25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

May 2, 2022

May 5, 1997

STOCKHOLM — As Washington leads the imperialist drive to extend NATO into eastern and central Europe, the Swedish ruling class has become increasingly active in defending its imperialist interests in the Baltic region. Both the Social Democratic foreign minister Lena Hjelm-Wallén and Conservative opposition leader Carl Bildt have made statements in favor of the Baltic states to be included in the NATO expansion.

The foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland made a joint statement demanding that while they remain nonaligned countries for the time being, the doors of NATO should be open if they want to join later.

Finland is the only imperialist country that has a long border with Russia, and it was in the Baltic states that the Soviet Union concentrated most of its military installations to counter an attack by NATO during the Cold War.

May 5, 1972

It is now clear that the renewed revolutionary offensive is on a significantly larger scale than the Tet offensive. After one month, the revolutionary forces are sweeping across central South Vietnam, threatening to divide it in two. There have been massive desertions from the Saigon army on all fronts.

Why, when the puppet armies outnumber the revolutionary opponents, have more sophisticated weaponry, and are backed up by massive round-the-clock U.S. bombing, do they fail to stem the advance?

The answer lies in the political realities of the Vietnamese civil war. On one side stands the hated capitalist-landlord regime, imposed on South Vietnam, armed, financed, and militarily supported by Washington. On the other side are the revolutionary forces, who have been struggling to throw off the imperialist oppressors for more than three decades.

May 3, 1947

DETROIT, Apr. 24 — In the biggest demonstration of labor’s power, more than 275,000 white and Negro workers, men and women from office and factory, marched into Cadillac Square this afternoon. Expressing their hostility toward the Big Business drive for vicious anti-labor legislation like the Hartley and Taft bills, the demonstrators filled the square.

The shutdown of the auto plants was complete. The local capitalist press admitted that 500,000 workers left the plants, striking proof of the virtually unanimous support of this demonstration.

But no speaker told the workers how to really fight politically. No speaker mentioned the great and crying need for a labor party. The growing political consciousness of the workers was expressed by the UAW-CIO Briggs Local 212 delegation, which bore slogans demanding the building of a labor party.