Views in brief

Contribute to a new theater project

WE ARE two independent theater artists and current seniors at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In our practice, we have not experienced a theatrical space that platforms current social debates, moreover one that is accessible to all audience members.

To combat this, we have launched The Black Snake, a one-woman show addressing our need to create activist theater that equips audience members with an opportunity to take ownership of a cause.

We are committed to creating an interview-based theater piece documenting the voices surrounding the implementation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Our goal with this project is to invite audience members into your experiences in hopes of empowering and legitimizing their sense of opinion. With that knowledge, we hope to share with them the same engagement we have with this event, and that your valuable narrative has expressed.

To fully actualize this multidimensional project, we would love to use your valuable personal connection to this cause through interview questions that we will utilize in a script. Please contact us at [email protected] if you are interested in being a part of this project. Additionally, if you have contacts you think would assist us in this project, we would greatly appreciate if you shared them!
Emma Ayres and Emily Edström, Amherst, Mass.

C.L.R. James and conceptions of party

IN RESPONSE to "An American Bolshevk Party": Some of the writings of the Trinidad-born socialist C.L.R. James are well worth reading today. But I'm puzzled by the decision of SocialistWorker.org to republish an obscure 1946 document by James that originally appeared in the internal bulletin of the U.S. socialist organization then-known as the Workers Party (WP).

The context for the document was not explained to readers. In brief, many WP members expected that after the Second World War came to an end, there would be explosive struggles in the U.S. and revolutions in Europe and elsewhere. In 1946, some in the WP were trying to come to grips with a different reality. But James and his cothinkers were not (see their "Program of the Minority," which claimed that the U.S. was in a "pre-revolutionary period" and that the era was one of "the death agony of capitalism").

Despite its name and its members' accomplishments as socialist activists, the WP was never a party in the genuine sense of the term: At its peak, it had no more than several hundred members in a country of well over 100 million people. The 1949 decision to change its name to the Independent Socialist League was the conclusion drawn from some constructive rethinking about how socialists should organize in the conditions in which they found themselves, in which Hal Draper played a key role.

Unfortunately, James's 1946 document shows no awareness at all of the problems that inevitably arise when members of a small socialist group think their organization is a party. It offers nothing positive to socialists today. Of more lasting value are some of James's writings on African American struggles, some of which you have republished here and here.
David Camfield, Winnipeg, Canada

Honoring the fight for our rights

ON MAY 17, Le Zbor, the Croatian lesbian feminist choir, is traditionally celebrating the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT)--and as always, on this day, we are not only singing for the rights of LGBTQI people, but also sending a message of solidarity to all groups fighting for human rights and equality of us all.

This year, we are giving a performance at the 70th anniversary of a major anti-fascist event in Croatia: the breakthrough of the fascist army lines that took place on the site called Petrova Gora, during which 730 partisans and 12,000 civilians, mostly women and children, were finally liberated from atrocities committed by fascist forces in this area during the Second World War.

The organizers of the event (well-known institutions in Croatia such as the Serbian National Council, the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Fighters in Croatia, as well as local municipalities) have this year decided to jointly commemorate this great anti-fascist victory and the IDAHOT. This act is of great symbolic importance to us since it sends a clear message that the struggle against homophobia is also the struggle against fascism, and that anti-fascism does not only belong to the culture of remembrance, but is also a vital part of current struggles for a better future, not only in Croatia, but also all over Europe.

In times of current economic and social crisis that sows poverty and at the same time generates attacks not only on LGBTQI people, but also immigrants, national minorities, workers etc., we find it more important than ever to remember our antifascist legacy and use it to unite our seemingly separate struggles in one common goal: defending human rights and demanding equality for all. As an activist choir, we call upon mutual cooperation and solidarity of all groups fighting for the equality of us all.

In solidarity,
Le Zbor, lesbian feminist choir, Zagreb, Croatia

The fascist threat in Ukraine

IN RESPONSE to "Ukraine spirals toward chaos": This article by Alan Maass is, in my opinion, a positive contribution to helping people better understand the crisis now unfolding in the Ukraine.

Alan points out that Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have good reason to fear the Yatsenyuk regime in Kiev. This becomes more obvious each time the U.S.-backed Kiev regime launches a new military attack on anti-Kiev forces, who have the temerity to follow the example that Maiden Square protesters set by occupying government buildings and proclaiming life is unbearable under the existing regime.

I do wish Alan had made mention of the mobile street armies of pro-Kiev "football fans" that, at least until the Odessa massacre, had been traveling from one city to the next in eastern Ukraine, launching storm trooper-style attacks on unarmed or very lightly armed pro-Russian "Occupy"-style camps. This shows all the signs of classic fascist shock troop movement in bloom.

This offensive by Ukrainian far-right forces, fascists by any other name, is inspiring Nazi skinheads from a host of other European nations to join Ukrainian fascist-led mobs in their crusade against the anti-Maidan forces.

Now, I believe, is a good time to come to terms with the reality that the rise of the U.S.-backed Yatsenyuk government is a disaster for not just Russian-speaking Ukrainian workers, but for the working class of all of Europe. The interim government now lording over the Ukraine, or at least trying to lord over it, is a political hybrid that resorts to a lethal and toxic mix of military repression and fascist street mobs in the pursuit of deepening the hold of neoliberalism on the country. Should this political hybrid succeed in bringing order, U.S.-backed order, to the Ukraine, it's a model that the masters of capitalism in other European countries will surely adopt in crisis situations likely to arise in at least some of their countries in the not-too-distant future.

The international working class has a huge stake in seeing the growing resistance to Yatsenyuk defeat this government and its odious political model.
Mike Howells, New Orleans