My uncle once lived on Patrice Lumumba Street in Gdańsk. When our socialist project fell, Lumumba’s name made way for that of the Jagiellon dynasty, a royal family from a time when history measured the exchange of thrones, not the heartbeats of people. 🧵

https://twitter.com/incontextmedia/status/1669767261349969922

Together with Lumumba’s memory went a rich legacy of socialist internationalism.

The Polish people had been in Accra, Baghdad, Lagos, Hanoi and beyond. They left behind schools, roads, hospitals, universities, and social housing.

NATO was founded on this day in 1949. Its mission, as its first Secretary General said, was "to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Like the fascist project that it absorbed, NATO's anti-communism was directed not just at the USSR, but at the aspirations of the European people—and the anticolonial movements springing up around the globe.

Today, Germany celebrates “Unity Day”: ideological cover for the 1990 annexation of the German Democratic Republic by west Germany.

The process was accompanied by perhaps the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history, estimated at $2 trillion. The annexation was marked by the severe curtailment of political and economic rights for the residents of east Germany.

With no democratic mandate, west German monopolists seized factories, farms, mills, and other GDR property, which they asset-stripped and wound down.

Gorbachev died. His legacy? Russia's GDP dropped by 40%. Real wages halved. Poverty ballooned from 2.2 million in 1987-88 to 66 million in 1993-95. Millions died under the brutal regime of privatization and shock therapy. Half a million women were trafficked into sexual slavery. Does Gorbachev hold sole responsibility? Of course not. He was just the feeble culmination of a revisionist current in Soviet governance that made increasing accommodation to capitalist interests. But he presided over the final capitulation, and that is his weight to bear.

Zelensky has ratified Law 5371, which strips 70% of Ukrainian workers of collective bargaining rights, introduces zero-hours contracts, and allows the state to confiscate trade union property. The price of admission into the imperialist alliance is heavy. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/ukra… The British Foreign Office has been spearheading a major campaign of capitalist propaganda, advising Ukraine on the benefits of "liberalizing" labor laws. It looks like they got their way, throwing Ukrainian workers right back to the 19th century.
progressive.international/wire/2022-01-1…

Today, as 'Black Ribbon Day' plays out on social media, you will be inundated with grotesque attempts to equate Nazism and Communism — an act that both minimizes the crimes of fascism and erases their colonial roots. Let us instead remember the victims of colonialism and fascism. We do not have a day in Europe to commemorate the millions of lives destroyed by Belgium's Leopold II in the Congo. His brutal regime would sever the arms of children in front of their enslaved parents for the crime of working too slowly.

Operation Barbarossa, likely the most momentous military confrontation in human history, began on this day in 1941.

Just as US settler colonialism conquered the “Wild West”, Hitler hoped to conquer the "Wild East" and build a slave nation — a "German Indies in Eastern Europe". Hitler admired, he said, how the US had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep[s] the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”

In this way, Nazism carried forward the colonial tradition against the promise unleashed in October 1917.

Who controls women's reproduction is a question of who holds power in society.

Look to Poland as an example. The socialist Polish People's Republic was the second country in the world to legalise abortion — after the Soviet Union. (1/6) In 1956, former revolutionary organiser and Auschwitz prisoner Maria Jaszczuk, now a Member of Parliament, fought to extend abortion rights to cases of economic hardship. The law that was passed was so progressive that women would travel to Poland from Sweden for abortions. (2/6)

The attempt to divert blame for climate inaction onto China and Russia is perhaps history's most cynical and destructive provocation.

The US has not only been the greatest contributor to climate change, but also the greatest obstacle to climate action. aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/2… As @jasonhickel has shown, the Global North is collectively responsible for 92% of total excess emissions — effectively colonizing the atmosphere, depleting carbon budgets while denying the Global South the right to industrialize and build prosperity.

https://twitter.com/ProgIntl/status/1424726967862038529

This annual "commemoration" is a vicious act of revisionism that crept into the Brussels technocracy through the veins of Eastern European reaction.

It is a smear as grotesque as Holocaust Denial — designed to mask the roots of fascism and inoculate us against Marxism.

https://twitter.com/eucopresident/status/1429680772672262146

It begins with the reinvention of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as the original sin of the war.

On this account, it was Stalin and Hitler's division of Poland that marked the start of war, plunging Europe into darkness.

The historical record could not be more different.

Whatever measures the EU takes in Belarus from today will not be motivated by concerns about "democracy" or "free speech".

There were no sanctions against Saudi Arabia when it dismembered Khashoggi, Britain when it kidnapped Assange, or Israel when it decimated media offices. A recent @Europarl_EN resolution gives us a clue as to the real motivation.

The resolution expressed “regret” that the Belarusian authorities failed to follow World Bank and IMF recommendations to privatize the state sector, implement austerity, and "encourage entrepreneurship".

Each year on Victory Day — after a celebratory round of military parades, flybys, and speeches — the people of Russia take to the streets in one of the most profound and solemn expressions of historical remembrance I have ever witnessed: the Immortal Regiment. The streets are filled with the faces of lost relatives and comrades.

For a few hours, the partisans and soldiers, workers and resistance fighters, medical personnel and others who had lost their lives in the brutal war of resistance against Nazi barbarism are returned to life.

Today marks 102 years since the start of the Spartacist Uprising, in which a group of revolutionaries led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht launched a general strike in Berlin — and were massacred by the Freikorps at the orders of SPD President Friedrich Ebert. Ebert unleashed some 3,000 soldiers from the Freikorps — a proto-fascist militia that incubated parts of the Nazi leadership — on the strikers. Using weaponry from World War I, the Freikorps murdered over a hundred striking workers.