CPUSA Online National Marxist School, Part I

May 20 – June 10, 2023

Working-Class USA, Forward Together: We Can Change The World!

 

May

 

May 20, Saturday

Click here to watch the recordings of the May 20 classes. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.

 

11:00 – 12:30 PM Eastern: The Fundamentals of Working-Class Strategy and Tactics
Reading: Readings for Session on Strategy and Tactics, May 2023

The slide presentation from this class may be reviewed here.

12:30 – 1:00 PM LUNCH

1:00 – 2:30 PM Eastern: Immigration and Immigrant Rights

Readings:
Understanding issues on the border: a working-class perspective
Immigration myths & facts: A look at the anti-immigrant furor
Out of Sight and Out of Mind: An Interpretative Human Rights Report on U.S.-Mexico Border Violence Under MPP and Title 42
Mortality, Surveillance, and the Tertiary Funnel Effect on the U.S.-Mexico Border: A Geospatial Modeling of the Geography of Deterrence

References:
Acuna, R. (2007). Occupied America: A history of Chicanos. Pearson Longman.
Alaniz, Y., & Cornish, M. (2008). Viva la raza: A history of Chicano identity and resistance. Red Letter Press.
Gonzalez, J. (2022). Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America: Second Revised and Updated Edition. Penguin.
Navarro, A. (2005). Mexicano political experience in occupied Aztlan: Struggles and change. Rowman Altamira.
Refusing To Forget
Zaragoza, V. (2016). Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era. Oxford University Press

 

May 23, Tuesday

7:30 – 9:00 PM Eastern: Marxist Economics Part I

Click here to watch the recording. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.

How is value created and how is it distributed under capitalism? Who constitutes the working class in today’s economy?
Readings:
Karl Marx: Wage-Labor and Capital
John Eaton: Political Economy, ch. 1-4

 

May 25, Thursday
7:30 – 9:00 PM Eastern: Marxist Economics Part II

Click here to watch the recording. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.
What is the structure of capitalism in the 21st century? How does it lead to economic crisis, racism and chauvinism, environmental catastrophe and war?
Readings:
Lenin: Imperialism, ch. 1-4
Victor Perlo: Super Profits and Crises

 

Memorial Day Weekend No Classes

 

May 30, Tuesday

7:30 – 9:00 PM Eastern: Marxist-Leninist Theory of the Party

Click here to watch the recording. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.
This session will examine the Communist Party as a tool developed and refined by the working class in the struggle for its own liberation.

Readings:
Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, ch. 1, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”
Lenin, Draft and Explanation of a Programme for the Social-Democratic Party

 

June

 

June 1, Thursday
7:30 – 9:00 PM Eastern: Class Struggle and Feminism in the USA

Click here to watch the recording. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.

Reading:
Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious

 

June 3, Saturday

Click here to watch the recordings of the June 3 classes. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.

11:00 -12:30 PM Eastern: Working-Class Democracy and Democratic Centralism

Reading:
CPUSA Program

12:30 – 1:00 PM LUNCH

1:00 – 2:30 PM Eastern: Ruling Class Culture: A Marxist Analysis

 

June 6, Tuesday
7:30 – 9:00 PM Eastern: The Fight for Environmental Justice

Click here to watch the recording. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.

In view of the present ecological crisis, can humanity and nature be saved? What is the Marxist view of the relationship between humanity and nature and the cause of the environmental crisis? Major economic and right-wing political forces are obstructing action. What will it take to overcome them before it’s too late?

Reading:

Marx on the metabolic rift: how capitalism cuts us off from nature

Could a reinterpreted Marxism have solutions to our unprecedented environmental crisis?

In Democratic states, climate victories push toward net zero carbon

 

June 8, Thursday
7:30 – 9:00 PM Eastern: China: from Feudal Dynasties and Humiliation to Socialist
Modernization

Click here to watch the recording. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.

Readings:
Asian Hate and racist incidents: Stop AAPI Hate
U.S. and Chinese governments present contrasting visions on future of international relations by David Cavendish
China Global Television Network (videos and articles on China and world news): CGTN
CODEPINK, China is Not Our Enemy, Stop Asian Hate
CPC Publicity Department: “The CPC, Its Mission and Contributions”
Dongsheng Weekly China News Report
Friends of Socialist China
McFarland, Duncan (editor): A China Reader, available from Lulu Press
Prashad, VJ: “The US Wants to Make Taiwan the Ukraine of the East
Red World Review: International Conference video recordings of poverty alleviation in China; short video on situation in Xinjiang; short video on AUKUS; congratulatory letters

 

June 10, Saturday

Click here to watch the recordings of the June 10 classes. You will be asked to enter your name and email before the video appears.

 

11:00 – 12:30 PM Eastern: The CPUSA Party Program

Reading:
CPUSA Program

 

12:30 – 1:00 PM LUNCH

 

1:00 – 2:30 PM Eastern: Party Clubs: The Foundation of multi-racial working class organizing and Party building

Readings:
Black Worker in the Deep South, A Personal Account by Hosea Hudson, International Publishers, 1972, Chapter 5

CPUSA Program, X The Role of the Communist Party: “To accomplish all this requires a much larger Communist Party USA. Building Communist Party clubs—with strategy, tactics, education, and organization within workplaces and working-class neighborhoods—helps win day-to-day struggles. Grassroots Communist Party clubs are vital to bringing the Party’s vision, strategy, and tactics into local work with masses of working people. Being of the working class and sharing its problems and struggles, the policies of the Party are tested and honed and become the property of more and more working people, eventually of millions.”

Resolutions Adoptd by the 31st Convention of the Communist Party USA, 2019, Resolution 25. BUILDING CLUBS AND DISTRICTS FOR SUSTAINABLE GROWTH