Over the last few years, we’ve seen a resurgence in class struggles around the world. From the uprisings in Haiti and the Yellow Vest movement in France, to the anti-neoliberal movements in Chile, Iran and Lebanon and the anti-government protests in Sudan, the masses around the world are rising up against a capitalist order that has nothing to give but misery. While most of the media ignored these protests, Left Voice published news and analysis from a socialist perspective based on reports on the ground from places like France and Chile. We also had a correspondent reporting and streaming live from Plaza de la Dignidad in Santiago, Chile, which had become the nexus of the uprising there.
In the United States, the brutal murder of George Floyd ushered in a new era of Black Lives Matter uprisings, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets against racism and police brutality. These protests have been some of the largest social protests in U.S. history, and their effects have reverberated around the globe, sparking an unprecedented international movement that has led many to question the very nature of police and their relation to the state. Again, Left Voice reported live from the protests and put forward a socialist political perspective, demanding cops divest from our unions and linking the struggle against police violence to the struggle against capitalism.
But, over the past few months, we’ve also experienced unprecedented disaster wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, both medically and economically. To date, over a million people have died worldwide, with over 200,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. The pandemic has disproportionately also affected the working class, especially working-class communities of color, who have faced worse health and economic outcomes. The subsequent shutdowns and blow to the workforce have also resulted in millions of unemployed and the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession. Left Voice comrades who work in healthcare, like Tre Kwon and Mike Pappas, organized actions among healthcare workers during the peak of the pandemic in NYC and spoke about the dire conditions in hospitals, demanding nationalized hospitals under worker control.
In the meantime, while large portions of the population battle with economic uncertainty, poverty and hunger, capitalists like Jeff Bezos are making record profits. Irrespective of which representative of the capitalist class wins in the bourgeois elections this November, there is only austerity lying in wait for the working class as the state scrambles to preserve capitalist profits.
At Left Voice, we’re clear about this: Capitalism is to blame.
Since our inception five years ago, we have grown from a small online publication to one that reaches hundreds of thousands every month. Through this period, we have unflinchingly argued for a revolutionary, internationalist perspective for fighting for socialism. We not only strive to bring news of class struggle that is ignored by mainstream media, but we also put forward ideas and debates that we see as essential for revolutionaries in the U.S. On our pages, we have consistently maintained the need for the working class in the U.S. to fight for its own organizations and to build their own power, independent from both the Democrats and the Republicans — the two parties of the capitalist regime. We’re unflinchingly anti-imperialist and socialist, which is why you won’t see us supporting lesser evilism or stanning for imperialist, racist Joe Biden.
But we want to reach more people with these ideas, and we need your help. We want Left Voice to be a tool to highlight the local struggles in your workplace and neighborhood — the stuff no one else is talking about. We want it to be a tool for you to talk to your co-workers, friends, and maybe even your grandma about the need for socialism in our time.
But our goal is not only to be a publication with many hits. While we aspire to reach larger sections of the working class, oppressed and radical youth with ideas for revolutionary socialism, we also see the website as a tool to help in the essential task of building a revolutionary party in the U.S. Left Voice was founded on the spirit of the newspaper as a “collective organizer,” as Lenin imagined Iskra in the years before the 1905 revolution. We hope that the debates and discussions put forward on our pages serve as a pole of attraction for revolutionaries, but also to build a group of fighters based on these very ideas.
Today, Left Voice is comprised of dozens of militants who work tirelessly to grow the press, based on the aforementioned principles.
It is in this spirit that we invite you to come and collaborate with Left Voice and join us on Saturday, October 17, from 2-4pm ET, for our Journalism School! You’ll learn about Left Voice as a project, as well as some skills you can put to use right away. You’ll get to choose a workshop about breaking writer’s block, reporting from the front lines of struggle using video and photos, or a workshop about creating socialist visual media.
If you’re inspired by our ideas and want to put forward a revolutionary, anti-imperialist, socialist perspective to fight against a capitalist class that is killing the planet and a bourgeois state that upholds it, we would love to collaborate with you. If you’re looking to write, do video journalism, design multimedia content, or are simply drawn to our ideas and want to explore new skills, this is the space for you!
Check out our Facebook event here.
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