By IVAN DOLPHY All across New England, workers in over 240 Stop & Shop stores have declared that they will not tolerate the attacks to their wages, benefits, and jobs being made during contract negotiations by their employer. Some 31,000 employees have moved to strike and join the picket lines at their shops. On April 11,…
“Equality, work and land” is the slogan of the new radical political party in South Africa that seeks to revolutionize South African politics and contest elections this coming May. The Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) held its launch congress from April 4-6 in Johannesburg, South Africa with attendance from over a thousand of the party’s…
By STAN OREGANO For the past three years, the center of Democratic Party opposition to the Trump presidency has been on the basis of loud and repeated claims that Trump is a bought-and-paid-for agent of the Kremlin. Dreams of recouping the party’s fortunes by explaining away the debacle of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat stirred…
By CHRISTINE MARIE “We are the feminist, trans feminist, anti-racist, antifascist tide that will take over Verona, opening up liberating spaces which were born from the global power of the International Women Strike!” So concludes the call for action that put 30,000 feminists and their allies on the streets on March 31 to protest a…
By BRUCE LESNICK When you corner a rat, it lashes out. The rats in charge of the U.S. empire are cornered by the contradictions built into their own system: increasing economic inequality, regular depressions and recessions, declining profit rates, perpetual austerity, and endless wars promoted to stave off increasing global competition. The current vicious U.S.…
By GRAHAM ROGERS The political theater of the U.S. Congress lurched through yet another performance on March 26, as the Senate decisively rejected a bill put forth by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell that copied Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Senator Ed Markey’s February non-binding resolution calling for a Green New Deal. Forty-three Democrats, including all Democratic…
By JEFF MACKLER and BRUCE LESNICK In a new campaign reminiscent of the McCarthy era witch-hunt, politicians and media pundits have taken to smearing pro-Palestinian, pro-BDS activists as anti-Semitic. Singled out for special attention are those, like Somali-born Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who happen to be people of color. A…
STATEMENT OF FOURTH INTERNATIONAL BUREAU Algeria is experiencing a popular uprising that is unprecedented since the proclamation of national independence. Since 22 February 2019, following calls launched on the Internet, large rallies, with a massive presence of women, have been organized in all cities, followed by workers and young students. The trigger for this powerful…
By A WORKING CARPENTER I’ve been a carpenter my whole adult life. I worked nonunion before I joined the Carpenters’ Union—easily the smartest thing I’ve ever done. For a working-class person, a union is still the best anti-poverty program. Recently, the heads of the Building Trades unions, alongside the leaders of the United Steelworkers and…
By LAZARO MONTEVERDE “A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the working class shaped the guerrillas’ victory,” by Steve Cushion. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.) This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Given its durability, revolutionaries should pay close attention to both its successes and failures. This is not always…
By JOHN LESLIE Elcon Recycling, an Israeli-based company, has proposed the construction of a toxic waste processing plant in suburban Philadelphia. The plant would boil toxic chemical and pharmaceutical waste to remove the water from it, reducing the materials to a toxic sludge. The resulting muck, which could contain elements such as lead, cadmium, and…
By MARTY GOODMAN “We have a little minority (of) rich people in this country, running this country, earning everything, and we have the mass of the population dying, hunger, and misery like this. It’s impossible,” said a Haitian protester, Valckensy Dessin, last month. Feb. 7, 2019, marked 33 years since nationwide protests forced the 1986…
BULLETIN — APRIL 11 — At 1 p.m. this afternoon, Stop and Shop workers in three New England states walked away from their cash registers, shopping aisles, and stockrooms in a coordinated strike action affecting thousands of workers. Picket lines immediately went up outside the stores. The strike includes workers at about 163 stores in…
By BARRY SHEPPARD Chelsea Manning, a transgender U.S. soldier who blew the whistle on U.S. war crimes and spent 2013 to 2017 in an army stockade as a result, is back in prison again. This time, it is because she refuses to join a bipartisan campaign against Wikileaks that seeks to bring Julian Assange from…
By KYLE HARRINGTON and RYAN BALBONI On Feb. 7 and 8, two leading feminists toured Connecticut. Audiences heard Lucía Cavallero, a member of Ni Una Menos, an Argentine feminist collective that has repeatedly put hundreds of thousands of women on the streets in protests against femicide, and Julia Cámara, a member of the coordinating body of…
By ERWIN FREED The Haymarket/Jacobin/Verso jointly edited collection of articles titled “Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics: A Report” is timely and interesting but ultimately does not put forward what its title promises. Almost the entire history of the electoral practices of independent socialists, the working class, and oppressed nationalities in the United States is missing…
By JEFF MACKLER and BRUCE LESNICK The relentless U.S. imperial beast has embarked on a full-scale, openly declared, bipartisan regime-change war aimed at overthrowing Venezuela’s democratically elected government headed by President Nicolás Maduro. Top U.S. officials—from President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Adviser John Bolton and special envoy Elliot Abrams of Iran/Contra…
By JEFF MACKLER Facing a pro-charter school board intent on closing or consolidating 24 schools in the next five years, presumably to replace some with private for-profit charters, 3000 teachers represented by the Oakland Education Association (OEA) began a district-wide strike on Feb. 21. On the seventh day of the strike, March 1, a tentative…
By MARTY GOODMAN On Feb. 14, Amazon, owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos ($166 billion), announced that it was pulling out of a deal made with top New York Democrats for a second Amazon headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, near Manhattan, due to opposition from local politicians. But the resistance was much…
By LISA LUINENBURG On Feb. 15, President Trump declared a National State of Emergency in order to appropriate billions of dollars to build his much-touted wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Even though Congress had granted him $1.375 billion for the border wall in the latest federal budget bill, this wasn’t enough for Trump. He wanted…
By ANN MONTAGUE Lesbians resist and rebel against institutions and belief systems that oppress us. Starting as young girls we fight against the tyranny of pink. Today, the situation is worse than ever for all girls, as multi-million-dollar corporations become the enforcers of oppressive sex stereotyping. Over the last 10 years, Disney has marketed over…
By OKDE-SPARTAKOS Greek section of the Fourth International Τhe Prespes agreement between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia imposes in the clearest manner the hegemony of the Greek state over the neighboring Macedonian state and constitutes an overwhelming diplomatic and political victory for the Greek bourgeois class. According to the agreement, the Republic of Macedonia…
By BARRY WEISLEDER “Other Diplomacies, Other Ties: Cuba and Canada in the Shadow of the U.S.,” Luis Rene Fernandez Tabio, Cynthia Wright, and Lana Wylie, ed., 363 pages, University of Toronto Press, 2018. In the wake of Ottawa’s vocal support for the latest U.S.-backed attempt at a coup d’etat in Venezuela, studies on foreign relations…
By GARY PORTER The Canadian state brutally violated the Rights of Unist’ot’en and Gidimt’en clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, in the interests of the Oil and Gas Barons. Demonstrations immediately occurred in over 30 cities as thousands of Canadians showed they are fed up with Official Racism. The RCMP moved to enforce a B.C. Supreme…
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…
