Like many of my generation, I was active in the left. From the mid to late 1960s to the late 1970s, I was affiliated with Trotskyist organizations. We considered ourselves revolutionaries and foresaw the day when the working class would rise up against capitalist oppression, overthrow the government, and establish a proletarian dictatorship. There was no doubt in our minds that this could not be accomplished without violence. When the revolutionary situation was ripe, we would need weapons.
Place: North America
Angela Walker, “Free Range Socialist,” Runs for Sheriff in Milwaukee
Angela Walker, an independent socialist, is running for the office of Sheriff in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this coming November. Her campaign is part of a small trend of independent labor, Green Party, and socialist campaigns around the country that are discussed in a survey article by Dan La Botz in the forthcoming Summer issue of New Politics. Here La Botz interviews Walker to learn why she is running and what she hopes to accomplish.
Betrayals in Social Movements
Explaining the defeat of tenure and teachers unions in Vergara
Tenure and teacher unions suffered a defeat this week when a California court ruled in the Vergara case that the state's law giving teachers tenure violated California's constitution. I've blogged about why the claims in Vergara were manufactured to pit students against teachers.
Trotskyist Teamsters of the 1930s—an Attempt to Draw the Lessons
Review of: Bryan D. Palmer. Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike of 1934. Historical Materialism Book Series. Chicago: Haymarket, 2013. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Photos. 308 pp.
Hats off to Philly's Caucus of Working Educators (CWE)
This brief story about the Philly TAG (Teacher Activist Group) conference suggests what was special about the occasion but it misses what was the most salient political feature of the conclave. Philly teachers who are committed to social justice have formed a caucus in their union, an AFT l
Steve Kindred (1944-2013) and University of Chicago Students for a Democratic Society
A distinctive strain within the New Left, both passionate and reasoned
Steve Kindred, my friend, brilliant Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader, organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, activist in the struggle to keep the Stella d’Oro plant in the Bronx open, campaigner against a lockout of workers by Sotheby’s auction house—all this, and a thousand other causes. Steve is, for lack of a better word, “gone,” in a New York hospital, suffering from abdominal cancer, which has spread. Having been close to Steve and having admired and loved him now for 50 years, I am very sad.
May 1, 2014
Spring Mix
The salad days. Too cold or hot or wet for much of anything this time of year, and rereading E. P.
Teacher Appreciation Week: How to #thankateacher
This is “Teacher Appreciation Week.” Should we mark the occasion? How? Why?
Teachers unions need critical friends
Union Power’s sweep of the election for union officers in United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) signals a seismic shift in power relations in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Teachers, teachers unions and the “Common Core”: This is a test
1. More rigorous academic standards required by the new national curriculum, Common Core Curriculum Standards (CCSS) and its high-tech national test PARCC controlled by Pearson will alter employment for US students by making them “college and career ready.”
2. The Common Core Curriculum Standards are a “state-led” initiative.
OUR HOUSE OF CARDS: POPULAR CULTURE IN THE OBAMA ERA
Americans’ profound cynicism about Washington finds full expression in the wildly popular House of Cards, the Netflix series created by Beau Willimon and based on a novel by Michael Dobbs in which Francis J. “Frank” Underwood (Kevin Spacey), will stop at nothing—including murder—to achieve his political ambitions.
Beyond the ER
Eminent doctor takes a small and belated peek at how his own privilege saved his life as a patient at Mass General
The February 6 issue of The New York Review of Books carried Dr. Arnold Relman’s account of his own hospitalization at Massachusetts General Hospital (and elsewhere) under the title “On Breaking One’s Neck.” In a subsequent article, I said that the appearance of Dr. Arnold Relman as a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital, accompanied by his wife, Dr.
It's Earth Day. Thanks, Toyota!
Save the earth by buying a Prius? That seems to be the takeaway message from this year’s Earth Day New York taking place on April 22. Earth Day events in the city will be sponsored by – Who would have guessed? – Toyota.
Jogging our Memory
Review of Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story
By Natalie Byfield
Temple University Press, 2014
Militant Minorities and Union Unity
Steve Early. Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement In Distress. Monthly Review Press, November 2013. 304 pages. Notes. Index.
The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band 1970-1973
A Slapstick Demolition of Male Supremacy
[Introduction by Naomi Weisstein: My paper, “The Chicago
Women’s Liberation Rock Band 1970-1973: A Slapstick Demolition of Male Supremacy” was presented at the end of March at the Boston University Conference “A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the Late 1960s and early 1970s.” This landmark conference drew a multiplicity of papers, rigorously retrieving a suppressed history, and countering such contemporary notions as that “leaning in” is what the radical women’s liber
Adolph Reed's premature burial of the U.S. Left
Back in the day, (a cliché, I know) Adolph Reed wrote a waspish piece in the Village Voice, “Liberals, I Do Despise,” which made something of a splash and was hard to refute — this when the Voice was widely read, not a freebie and well-worth paying for — as he attacked a coterie of Clintonistas for “a politics motivated by the desire for proximity to the ruling class and a belief in the basic legitimacy of its power and prerogative.” He called it “a politics which,
CÉSAR CHÁVEZ: RECOGNIZING HIS ACHIEVEMENT—AND ITS LIMITATIONS
The forthcoming film Cesar Chavez: An American Hero will be opening in cities across the country on April 4, 2014 and already it has stirred discussion and debate among labor union activists, academics, and those on the left.
Lemisch's On Active Service Now Available Online
Online Free Availability of Lemisch's, On Active Service In War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession (1969, 1975)
Starring: Samuel Eliot Morison, Oscar Handlin, Richard Hofstadter, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, Daniel Boorstin (including HUAC testimony), Allen Nevins, William Hardy McNeill, Eric Hoffer, John Blum, Stanley Elkins, and others. With 305 fact-filled footnotes!
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