BY LAZARO MONTEVERDE A review of “What went wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis,” by Dan La Botz. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018.) When I visited Nicaragua in 1983 as part of a delegation of religious activists from the Central America Movement, I thought I was witnessing a miracle. The country was radically transformed both…
By AUTUMN RAIN and ERWIN FREED On Jan. 28, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing and anti-LGBTQIA group, hosted a panel titled, “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns From the Left.” The speakers were trans-exclusive radical feminists (TERFs) who argued against rights for transgender people, ostensibly “from the left.” Yet one would rightly ask why…
By ANN MONTAGUE The new wave of teachers’ strikes suggests one way that the fight for women’s liberation from the privatized tasks of social reproduction may unfold. The recent one-week strike in Los Angeles, which featured demands to arrest the privatization of public education and improve student health services, reaffirms the potential of political strikes…
By JEFF MACKLER After seven solid days on the picket lines in drenching rains and in the face of a poor-mouthing school district that swore they were dead broke, 34,000 Los Angeles teachers voted overwhelmingly to approve a three-year contract. Most teachers saw the agreement as an important first step toward stemming the decades-long tidal…
By BRUCE LESNICK Ruling elites have united behind the Trump administration in its illegal, unjust, and brutal attempt to meddle in the internal affairs of Venezuela. Democrats and Republicans alike have fallen in line, revealing the degree to which the two parties march in lock step when the geopolitical prerogatives of the one percent are…
By AUTUMN RAIN The Supreme Court of Japan upheld an abhorrent law that explicitly requires trans people to be sterilized in order to have their gender recognized by the state—a terrible blow to trans people’s rights, and reproductive rights generally. Trans people are denied the right to have their gender legally recognized in many…
By MARTY GOODMAN On Nov. 13, after long secret negotiations, two New York “progressive” Democrats, Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, jointly announced that Amazon will place one of two new corporate “headquarters” in New York City and the other in Arlington, Va. Virtually kissing the feet of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, whose…
Once again, the Wall Street-captured, war-promoting, servants of the one percent—who administer the U.S. government at the pleasure of, and solely in the interest of, corporate America—have deigned to command a sovereign nation as to how to handle its internal affairs. In a further escalation of the U.S. government’s long-running campaign against the elected Venezuelan…
By ERNIE GOTTA Across the country, teachers in their thousands are fighting back against poor working conditions, low wages, overflowing classrooms, and unusable health care. Following teachers in Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia, Los Angeles teachers erupted in a strike last month. They are 34,000 teachers strong and ready to take a stand against…
By STEVE XAVIER On Jan. 19, there were reports of threats and intimidation against women’s rights events in several cities, including Boston and Orlando, Fla. According to a source, Proud Boys and allied rightists attacked the Portland, Ore., Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) hall and a Democratic Socialists of America meeting in the same…
By JOHN LESLIE On Dec. 28, one day after the decision by Judge Leon Tucker opening the door to further appeals by Mumia Abu-Jamal, employees of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office “found” six boxes in a storage space, while allegedly looking for office furniture. Five of the six boxes are marked with the name McCann,…
The following statement was initiated by International Women’s Strike. We are calling for Feminism for the 99% contingents in the upcoming Women’s Marches of January 19. This past year has confirmed that corporate feminism, that is afraid to challenge the prerogatives of capitalism, has no solution to the crisis that women and LGBTQIA communities are…
By KAMRAN NAYERI The fanfare about the UN Conference of Parties (COP) 24 in Katowice, located in a coal-mining region in Poland, that the diplomats from some 200 countries have “struck a deal after an all-night bargaining session” that may advance the fight against the unfolding catastrophic climate (The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2018)…
By THE EDITORS Following a three-month pre-convention discussion period that saw members submitting some 70 written contributions, Socialist Action’s elected delegates, along with members, supporters, and international guests, assembled in Minneapolis, Oct. 12-14, for the party’s 18th national convention. The convention opened with a critical evaluation of the Fourth International (FI), in which Socialist Action…
By KAREN SCHRAUFNAGEL Donald Trump, the misogynist-in-chief, daily tweets out his hate-filled rhetoric, serving up women, immigrants, and people of color as red meat to his hungry base, always ready to blame the least powerful for capitalism’s crimes. In the meantime, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s entitled, over-privileged Supreme Court nominee, likes beer and torture and “deserves”…
By BARRY WEISLEDER What does the arrest in Vancouver [on Dec. 1, 2018] of Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive with China’s tech giant Huawei, have to do with the “rule of law?” Precious little. What does it have to do with enforcing Washington’s illegal trade embargo of Iran? A bit more. Meng is accused of…
By CHRISTINE MARIE In early December, the Global Carbon Project published statistics showing that global emissions of CO2 rose 2% in 2018 to a record high. As Sean Sweeney and John Trent from Trade Unionists for Energy Democracy summarized in a Dec. 31 article, “When ‘Green’ Doesn’t ‘Grow,’ “ the market-focused approach to climate protection…
By IVAN DOLPHY In late December, Angela Nagle, author of “Kill All Normies” and a supposedly left thinker, penned a piece for the conservative journal American Affairs entitled “The Left Case Against Open Borders.” In her article she scores the “left” for employing the slogan “no human is illegal,” charging that it is an implicit…
BY JEFF MACKLER President Trump’s unexpected December 19 twitter announcement ordering a 30-day timetable for the withdrawal of the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria and 7,000 of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan provoked a bipartisan panic in Washington. Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” James Mattis, “the butcher of Fallujah,” resigned in protest stating, according to…
BY JEFF MACKLER On Dec. 27, Philadelphia Superior Court Judge Leon Tucker ruled in favor of Mumia Abu-Jamal, holding that the actions of former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Judge Ronald Castille had demonstrated a “lack of impartiality” and “the appearance of bias.” Tucker’s decision represents a major victory for Abu-Jamal, which opens the door to a…
Below, we present a statement by the Young Workers Committee of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Socialist Action believes that this statement is an excellent contribution to a discussion in the labor movement of what to do next in the fight against Trump’s government shutdown. One real strength of this statement is that it does not…
By THE EDITORS Revolutionary greetings and well wishes for 2019! In 2018, we saw a deepening economic and environmental crisis overtake working people worldwide, together with a resurgence of racist, anti-immigrant, and ultra-right activity. And yet, workers around the globe from China to Latin America to the United States demonstrated their ability to stand up against…
By DANIEL TANURO Dec. 19—The Twenty-Fourth United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24) has just concluded in Katowice, Poland. Instead of responding to the clear message of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report to take urgent measures to keep warming below 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels, the Conference struggled to set the…
Por la Revolución y Anti-capitalismo corriente dentro del Partido Nuevo Anti-capitalismo de Francia. La aparición de los “chalecos amarillos” es, desde las huelgas contra la Ley del Trabajo de 2016, un nuevo síntoma de un enojo social contenido que acaba por explota. Las direcciones del movimiento obrero, las que pasaban su tiempo explicando que no…
This is a statement issued by Anticapitalism and Revolution, a current within the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France. The birth of the “Yellow Jackets” movement is, after the 2016 strikes against the Labor Law reform, another symptom of a contained social anger that has finally blown up. The labor movement leadership, alongside those who spent…
BY JEFF MACKLER For public consumption only, General Motors’ billionaire executives flew on public airlines to Washington, D.C., in 2009, leaving their private jets behind. Bleeding $1 billion in monthly losses, and threatening bankruptcy, this corporation—once the world’s largest—eased its way to the government troughs, with their kept media and the United Automakers Workers (UAW)…
