Whatever has happened with Stalin, gentlemen, is a question for the Soviet Union. You are responsible, and your forebears, for 60 million to 100 million Black people dying in the slave ships and on the plantations, and don’t ask me about anybody, please.
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Denazification in socialist Germany opened door to gay rights
By Leslie Feinberg
Articles appeared in many newspapers advocating the elimination of Paragraph 175. In Saxony, which later became a part of East Germany, the legislature endorsed repeal of the Paragraph.
One communist in particular deserves credit for these efforts: Dr. Rudolf Klimmer.
As a medical student in Dresden during the Weimar Republic, Klimmer, a gay man, had traveled to Berlin many times to follow developments within the homosexual emancipation movement. He particularly developed an association with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Human itarian Committee.
Klimmer was a member of the Communist Party. So was the committee’s secretary and later chairperson, Richard Linsert.
During 12 long years of fascism, Klimmer kept his political views and sexuality under wraps, marrying a lesbian for mutual protection. After the Nazis were defeated, he chose to live in the Soviet Occupied Zone and joined the Communist Party once again.
Steakley noted, “He launched a one-man campaign which aimed at repealing all laws against homosexuality, re-establishing Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, and agitating with Soviet and local authorities for the full equality of gay people.”
More by Leslie Feinberg on LGBT rights in East Germany:
Same-sex rights in East Germany: Legal and material progress
East Germany in the 1970s: Lesbian & gay movement blossoms
East Germany: Forming of gay groups ignites church struggle
Lesbians and gay men: Great gains in 1980s East Germany
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The first publication in any language of Che Guevara’s controversial and critical analysis of the Soviet economic model. As minister for industry and head of Cuba’s National Bank, Che Guevara prepared this manuscript to compare the Cuban experience with that of the Soviet bloc. With extensive appendices, this is the complete anthology of Che Guevara on political economy.
Writing in 1965, Che explained his critique was necessary “because Marxist research in the field of the economy is proceeding along dangerous routes. The intransigent dogmatism of the Stalin era has been succeeded by an inconsistent pragmatism.” He justified what he described as his “heresy” by pointing to Marx’s statement in the first few pages of Capital, about “capitalism’s inability to criticize itself, using apologetics which now, unfortunately, can be applied to Marxist political economy.” He argued for doing away with capitalist concepts and formulas and concentrating instead on the motivation and development of individual human beings.
Published in association with the Che Guevara Studies Center in Havana.
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Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
By Deirdre Griswold, Workers World
Not one U.S. newspaper, television or radio outlet has reported or commented on these cables released by WikiLeaks, nor on the Telegraph story about them. It is as though they fell into a bottomless chasm.
Is it because the media here don’t believe the report is credible? Hardly.
The New York Times knows it’s credible. Their own Beijing bureau chief at the time, Nicholas Kristof, confirmed it in an extensive article entitled “China Update: How the Hardliners Won,” published in the Sunday Times magazine on Nov. 12, 1989, five months after the supposed massacre in the square.
At the very end of this long article, which purported to give an inside view of a debate within the Chinese Communist Party leadership, Kristof stated categorically: “Based on my observations in the streets, neither the official account nor many of the foreign versions are quite correct. There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.”
Had there been fighting in Beijing? Absolutely. But there was no massacre of unarmed students in the square. That was an invention by the West, intended to demonize the Chinese government and win public sympathy for a counter-revolution.
The turn toward a market economy under Deng Xiaoping had alienated many workers. There was also a counter-revolutionary element trying to take advantage of popular grievances to completely restore capitalism.
The imperialists were hoping the struggles in Beijing would bring down the Chinese Communist Party and destroy the planned economy — similar to what was to happen two years later in the Soviet Union. They wanted to “open up” China, not to truth, but to the looting of the people’s property by imperialist banks and corporations.
After much wavering at the top, the army was called out and the uprising crushed. China was not broken up like the Soviet Union; its economy has not imploded nor has the standard of living declined. Quite the opposite. Wages and social conditions have been improving at a time when workers elsewhere are being forced backward by a severe capitalist economic crisis.
Despite deep concessions to capitalism, foreign and domestic, China continues to have a planned economy based on a strong state-owned infrastructure.
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