The Education International (EI), the international confederation of teachers unions, held its seventh World Congress in Ottawa over the summer.  Though most teachers don’t know this organization exists, and few people write about its activity, what it do

Review of Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The Occupiers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Occupy was the largest political mobilization of my lifetime. The explosion of energy it produced gave the feeling of perpetuity, with thousands of volunteers supporting each other through donations of food and standing together in solidarity against the police. But as the encampments became rooted, many had to check their excitement with a growing sense of disillusionment. It was clear that the Occupy strategy, and how it played out in practice, was rife with weaknesses that were ultimately exploited by those who sought to destroy Occupy and the discourse that it created.

In a recent New Politics essay, Dan La Botz argues that “the debate between” Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement is “one of the most important discussions of our time.”  It is “a great debate about the priorities and the program of the American people” that “could lead to the construction of a new analysis and lay the basis for a new and broad social movement” that helps us “find a new way forward against both capitalism and racism” – “a new movement that combines the fight for greater economic equality with demand for racial justice, perhaps a movement for socialism.”

Jean Batou’s article Putin, The War in the Ukraine, and the Far Right in Volume XV No. 3 of New Politics, despite briefly acknowledging in its final paragraphs the role of NATO in the Ukrainian crisis, basically echoes the party-line apologists for NATO and American imperialism.

I was sitting in a one-bedroom apartment watching the telethon for Hurricane Katrina when it happened. After a commercial break, Kanye West stood nervously looking like he was about to do something that would end his career. He was fidgety and sweating when he said it: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” It was a transcendent moment for Black America.

This is a video of a recent debate between Leo Panitch and Richard Fidler who discuss their differing socialist analyses of the politics of SYRIZA.