The People Speak: Some of the latest comments from PW readers

People’s World readers offer their take on a number of recent articles featured in our pages. The comments below have been proofread and edited for length. Join the discussion on the PW website and on Facebook. Your thoughts could be the next to appear in this space.

Re: Tackling white privilege: AFL-CIO targets racism and prison-industrial complex

Cameron Orr says:

Excellent article. I was amazed to read the following: “The secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, Loretta Johnson, presented the resolution. ‘Our nation’s racial history is our nation’s economic history,’ she proclaimed. ‘When the South lost it’s enslaved labor, the government created new ways to get forced labor—of predominately Black Americans—and that was through mass incarceration. Capitalism and the U.S. incarceration system is greatly intertwined,’ she went further… ‘We must end the profit-prison pipeline in this country,’ she concluded.”

It is good to hear union leaders drawing historic and economic links between racism, our country’s history of slavery, and its connection to capitalism today, and actually naming capitalism as the problem.

Very good read!

Re: The Soviet Union aspired to a dream yet to be realized

Rama Kant Sharma says:

My congratulations to David Cavendish for an excellent outline of happenings preceding and proceeding the Soviet Revolution and events of the past century. The USA represents a dangerous peak of development of monopoly capital in the world with its military-industrial complex and banking and information technology monopolies. The fascist threat is looming large all around the globe. The socialist camp, led by the Chinese Communist Party with its 89 million-strong membership, has upheld the promise of peaceful foreign policy and a healthier world trade system with all developing and developed nations of the world. As a scientific optimist, I would assume that the American majority agrees with John Kerry’s statement of last week that China and America can be the best of friends. Can this healthy voter majority in America, led by its trade unions, come forward to galvanize this unity in action to provide a transition to better life of plenty? Or will fascists continue to prevail and the spiral of death never stop? It all depends upon whether the ignorance of a section of voters continues to keep them home on election day.

Re: The Soviet Union aspired to a dream yet to be realized

Ismael Parra says:

I question these two sentences because of a certain American chauvinism: “The United States has the strongest economy in the world. Our people are highly educated and understand how the world works.” BUT, the article is good because it places the heights that humanity may have under socialism. I hope the next ones get into detail about what some of those wonders might look like concretely so as to give people goals to work toward…like public health, free education, free public non-polluting transportation, public banks, voting from home via the net, and so forth—things that technology today can already provide.

Re: AFL-CIO calls for a break with “lesser of two evils” politics

John Bachtell says:

The need to establish a labor-led party when the conditions are ripe is obvious. But I’m troubled by two things in this article: the complete absence of any mention of Trump, the extreme right and fascist danger and political domination by the GOP of the federal and most state governments, and the need to break their domination of government; and the complex dynamics going on in the Democratic Party, the many class and social forces at play and the need for maximum unity of every force possible at this moment.

This is the political context we are dealing with—which constitutes a very dangerous time. How the broad people’s movements work today in this political context and the reality of the two-party system can lay the basis for a third party (and not one so narrowly conceived as a labor party), but not if the most critical democratic task of our time is ignored.