Subjects Archives: Class

Throughout the previous period, PAME, the class-conscious movement, was at the forefront of the struggle against capital’s attack on labor and popular rights.  We will continue in the same direction, because the problems and factors that led the vast majority of the people to poverty, misery, and the loss of rights and conquests are still […]

Support Our Comrades Saïd Bouamama and Saïdou (Z.E.P.)! by Young Communists, Lille Section On 20 January 2015, our comrades Saïdou, of the band Z.E.P. (Zone d’Expression Populaire), and Saïd Bouamama, a sociologist and militant communist based in Lille, are summoned to appear before the Court of First Instance of Paris, charged with “public insult” and […]

Prisoners in Colombia have recently gained new visibility.  Prisoner protest actions are one factor.  Another is discussion at the Havana peace talks of prisoners as victims of armed conflict.  November 2014 marks the two-year anniversary of talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government. Beginning on October 20, hunger strikes […]

  Numsa General Secretary’s Presentation to the Cape Town Press Club, February 11, 2014 I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year — the parliament we called the Numsa Special National Congress.  In that parliament […]

  The news that Detroit has declared bankruptcy, the largest North American city to do so thus far, foreshadows an extension of the social crisis currently afflicting the centers of capitalism.  As some observers have noted, Detroit is just the tip of the iceberg in what is sure to be a procession of indebted municipalities […]

  When Wisconsin state workers were courageously occupying the state capitol to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on their unions’ right to bargain, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka trumpeted a call for solidarity actions throughout the labor movement on April 4, 2011, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, killed during the Memphis sanitation […]

  1. For days now Turkey has been witnessing a genuine popular movement.  The actions and protests, which have started in Istanbul and spread all over Turkey, have a massive, legitimate, and historic character.  The most important of all is the striking change in the mood of people.  The fear and apathy has been overcome […]

In a recent PBS interview with Bill Moyers, journalist Chris Hedges discussed protest for social change.  “Revolt,” he said, apropos of salvaging a collapsing world, “is all we have.  It is our only hope.” I agree.  So would my friend Tito Gerassi, who believed all his life in revolution.  And, since rising unemployment is part […]

Whereas once the primitive was our savage other, today the native is the bearer of an alternative future.  In the late 1980s the Kayapo Chief Raoni, with his spectacular feathered headdress, accompanied the pop star Sting on concert tours to enlighten western audiences of the ecological disaster in the Amazon that came hand-in-hand with human […]

A young veteran was just arrested for murdering homeless people in Los Angeles.  Regardless whether he is actually guilty, a large number of terrible acts have been committed by returning veterans traumatized from the war.  None of the studies of which I’m aware accounts for such costs (including the cost of imprisoning them) in the […]

  “Real Class Warfare: The Great 1934 Longshore Strike in Portland” Presentation by Michael Munk Tuesday, October 11 7:30 pm Rialto Poolroom and Bar 529 SW 4th Ave, Portland Free and open to the public Must be 21 or over. On May 9, 1934, thousands of longshoremen along the West Coast walked off the job, […]

Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as “class warfare” any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation. The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries.  But […]

The Washington Post and Robert Samuelson did their part in publicly passing along the marching orders from the rich and powerful to Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve Board.  The word from these folks is “No Inflation!”  If that means millions more people will suffer unemployment for a few more years, that’s a price that […]

“. . . and they won’t stop till we all become slaves grateful to be able at least to eat, twice a day.” Juan Kalvellido is a Spanish cartoonist.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print

The political posturing around the debt ceiling “crisis” was mostly a distraction from the hard issues.  The hardest of those — underlying US economic decline — keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains, and injustices that threaten to dissolve society.  Its causes — two long-term trends over the last 30 years — help also to explain […]

Throughout its history, capitalism never succeeded in preventing recurring economic cycles or crises.  However, they were usually contained within the system.  Economic crises usually did not become social crises; the system itself was usually not called into question.  Transition to a different system was then an idea kept away from public discussion, a project kept […]

  Excerpt: Forty percent of South Africa’s 48 million people are poor, and more than half of poor people are female.  Official unemployment figures hover at around 25%, but since this statistics does not count those who have given up looking for work, real unemployment may be double this.  South Africa is, by world standards, […]

The middle classes as a whole rally around only the democratic objective, without necessarily objecting to the “market” (such as it is) or to Egypt’s international alignment wholesale.  Not to be neglected is the role of a group of bloggers who take part, consciously or not, in a veritable conspiracy organized by the CIA.  Its […]

  So Syrian opposition groups met in Antalya.  I closely followed that conference and read about their deliberations and received reports about it. There are Syrian leftists who argue with me constantly that I should not reduce the Syrian opposition to lousy Khaddam or lousy Ma’mun Humsi (a tool of Hariri Inc.) or lousy war […]

The notion that Asian Americans are model minorities originated in the 1960s, mainly in reference to the socioeconomic gains of Japanese and Chinese Americans in particular.  It did not take long, however, for that very idea to be applied to Asian Americans as a whole, especially as it continues to be perpetuated by the mainstream […]