241

Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241

Much of the historical material in this article can be found in the book, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire, by Richard Becker. (PSL Publications, 2009) https://store.pslweb.org/Palestine-Israel-and-the-US-Empire_p_10.html As Israeli leaders and the Trump regime grotesquely celebrated the moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence, M...

But does the pro-Israel lobby—or Israel itself through the lobby—control and direct U.S. policy in the Middle East? To put it another way, does the tail wag the dog? Is it really conceivable that a small, dependent country could call the shots for the most powerful empire in the history of the world? The answer to all of these questions is no. Israel is part of the U.S. global empire, not the othe...

While Palestine was still nominally under Ottoman rule, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, sent a letter to Lord Rothschild, a member of the British House of Lords and one of the world’s richest men. The infamous Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917, reads: Dear Lord Rothschild: I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of s...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Zionism represented a small minority among Jewish people. It was mainly a movement of the middle class, with support from a few wealthy sponsors, particularly the Rothschild oil and banking interests. Jewish workers and intellectuals of that time played a vital role in the socialist, communist and other progressive movements in Europe and the United State...

Though it had its own distinct roots, Zionism shared some of the characteristics of the reactionary European movements. It fiercely opposed the anti-colonial and genuine national liberation movements. The Zionists, while aiming to create a Jewish nation-state, did not seek to acquire territory in Eastern Europe where most of the European Jewish population was concentrated and most violently repres...

The aim of the Zionists to dispossess Palestinians of their land and rights was no mystery to the Palestinian population. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s there were numerous uprisings against British colonialism and Zionist settlements, the most famous and protracted of which was the 1936-1939 revolt. In 1936, Palestinians launched a general strike that lasted six months—the longest general strike...

Suffused with anti-Semitism themselves, many in the U.S. ruling class in the 1930s viewed Nazi Germany as a weapon against their main enemy of the time—the Soviet Union. A number of U.S. capitalists regarded Nazi Germany as having an ideal business climate. The Nazis had smashed the powerful German labor unions and had fused German corporations closely with the state. Among those who shared Nazi s...

Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241

Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was born September 12, 1924 in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau, one of Portugal’s African colonies. On January 20, 1973–48 years ago today–Cabral was murdered by fascist Portuguese assassins just months before the national liberation movement in which he played a central role won the independence of Guinea-Bissau. This particular struggle was waged for the liberation of not jus...

There is, in fact, an irreconcilable conflict in the Middle East, but it is not one between different peoples or faiths. It is instead the struggle between imperialism, Israel and the dependent Arab regimes on the one hand and the oppressed peoples of this oil-rich and strategic region fighting for liberation and progress on the other. At the very heart of this conflict is Palestine. The Palestini...

Devastation in Iraq exposes U.S. imperialism's lies. https://www.breakingthechainsmag.org/

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress on April 28, Joe Biden made the calculation that he needed to directly address the needs of the working class. “20 million Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic – working- and middle-class Americans. At the same time, the roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion,” Biden noted, “[T]rickle-down ec...

May 4 marks the anniversary of a seminal moment in modern Chinese history. In 1919, the “May 4 movement” broke out — a youth-led uprising against the country’s domination by foreign colonial powers. In the following piece written in 2008, Fidel Castro reflects on this and other milestones in China’s long struggle for independence. The following reflection was published over a two-day period in the...

We are excited to announce ‘Reading Capital With Comrades’—a new 12-part podcast series teaching volume 1 of Karl Marx's Capital. Listen now on Spotify, Soundcloud & more! Marx published the first volume of Capital in 1867 after pouring over a decade of his life into writing it and another decade researching political economy. The book is more than an endurance challenge or a purely intellectual m...

PSL organizer Sasha Murphy speaks on Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict, a result only thanks to mass uprising, and what's next for the movement against police terror!

One thing is unambiguously clear: Derek Chauvin being found guilty is the result of a historic popular uprising. Chauvin’s brutal murder of George Floyd ignited a massive resistance from Minneapolis’ Third Precinct into the smallest towns and biggest cities in the United States. The Party for Socialism and Liberation was proud to participate in this historic movement that brought millions into the...

To General of the Army and First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Raúl Castro Ruz; To President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, and to all delegates of the Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba: On behalf of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the United States, we send you revolutionary greetings and solidarity on the occasion of the VIII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. We sa...

History is always political – many of us here are familiar with this concept. However, the lessons taught in school leave out the important context, reducing history to just a mere list of dates, people, and isolated events. As Marx once said “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Understanding the progression of society and the social forces at play situ...

After the deaths of Marx and Engels, socialists began taking up the important task of summarizing their work for popularization. In 1919, for example, Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist, argued that the essence of Marx’s project is not the correctness or incorrectness of his many theses, but rather, his dialectical method. Stressing the significance of Marx’s method Lukács notes that it is a “wea...

Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General and renowned international human rights attorney who stood against U.S. military aggression worldwide, died peacefully April 9 at his home in New York City, surrounded by close family. He was 93 years old. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/ramsey-clark/