By JOHN LESLIE An interview with Ellie Hamrick. As the socialist movement grows, independent socialist candidates for local office will be faced with challenges. How to advocate for the oppressed and exploited effectively without adapting to bourgeois politics? Once elected to local office, a socialist candidate can use the megaphone offered by their office to…
By LAZARO MONTEVERDE “America’s War for the Greater Middle East,” by Andrew J. Bacevich. (New York: Random House) 2016. In Joe Haldeman’s award-winning 1974 science fiction novel “The Forever War,” elite United Nations troops fight an alien enemy that they don’t understand for reasons that are obscure. Haldeman based the novel on his own experience…
By LUCAS ALAN DIETSCHE April 26, 2019 marked the one-year anniversary of the day that the Husky Refinery, in Superior, Wis., exploded and caught fire. For nine hours, toxic fumes blew 30 miles to the south. Eleven workers were injured but soon recovered. Most of this city along the shore of Lake Superior had to…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, “Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto” (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 85 pp. Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser have a mission. They are collaborating to bring the lessons of a new global feminist uprising to the United States. Their latest effort is…
By NICK BAKER “The U.S. ruling-class multi-billionaire elite have two parties, the Democrats and Republicans—the twin parties of war, racism, poverty, and environmental destruction,” said Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action’s 2020 candidate for the U.S. presidency. “We need a party of our own—a mass working-class party based on an independent, reinvigorated, democratic, fighting trade-union movement allied…
By JEFF MACKLER “Nobody said regime change was going to be easy,” read the first line on the front-page New York Times article of May 2 entitled, “Pressure Rises After Failure In Venezuela.” The article, billed as “news analysis,” continues, “President Trump’s top advisers woke up Tuesday [April 30] believing that a rebellion in…
By ERWIN FREED and ERNIE GOTTA The UFCW’s historic 11-day strike that involved over 31,000 Stop and Shop workers and covered all stores in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts came to an end on April 21. As covered at socialistaction.org (April 11), the demand of the union was to maintain all wage, benefit, and work…
By BARRY WEISLEDER Federal Secretary, Socialist Action (Canada) May Day is OUR day. “Labour Day” treats Labour like a commodity. May 1 honours workers as a class, as a conscious, fighting movement. We are a living, creative force with the power to change the world. On May Day, even in the pouring rain in downtown…
By STEVE XAVIER Mass protests leading to the downfall of long-term rulers in Sudan and Algeria have evoked memories of the Arab Spring protests eight years ago. That wave of protests began in Tunisia with the December 2010 self-immolation suicide of a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi. The Tunisian government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali…
By JOHN LESLIE On the evening of April 30, a contentious meeting of the Falls Township Board of Supervisors denied the site plan application for the Israeli-based Elcon Recycling to build a 32-acre toxic waste “treatment” plant in lower Bucks County, Pa. Hundreds of area residents turned out to oppose construction of the toxic facility.…
By JEFF MACKLER Two months in the planning, the April 6 public forum at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley represented a profound contribution to renewing the justice and freedom struggle of the innocent and framed for murder political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal. A capacity-filling multi-racial and multi-generational crowd of 400 people, including a broad range…
By LUCAS ALAN DIETSCHE and ADA RITSCHER The Twin Ports of Superior, Wis., and Duluth, Minn., have had to confront several incidents by white nationalist groups in recent years. In one notable event, in 2012, one of the groups had a public event at Duluth City Hall, which was protected by the police when some…
By LAZARO MONTEVERDE “The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup,” by Dana Frank. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018). Activist and scholar Dana Frank has given us a useful book to help us understand the present events in Honduras, at the U.S.-Mexico border, and elsewhere in Latin America.…
By JOHN LESLIE In the suburban Philadelphia neighborhoods surrounding a two now-closed U.S. Navy air bases, residents are faced with a drinking water crisis. Groundwater contaminated with carcinogens linked to a fire fighting foam forced the closing of both public and private wells. The Department of Defense (DoD) knew as early as 2001 that fire…
By JEFF MACKLER The sensational news on April 17 that Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner withdrew his appeal of Superior Court Judge Leon Tucker’s granting of new appeal rights to Mumia Abu-Jamal represents a major breakthrough in Mumia’s 37-year freedom struggle. Krasner’s decision opens the door wide to re-building a broad and decisive movement in…
By DAVID RIEHLE Four score and seven years ago … Franklin Roosevelt brought forth in this country a New Deal. Not a Square Deal (Teddy Roosevelt) or a Fair Deal (Truman) but a NEW DEAL. New York Governor Roosevelt was nominated for president at the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago on July 2, 1932.…
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…
