It is important to look at the union’s strategy, comparing it to both other failed campaigns (especially of the UAW in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky), but also to a variety of mostly less publicized campaigns which were in fact successful.
Place: North America
Union Organizing Drive at Amazon Fails—Why? What Next?
In a major setback for the U.S. labor movement, last week the union organizing drive at the giant Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama defeated.
Heads up! Chins down! Resisting the New Bipartisan Neoliberal Project in Education
Teachers’ work is being transformed beneath our collective nose. We have missed an opportunity to combat the project in its earliest stages but we cannot delay in understanding and combating the new iteration of neoliberalism’s global project in education.
As American Life Returns to Normal, Mass Shootings Resume
Most Americans, 60%, now favor stricter gun control laws, up by almost ten percent from a few years ago. Yet the U.S. government has proven unable to do anything about this problem. Why is that?
The Only Treatment is Freedom: Mumia Abu-Jamal and COVID
The inextricable link between incarceration and standards of democracy in a country led the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky to observe that, “The degree of civilization in society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
Biden’s Plan to Revamp American Imperialism
American socialists face the task of opposing American imperialism while showing internationalist solidarity with struggles for democracy, social reforms, and socialism in countries around the world.
Union Democracy and “The Final Goal”
Union democracy or more accurately the transformation of major unions into living democratic participatory organizations and cultures is a necessity precisely because of the corporations’ massive powers of resistance.
Does Biden’s American Rescue Plan Open a New Era of Reform?
Democrats claim that Biden’s ARP continues the work of Roosevelt and Johnson and that it will transform America. Yet, while these reforms are much needed, none of the programs begins to transform the fundamental structures of American capitalism.
In Support of Joint Struggle
Hal Draper proposed that Jews and Arabs could engage in “joint struggle from below, cemented by common national-revolutionary aims and common social interests.” What Draper contended in 1954 is still true today; the Zionist state has been a disaster for Israel’s Jews.
Can Amazon Be Organized? In Alabama They’re Trying
In Bessemer, Alabama, 5,800 warehouse workers will vote this month on whether or not they want a union at the Amazon facility there. If they vote to unionize, it will be the first successful union campaign at Amazon in the United States.
Mumia Time or Sweeney Time
Dave Roediger wrote in 2000, “[T]he extent to which Abu-Jamal knows that he needs to identify with the labor movement, and that some in the labor movement know that they need to support him, signals what the working class movement is becoming and can be.”
The coup that wasn’t: Why Donald Trump failed to steal the White House
Trump’s attempts to retain office despite losing the election failed for a simple reason: the complete absence of any interest among leading capitalists or state bureaucrats to eradicate or even weaken the Constitutional order in order to extend Trump’s presidency.
Open Letter to Editors of Jacobin and Monthly Review
Scholars and activists respond to the spirited attacks by Jacobin and Monthly Review on Yaku Pérez, the indigenous candidate in Ecuador’s presidential election.
Climate Change Comes to Republican Texas Producing a Disaster
Twenty years ago, Republicans took over Texas’ governorship, house, and senate and then deregulated and neglected the state’s energy systems, leading to this catastrophe.
A Memorial for my Marxist Mentor: On Leo Panitch
Leo Panitch was a genuine organic intellectual. He was a great teacher and a good friend. He should not have left us so soon and so suddenly. But we should all be grateful for what he gave to the left, to his students, to his comrades.
Trump Acquitted, Biden Builds Business Support for Relief
While Trump remains a major figure and his mass base a serious problem, today his party is weaker than ever. While Republican disarray benefits Democrats, Biden’s party still faces COVID, economic depression, climate change, and racism.
Union Democracy is Our Goal But Is It Practical? Responding to Nelson Lichtenstein
Nelson Lichtenstein and I agree on two major ideas that I think distinguish our shared viewpoint from the practice of many union officials and some of their supporters on the left.
How the GameStop Saga Fell Short
The Wall Street establishment’s swift suppression of GameStop trading has illuminated how the endless drive for profit, inherent in capitalism, extends not just to destroying the lives and jobs of the working class, but even to thwarting the market itself.
Biden Moves Ahead as Republicans Line Up Behind Trump
President Joseph Biden, in office for less than a month, continued to move ahead with his plan to solve the American health and economic crises and to reassert U.S. global dominance. As he pushes ahead with his relief program, Republicans have lined up behind Trump.
Unions and Democracy: A Response to Lois Weiner
When I think of the tasks before the labor movement, and even more so the left in general, I think not of how to shift the policy program of the AFT or even of SEIU, but of what it will take to organize Walmart and Amazon and now Google.
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