Subjects Archives: Movements

Since the Charlottesville attack a month ago, a review of commentary in the six top broadsheet newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, San Jose Mercury News and Washington Post—found virtually equal amounts of condemnation of fascists and anti-fascist protesters.

Conservative forces, organized by infamous groups like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), are using their influence in state legislatures to pass preemption laws. The purpose is to stop, and even roll back, the gains of progressive local coalitions by usurping the authority of city governments, thereby rendering popular strategies, like ballot and elected official vote measures, useless.

The AFL-CIO was one of the main supporters of employer sanctions back in 1986. It only took 13 years for the labor federation to learn its lesson: in February 2000 it officially called for the elimination of the policy. Another 17 years have now passed, and the case against the sanctions has only grown more solid.

Not even the stubbornest non-voters can ignore the coming Election Day in Germany, as always on a Sunday, September 24. With 34 parties, some state or local but most of them national, every stroll offers a wide choice of handsome, smiling candidate photos and bold clichés.

Inequality is rising, social divisions are becoming more entrenched, social guarantees once taken for granted have yielded to a generalized culture of insecurity and a common fear of decline.

From the time of independence in 1947, India has had the resources and the potential to achieve a high level of human development—yet the great majority of the country’s people have remained desperately poor.

For the vast majority of media outlets Africa is a continent in chaos, a place of countless massacres, epidemics, and starvation caused by conflicts, that generate extremist groups which mercilessly loot, rape, and kidnap.

Our nation is often flummoxed by the chaotic and deceptive behavior of the Trump administration. Yet, these distractions disguise an economic agenda. That agenda is unapologetically determined to benefit corporate financial interests against the interests of all working people.

More than half a century ago, E. P. Thompson pioneered a new approach to labor history in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was dismayed with the bourgeois idea that history is made by great men, and the occasional princess or queen, but also frustrated with socialist histories that replace statesmen and business moguls with wise, if not infallible, party leaders and union bosses allegedly executing the iron laws of history.

The US continues to provoke North Korea with military exercises near its borders. It also fails to live up to diplomatic agreements. Western media continue to distort the chronology of cause and effect, inverting reality to claim that North Korea is provoking the West.

There are plenty of reasons to be interested in—and, even more, concerned about—Facebook. Many of them are raised in the recent review of Facebook-related books by John Lanchester [ht: db]: the fragmentation of the polity (via the targeting of posts), the dissemination of “fake news” (which played an important role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election), the undermining of other livelihoods (such as journalism and music), the level of surveillance of users (much more than any national government), the violation of anti-monopoly rules (via individualized pricing), and so on.

We are, the 1960s radical generation, now once more marching, marching, sometimes it seems mostly with the Millennials by our side. And here comes the ghost of Herbert Marcuse, who was so much with us the first time around.

The repetition of words like “thug” and “gang” in media coverage of anti-fascist demonstrators suggests the degree to which mainstream journalists, and centrists more widely, understand challenges to the state in the same euphemisms with which they express their own deep anti-blackness.

Deep down, the dispute is not over Maduro’s government. The dispute is over the oil rent, which was illegally appropriated by US companies throughout the XXth century, and by a minority of Venezuelan oligarchs who lived like maharajas! And that is over.

Venezuela has provided free gas to rescues workers, firefighters and police in their efforts to help victims in areas affected by Harvey, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.

Trump and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, have regarded Iran and the agreement with suspicion, with Trump threatening to withhold certification of Iranian compliance, and saying in an interview in July, “If it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago.”

Imagine being arrested and detained for months just for showing up to work. That’s what happened to construction workers Hugo Mejia and Rodrigo Nuñez on May 3, when their company sent them to work on a hospital inside Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California.

“I have spent most of my life studying Marxist ideas and have identified with groups that have not only embraced Marxist-inspired critiques of the dominant socioeconomic order, but have also struggled to understand the co-constitutive relationship of racism and capitalism.”

As a growing number of groups on the left have begun dabbling in local electoral politics—most notably via the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA-backed candidacies)—we would do well to heed the warning of Juan Gonzalez about the “consultant class” (currently in the employ of Mayor de Blasio). The allure of corner-cutting political consultants, corporate cash, and the always pernicious influence of pay-to-play after any election day success by would-be reformers are pitfalls that left electoral efforts must avoid at all cost.

For those confused by the recent headlines on Venezuela, this is a point worth explaining. The so-called ‘peaceful’ ‘pro-democracy’ demonstrators of the opposition had made threats against those who planned to participate in the Constituent Assembly elections, leaving many people fearful to vote in their own communities, particularly those with a strong opposition presence. This fear was not unfounded.