Logos symposium on Labor

Logos, the online, on point and highly readable journal of modern society & culture features in its most recent issue a symposium on the future of US unions. In addition to a piece by me ["So Why Don't We Have Better Unions?"] are contributions from Melvin Dubofsky, Bill Fletcher Jr., and Steve Early and Rand Wilson. All worth reading. Enjoy.

The True Story of Pascale Mauclair

Here is an extraordinary piece about Digger Murdoch's New York Post harassing a teacher who was rated poorly on the city's bogus teacher evaluation. When the Los Angeles Times printed the same slanderous tripe a year ago, based on the same crap methodology, the Los Angeles United School District teacher involved committed suicide. It was a big story then. This one is no different, except that no one's taken their own life, yet. Wish I'd written it.

Occupy Wall Street and Labor: The Closest of Strangers

     A sign on a lower Broadway storefront window just one block south of Wall Street reads "I can't afford a lobbyist, so I organize." The sign, one of many put up by Occupy Wall Street activists, sits inside a cavernous street floor space the United Federation of Teachers lent gratis to OWS for storage and coordination. The UFT, like other city unions, can afford lobbyists—subsidized by its own members through voluntary contributions.

The Republican primary: garbage in/garbage out

     In his appreciation of the late Lucio Magri, the Italian Marxist and founder of the exemplary Il Manifesto newspaper, Perry Anderson tells the story in the most recent New Left Review of the trashing a young Magri took from Italian Communist Party elder Enrico Berlinguer for a speech Magri wrote that bordered on the substantive.

     “Magri,” Berlinguer said, “you have yet to learn that in politics one needs the courage of banality.”

They hoped for FDR; all they got was the "F"

[The following appeared as a contribution to a symposium on electoral politics in the September 2011 issue of Yankee Radical, DSA's Boston-area socialist monthly. While the piece makes reference in places to the perspectives of a particular organization, its analysis is meant to apply to a broad swath of the US left as well.]

The Existential Robert Fitch

An overflow crowd at New York's Brecht Forum on Sept. 18 commemorated the life of the late journalist, author, scholar, educator, activist, union organizer and frequent New Politics contributor Bob Fitch, who died in March after complications from a fall. Among the speakers were Bertell Ollman, Steve Bronner, Doug Henwood, Christian Parenti, Jonathan Fitch and NP's Michael Hirsch. Below are Hirsch's remarks.

The Working Families Party: Stumping for Jesus

     An isolated Assembly race in underserved North central Brooklyn in an election off- year wouldn't normally attract much interest -- witness grudging coverage in The New York Times on the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend.

Rebels in industry: A story told well, and one worth telling

Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s
Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow (editors)
Verso, 2010 $29.95

     Wordsworth's paean to the French revolution, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!" doesn't appear in Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s. It should.