“Eight Rough and Random Thoughts on Socialism” first appeared on  PoliticalAffairs.net on April 22, 2010. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

(1) Socialism has its material roots in the inability of capitalism to solve humanity’s problems. Working people gravitate toward a radical critique of society out of necessity, out of a sense that the existing arrangements of society (people don’t necessarily call it capitalism) fail to fulfill their material and spiritual needs. It is no coincidence that around the time of the economic meltdown last fall, public opinion polls showed growing support for socialism.

“The Right’s Last Dance: 2008 Elections” first appeared on PoliticalAffairs.net on July 25, 2009. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

Report to the CPUSA National Committee, July 7, 2007

To begin, I want to acknowledge that more than my fingerprints are on this report. Many comrades in discussions and by email gave me ideas and suggestions that I believe give the report more depth and range. I want to thank the comrades who took time out to convey their thinking.

The report focuses on some aspects of the current situation. It doesn’t try to span the entire country or the globe. Its aim is less ambitious. I will make an assessment of the Bush administration and the people’s struggle against its policies. Then the report will look at the 2008 elections and some of the main questions that will frame them. Finally, some aspects of our party’s work will be considered. 

“Change is Here, Change is Coming” first appeared on PoliticalAffairs.net on July 3, 2009. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

Editor’s note: Excerpted from remarks by Sam Webb, national chair of the Communist Party USA, to the national committee of the Communist Party, June 20.

I make no attempt to be comprehensive in these remarks. My aim is much more modest, as you will see.

Let me begin with a simple observation: If the last 30 years were an era of reaction, then the coming decade could turn into an era of reform, even radical reform. Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.

“Obama, Reform and the Role of the Left” first appeared on PoliticalAffairs.net on May 3, 2009. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

After the first, perhaps over analyzed, hundred days of the Obama administration, it is fair to say that President Obama is a reformer and we are entering an era of reforms, possibly radical reforms.

Some on the left (ignoring the right wing talk shows and their fantastic claims about Obama’s socialist pedigree) mockingly dismiss the new president and his reform inclinations, saying that his main mission is merely to save capitalism. Even if that is true, and there is no reason to doubt it, what does it tell us – that he is neither a politician of the left nor an advocate of socialism? Well, we already knew that.