Summer Issue Editorial

Again, the west is on fire and Gulf coast states are inundated with hurricanes and flooding. As connected crises escalate, this has been a summer unlike any we have experienced.

Increasing police violence, driven by arrogant racism is driving protests around the country. These are now targets of extreme-right racist attacks from "boogaloo" terrorists to federal goon squads licensed and urged on from the top, to kill us. The tyrannies and violence our government has unleashed for decades on poor countries, who dare to resist U.S. corporate control and the impoverishing austerity of debt colonialism, have now come home and are being inflicted on us.

The targeted enemy (minorities and ecological activists aside) is "Antifa," meaning those who actively oppose fascism, as every decent human being must. We named ourselves Partisan Press because we identify with the antifascist partisans of the past. Ironically, as a not-for-profit press, we are officially nonpartisan meaning that we do not endorse either wing of the corporate party or any candidates. While making no endorsement, we hope this election year will put an end to the monstrosity of a fascist-identified misleader who makes war on the old, the poor, minorities, women and the biosphere on which life depends.

The poems in this collection speak not only of the misery of wage slavery, but of the terror of losing jobs and homes. We as a class have no security. Many of us lack basic healthcare. We live in constant fear of landlords, bosses and illness.

The continuing nightmare of this mismanaged pandemic is also reflected by numerous poems. Our social and personal losses pervade this collection, as does our militant human solidarity with those especially targeted for abuse by this monstrous system. Our Summer issue has always had a thematic focus on the inseparability of climate and war. This issue is no different with poems remembering the anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and condemning our continuing nuclear weapons escalation and foreign aggressions. We remember and mourn the multitudinous and unnecessary deaths, continuous suffering and devastation of the crime of war.

The rapidly escalating climate catastrophe and our realization of the strong probability of resulting social collapse and possible extinction pervade this collection as well. A fossil-fuel reliant system based on endless growth in a finite world is beyond suicidal. It is ecocidal, threatening life itself.

The winning poems in our annual Working Peoples Poetry Contest are featured here. This year's winner is Frank Flavin for "A Working Man's Son." He wins the $100.00 prize and a one year subscription. and his poem will be posted on our website for a year. A runner-up is "Fitting" by Lyle Estill whose poem is also posted for a year.

Other poems in this issue remember poets lost. As a Taoist saying goes, we are not truly gone until we are forgotten in the world. These poems, like the writing left behind, keep those presences with us.

Class conscious solidarity is what keeps us going and what can save our country and world from the deadly onslaught of myopic greed and cultivated division by profiteering gangsters. That is the necessary foundation of our struggle for social and economic justice, climate sanity and authentic democracy. The final poem by labor organizer Stewart Acuff gets to that point and reminds us that militant solidarity -- love in action -- is a learning process. All of us or none!