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Mansa Musa was the ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa. Details recorded here should be sourced; unknown information is left blank.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Sam Marcy | |
|---|---|
| Chairman of the Workers World Party | |
| In office 1959 – February 1, 1998 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1911 |
| Died | (aged 86) New York City, U.S. |
| Party | Workers World Party (after 1959) |
Other political affiliations | Communist Party USA (until 1940s) Socialist Workers Party (1940s–1959) |
| Spouse | Dorothy Ballan[1] |
| Occupation |
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| Trotskyism |
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Sam Ballan (1911 – February 1, 1998), known by his pen name Sam Marcy, was an American lawyer, writer, historian, and Trotskyist activist of the post-World War II era. He co-founded the Workers World Party in 1959 and served as its chairperson until his death.
Marcy was born in the Russian Empire to Jewish parents. During the Russian Civil War, his family was a target of anti-Jewish pogroms by the White movement and received protection from the communist forces. They resettled in Brooklyn, where Marcy became an activist for the Communist Party USA. He studied law at St. Johns University and provided legal advice to labor unions in New York.[1]
Marcy grew discontented as a member of the Communist Party, viewing the Third International as increasingly detached from working class interests and instead a mouthpiece for Joseph Stalin, whose oppressive bureaucracy he despised. He joined the Trotskyist movement in the 1940s, building a branch of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Buffalo.[1] Yet he again became dissatisfied, finding the SWP uncommitted to revolutionary politics and instead oriented toward parliamentary reform.[2] Marcy, Vince Copeland, and other SWP members developed a theory of "global class war", according to which Marxists had a duty to defend the existence of the USSR and its satellites in spite of their bureaucracy.[3] The theory not only guided the formation of the Workers World Party but has more recently made inroads into academic Marxist debates in the U.S.[4][5][6][7] Over several years Marcy clashed with the SWP leadership on several questions, including their approach to Communist China and North Korea, whether the SWP should endorse Henry A. Wallace,[8] and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. On the last question, Marcy's faction supported the Soviet military intervention, arguing that the initial worker uprising had attracted class elements that sought to restore capitalism.[9][10]
In 1959 the "global class war" faction set up a new organization, the Workers World Party, characterized by outspoken defense of all Communist governments in the world. Marcy's writings included extensive works on socialism, the Cold War era and the rise of the powerful military-industrial complex. He also wrote about the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, the economic forces behind capitalist downsizing and the impact of high technology.[11] Selections of his works have been translated into many languages, including Persian, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, French and German.[citation needed]
His writings show a strong support for Mao Zedong and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and he defended the leadership of the People’s Republic of China until the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Marcy defended both China and the Soviet Union against charges of imperialism despite disagreeing with some policies and practices of the Communist Party leadership of both countries.[12]
In addition to his writings, Marcy and Copeland were some of the organizers of the first demonstration in the United States against the Vietnam War. The demonstration, by WWP affiliate group Youth Against War and Fascism, occurred in August 1962 and was subsequently noted by Ho Chi Minh in an interview with the National Guardian newspaper.[citation needed] Marcy died at Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan on February 1, 1998, at age 86.[1]
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Sam Ballan (1911 – February 1, 1998), known by his pen name Sam Marcy, was an American lawyer, writer, historian, and Trotskyist activist of the post-World War II era. He co-founded the Workers World Party in 1959 and served as its chairperson until his death.
Vincent Copeland (June 19, 1915 – June 7, 1993) was an American actor, labor official, writer, and political activist. A communist, Copeland was an actor during the 1930s but soon turned to political activism. Turning to industrial labor, Copeland was a welder, grievance officer, and editor of his unions' newspaper at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, New York. He "opposed the company's practice of denying black furnace workers better jobs by hiring outsiders to fill them" and 16,000 workers walked off the job in a wildcat strike. Copeland, however, was not rehired. A member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Copeland, Sam Marcy and others formed a faction which eventually left the party in 1958. A year later, Copeland became a founding member of Workers World Party (WWP). He was the founding editor of the party's newspaper, the eponymously named Workers World. During the 1960s, he was a board member of National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a major coordinating organization for mass protests against United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Copeland was a long-time resident of Jersey City, New Jersey, where he edited the Community Voice newspaper from 1985–1988. Copeland married fellow communist Elizabeth 'Libby' Ross in 1940. Ross died in 1989. He had two step-children, one of whom, Deirdre Griswold, was Workers World's nominee for president in 1980. He died on June 7, 1993, at his home in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The Workers World Party (WWP) is a Marxist–Leninist communist party in the United States founded in 1959 by a group led by Sam Marcy. WWP members are sometimes called Marcyites. Marcy and his followers split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1958 over a series of long-standing differences, among them their support for Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948, their view of the People's Republic of China as a workers' state, and their defense of the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, some of which the SWP opposed.
Workers World is the official newspaper of the Workers' World Party (WWP), a communist party in the United States. Sam Marcy led a faction out of the Socialist Workers Party and founded WWP in 1959; the first issue of Workers World was published in New York City in March of that year.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
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