Growing old in the U.S. is becoming increasingly scary. Beginning in January, U.S. baby boomers will be turning 60 at a rate of more than 4 million per year, and for most of them the American dream of a comfortable, worry-free retirement after a life of hard work is not going to materialize. With the […]
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Monthly Review Magazine
Exhaustion
if she could use her hands to fasten a button twist a knob scribble a letter to tell me she dreams about tailpipes thirteen parts assembled again and over like a broken dance of two palms stroking rubbery backs fingers bowing to partners swollen with gnarled collapse snapping delicate cylinder joints in place for the […]
Remembering Evelyn Wiener
Evelyn Wiener died October 8, 2005, at 91, surrounded by her friends and comrades. Her earliest memory was her parents’ two-week celebration of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Hiding her age to join the Young Communist League at 14, she was the Manhattan District Organizer for the American Communist Party in the 1940s. A childhood […]
The Masters Make the Rules for the Wise Men and the Fools
One law for the rulers and another for the ruled. So decided English Chief Justice Bingham in his 1998 ruling granting the mass murderer (and former dictator of Chile) Augusto Pinochet immunity. His exact words were: “The applicant is entitled as a former head of state to immunity from civil and criminal proceedings of the […]
Fifty One American Revolutions
50 AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW: Reclaiming American Patriotism by Mickey Z BUY THIS BOOK In his new book, 50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know, Mickey Z has authored yet another incisive examination of the political and social landscape. This time his focus is on people’s victories that have been won […]
Protect UAW Retirees: Their Future Is Our Future
[The UAW New Directions Movement (NDM), founded in the 1980s to challenge the auto union’s policy of “jointness” and lack of internal democracy, is experiencing a new burst of support from the union’s rank-and-file membership. The movement’s revitalization comes as workers in the auto industry are facing unprecedented health care concession demands by General […]
A Note on South Africa’s National Land Summit
The national land summit that the South African Communist Party (SACP) called for in its 2004 Red October campaign took place at the end of July 2005. Provincial land summits ostensibly prepared the ground to stage the July land indaba, just as the SACP had requested government to do. Since the SACPs intention was to […]
“The High Price They Would Have to Pay”: The Israeli Unilateralist’s Logic of “Disengagement”
The Dan Halutz affair is well documented and the main facts are undisputed. Halutz, as commander of the Israeli air force, was responsible for an order on August 2, 2002 for the targeted assassination of an “alleged” terrorist, Saleh Shehada. Since, among his other evil activities, Shehada happened to live in an apartment building, a […]
The Bankruptcy Bomb: Companies Use Bankruptcy Threats and Courts to Force Bigger Givebacks, Break Unions
Employers in heavily unionized U.S. industries are turning to bankruptcy courts as a strategy for gutting union contracts and imposing layoffs and givebacks even deeper than those workers made in the concessions of the early 1980s. Bankruptcy-as-a-strategy first became prominent during the restructuring of the steel industry in the late 1990s, then spread to the […]
BC Teachers Go Back to Work — Who Won the Battle?
For the first time in two weeks, public schools in British Columbia were open for business yesterday. Teachers had voted over the weekend by a 77% margin to accept a mediated settlement to the dispute recommended by arbitrator Vince Ready. In the wake of the decision, there is much public debate and discussion, including among […]
In Patents We Trust: How the U.S. Government Learned to Stop Worrying about Monopoly and Love Intellectual Property
Today, patents supposedly exist to provide an incentive for new discoveries. Patents had a different purpose at their origin. When the Venetians invented what today we would call intellectual property in the fifteenth century, governments openly treated it as an element of state power. Workers could enjoy monopolistic privileges only if they continued to strengthen […]
Constructing Co-Management in Venezuela: Contradictions along the Path
[Below is a talk that Michael A. Lebowitz gave at el Encuentro Nacional de Trabajadores Hacia la Recuperación de Empresas (the National Meeting of Workers for the Recovery of Enterprises), organized by la Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT, the National Union of Workers) in Caracas, Venezuela, 22 October 2005. The meeting was preparatory to el […]
MAINTENANCE-FREE LIVING
Near the few remaining woods are modern pictographs, warning passing vehicles of the presence of deer, not for the protection of the deer but for the protection of the vehicles And a few of the signs are boastful, a strange sort of civic boosterism: our deer here were not […]
Neo-colonialism — a Palestinian Nightmare
The Israeli occupation of Gaza Strip didn’t end — it merely changed form. With the completion of the Israeli army withdrawal from Gaza Strip, and the eviction of all the settlers from there, its occupation has seemingly ended. And indeed, if by “occupation” we mean, as the Israeli establishment wants us to understand, a mere […]
Three Films and a Nation
The number of films on national figures like Gandhi, Ambedkar, Savarkar, and Bhagat Singh, as well as films like Lagaan and Gadar, in recent years point to an interest in revaluation and reinterpretation of history, especially that of the freedom struggle, in India. That this has happened in the last few years needs an explanation. […]
No Rules, Just Right?
As I was driving through Ithaca, New York, on the weekend of the Grassroots Folk Festival, a guy with long curly hair and a beard — the sort of ‘sixties revenant common in college towns — strode into traffic on a red light. I stopped my car, momentarily annoyed, and he grinned and flashed me […]
Disgrace of the Week: Senate Republicans Stop Minimum Wage Increase
It will be hard to find a Capitol Hill vote any more shameful than this one. . . . Click on the graphs to enlarge them. Real Value of the Federal Minimum Wage, 1950-2004 Annual Minimum Wage Earnings in 2003 Dollars and the Poverty Level for Family of Three Source: Economic Policy Institute Senate Republicans […]
The Socialist Vision and Left Activism
Monthly Review‘s July-August issue, focused on the theme of “Socialism for the 21st Century,” made me ponder the question of possible working-class organizing in the 21st century to build resistance to capitalism, the resistance that can dialectically develop into socialism. Harry Magdoff and Fred Magdoff wrote in “Approaching Socialism”: “[I]ntellectuals and specialists cannot derive a […]
An Open Letter to the Labor Movement regarding Katrina
Brothers and Sisters, The crisis for the working class (whether employed or not, waged or not) continues to grow. Even as the nation, and especially the poor and Black working class of the Gulf states and New Orleans in particular, tries to pick up the pieces after Katrina’s (and Rita’s) devastation, the assault by capital […]
BC Teachers Hold the Line — the Government Blinks
19 October 2005 Teachers in British Columbia are standing on the rainy picket lines this morning for Day 8 of an unprecedented illegal strike against the Liberal provincial government. This strike has surprised nearly everyone in its strength and resolve and is shaking the political culture of BC to its core. The strike began on […]
