From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to Black Lives Matter
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began as an organization of students from black colleges in the South to integrate lunch counters that refused service to blacks. The tactic they used was the nonviolent direct action sit-in. What began . . .
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In the first two decades of the twentieth century, dissident revolutionaries built a rival tradition—the syndicalist movement.
Employment-based Health Care Has Become an Anchor Around the Neck of the U.S. Working Class
At the June 2019 House Ways and Means Committee Hearing on Medicare for All, Texas Republican Kevin Murphy lamented, “That great health care plan that your union negotiated for you? It’s gone. Banned under Medicare for All.”
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Settler-colonialism, Capitalism and Marxism on Turtle Island
The politics of solidarity on display during the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline have raised the issue of Indigenous liberation more and more sharply to people on the left.
Japan’s 5.26 trillion-yen fiscal 2019 defense budget set a new record for the fifth straight year, as the country continued to beef up its armed forces while keeping a wary eye fixed on North Korea and China. The . . .
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The summer of 2019 will go down as a major moment in Puerto Rico’s history. Between July 10 and 25, street protests—unprecedented in their intensity, persistence, diversity, and size—led to an unprecedented result: The Island’s highest government official . . .
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As the water rose
to occupy Wall Street,
ten thousand helicopters
flew massed dollars out
lest all that cabbage salt to slaw
and the balance of payments
blow out to sea.
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Doug Henwood, who often has so many intelligent and useful things to say about economics and politics, has it wrong this time. A few days ago on his Facebook page he commented on an article that I had written about . . .
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Ruling Class Errors and Working Class Imperatives
The Boeing Company, a huge global, high tech aerospace corporation has stumbled badly with enormous adverse financial consequences. The Boeing Max 8 tragedy and other corporate tech blunders should encourage us, especially those of us in the labor movement, to . . .
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President Donald Trump has virtually declared war on Iran with the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, in an airstrike near Baghdad International Airport. The assassination of Suleimani will very likely lead to war, . . .
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A review of Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919 by Cal Winslow (Monthly Review Press, 2020).
The Middle East and the world woke up on the morning of Friday, January 3 to the shocking news that U.S. missiles had struck the Baghdad Airport, in a targeted assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani.
Donald Trump’s cold-blooded assassination is . . .
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The New York Times obituary of neocon historian Gertrude Himmelfarb shows why neoconservatives remain a potent political force in U.S. politics: many liberals can’t imagine a socialist challenge to capitalism that doesn’t apologize for authoritarianism.
The NYT’s sentimental gloss of Himmelfarb’s . . .
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I have written at some length about my experience as a member of Workers World Party, which I left due to the organization’s flawed political practice. What I’ve said less about is my psychological and ideological state during this time. . . .
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While the effort of House Democrats to impeach Trump has not undermined his hold on power, the real test lies in taking the battle against him beyond the confines of the impeachment process.
As temperatures dip near or below freezing, scores of Mexican refugees huddle in their makeshift tents of layered plastic sheeting at the foot of the Santa Fe Bridge that connects Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, with El Paso, Texas. Many small children . . .
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You can’t get the right answers if you don’t ask the right questions.
“What are the jobs of the future?” is the wrong question to ask about both work and education. It presumes a capitalist class determining the structure of employment . . .
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This piece is the text of a talk given to the DSA Lower Manhattan Branch’s Political Education Working Group on December 4, 2019, serving as introduction to “Bernie and Labor” part of its series “Why Bernie?”
After a much contested election process, the largest union of journalists in North America has chosen a 32-year old reporter at the Los Angeles Times to be its new leader, in the U.S. and Canada.
Jon Schleuss helped win union recognition and a . . .
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On Thursday, December 5th 2019, Frank Ordoñez, 27, a UPS driver and father of two, was killed in a shootout between police and suspects fleeing the scene of a robbery.
This is a critical moment in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2019, uprisings have emerged in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran. All have opposed authoritarianism, neoliberalism, poverty, corruption, religious fundamentalism and sectarianism. Women have been active participants . . .
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