Category: Uncategorized

Greece's left-wing government is on a collision course with the rulers of Europe over the commitment of the Coalition of the Radical Left, or SYRIZA, to reverse drastic austerity measures imposed under the Memorandums negotiated with the European Union (EU).

SYRIZA won a tremendous victory in the January 25 elections because it promised an alternative to the catastrophic economic and social crisis that Greece has endured for more than five years. But with the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras only two weeks old, the political and financial elite of Europe, from Germany's Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble to Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank (ECB), have rejected all proposals to negotiate Greece's huge foreign debt or relax the austerity conditions imposed as a condition for the bailout of the country's economic system. With a showdown approaching, all eyes are on the struggle in Greece and the hope it hold for the future.

In the wake of a Missouri grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown on August 9, it can be difficult to imagine a city in the United States where a police department and a largely black and Latino population work together productively.

But it’s happening in Richmond, California, a gritty town in the San Francisco Bay Area best known for its massive Chevron refinery and, in past years, for its high crime rate. 

Dear New Politics Subscribers and Friends,

The exciting new issue of New Politics is now available in print and online! This issue focuses on the American Scene as well as offering articles on the Ukraine and other international topics and theoretical discussions. Click any of the links below to access the online essays and book reviews.

Guest blog: This week I have a commentary by a reader. Doug Mann provides background about the issue of tenure for teachers in Minneapolis. His analysis, identifying how the Right has pushed this issue and why systemic racism has to be named in defending teachers’ rights to due process, applies in most respects to other urban school districts.  Doug is the Green Party candidate for Minneapolis School Board, citywide, and an education activist.

 

Subcomandante Marcos, the famous voice of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN),announced in the early hours of Sunday, May 26 that he ending his role as the group's spokesperson and military commander. Or as he put it, Subcomandante Marcos, a “harlequin” and a “hologram” created by the EZLN, has now ceased to exist.

While we recognize that the following statement represents the point of view of a small minority both within the Ukrainian rebellion and in Ukraine at large, we reprint it here nonetheless, thinking that it is an important statement of the left. – Editors.

Euromaidan and a Program for the Left

Euromaidan’s popularity has nothing to do with Ukrainians finding the question of free trade with the European Union so significant that it emboldened them to survive sleepless nights on the square. The country’s socioeconomic problems, which are much more acute than those of its neighbors to the East and West, gave the protest its meaning.

Susan Weissman. Victor Serge: A Political Biography. New York: Verso, 2013. Notes. Biographical glossary. Bibliography. Index. 452 pages.

From its opening pages Susan Weissman’s Victor Serge: A Political Biography thrusts us into the life of this remarkable revolutionary and writer as he plunges into the Russian Revolution with all of its contradictions. Weissman has written a wonderful intellectual and, above all, political life of Serge that focuses on his experience in the Bolshevik Party and then in the Left Opposition, explaining how he attempted to understand and express through his journalism, essays, histories, memoir, novels and poems the meaning of it all as the workers’ revolution first faltered and was then transformed into the Stalinist regime. Weissman’s Victor Serge takes up virtually all of the major incidents, issues, and personalities of the revolution during the 1920s and 1930s, giving particular attention to Serge’s coincidences and differences with Leon Trotsky.

Marta Russell died a few days ago in Los Angeles days short of her sixty-second birthday. A journalist and commentator about issues affecting disabled people as well as a film industry worker for many years, Russell was best known for her landmark and pioneering book, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the end of the Social Contract (Common Courage Press). Here she set out a compelling critique of how capitalism marginalizes and oppresses disabled workers.

A new website by the TAHRIR International Collective Network is trying to connect anti-authoritarian struggles in Europe and Middle East.

The House of Representatives has passed a $26 billion jobs bill, engineered by Democrats, that is aimed to save jobs of public employees, mainly teachers and help states pay for Medicaid health insurance. Funding will come from taxes on multinational corporations– and from slashing money for food stamps. Congressional Republicans lament that this is a “giveaway” to teachers unions.