Archive | April, 2018

It is both an honor and a pleasure to be here at the event of marking the 75th Anniversary of the Ceylon Bank Employees Union. First, let me offer my heartfelt greetings to CBEU, its office bearers and membership. CBEU has had a proud and celebrated history of struggles that helped immensely to record so many victories to improve the conditions of the working class in general and the bank employees in particular.

Sixteen months into the Civil War Karl Marx—as if anticipating apologists like Brooks 160 years later—criticized Lincoln for “trying to conduct it along constitutional” lines. It pleased him to no end, then, when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation more than a month later.

Not an April Fool’s joke. Here are the facts: Four days ago (March 29) the ultra-conservative Dean of the Montpellier University Law School was summoned to police headquarters, interrogated, hauled into court, and held over in jail for arraignment by the Chief Prosecutor–all on the complaint of nine student strikers, who claim to have been brutally assaulted with Dean Philippe Pétel’s active complicity while ‘occupying’ a school auditorium.

The 2016 presidential exit polls “substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters…and overestimated the white college-educated Democratic electorate,” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (3/29/18) writes.

Using Marx’s critique of political economy, it’s possible for workers employed in a variety of industries to calculate the value of their work and how this value is divided between employer and employee. It becomes possible to calculate the socially necessary labor time and surplus labor time, worker wages and employer profits in their particular workplace.

BACK in May 2017, just prior to the British general election, I wrote a piece arguing that a victory for Theresa May would see Britain dragged further towards war with Russia.

At the Labor Notes conference in Chicago this coming weekend, 2,500 rank-and-file activists will attend the largest gathering ever hosted by the now Brooklyn-based labor education project. This will be the nineteenth Labor Notes conference, which started in 1981.