UIC GEO membership authorizes a strike by 97%. April, 1, 2022. This is the first of a series of presentations to a February 22, 2022 Solidarity webinar on current struggles in higher education. I’m going to talk about three leadership groups whose organizing efforts I supported during the pandemic, either as union staff or as a volunteer with the…

On the night of September 11, 2001 I anxiously called a friend and comrade who, at the time, was a flight attendant working out of Boston’s Logan Airport. I wanted of course to make sure he was okay, to find out what was going on, and what might happen next. The comrade responded with the best, most concise Marxist analysis of the U.S. and global…

On March 11, 2022, Gabriel Boric will be inaugurated as Chile’s president, barring an earthquake, military coup, or some other unexpected event. He will be the most left-wing president of Chile since Salvador Allende, who held the office from November 2, 1970 until his overthrow and murder in a military coup on September 11, 1973. The article excerpted…

Photo: Dominique Botte Every year, International Women’s Day is a key moment to highlight feminist struggles against patriarchal capitalism, which looks ceaselessly for new ways to oppress and exploit us. With the health crisis provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic, added to the economic crisis and the attacks by conservative governments on women’s…

On the War in Ukraine and Global Crisis With regard to Ukraine, Russia is the aggressor power and Ukraine has the right to national sovereignty and self-defense.With regard to the larger confrontation, NATO and particularly U.S. imperialism are at least equally aggressive and as dangerous as Russian annexationism. NATO should not exist at all, and the…

Philippe Poutou campaign meeting, Rennes, Frence, December 2, 2021. (Photo: Copyright NPA) Philippe Poutou’s campaign, backed by the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA), in the 2017 French presidential election was a small success: in the televised debate of 5 April, we gained a certain notoriety in the confrontation with the right and the extreme…

Mike Parker, 1940-2022 (Photo: Alyssa Kang) On January 15, 2022 the rank and file labor struggle lost a wonderful, brilliant, selfless comrade, Mike Parker. Born into a socialist family, Mike joined the Young People’s Socialist League at the University of Chicago, then as a grad student at Berkeley got active first in the student peace movement, then…

Mike Parker (Photo: Jim West) I was very saddened by the news that Mike Parker, a revolutionary socialist for more than six decades, passed away in Richmond, California on January 15, 2022. I had last seen and talked with Mike in June 2021 at a party attended by more than 100 mainly young radicals in the backyard of the house of my younger daughter…

St. Paul, Minnesota, high school students walk out and march to demand justice for Amir Locke. (Photo: Chad Davis, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons) Once again, protesters gathered in Minneapolis demanding justice for a young Black man killed by the police. The victim was sleeping on a couch. Amir Locke, the 22-year-old man, died on February 2 after…

Everything happening in the United States comes to Canada, only a little later and a tad more politely. The rage that erupted in a Presidential-endorsed riot in Washington on 6 January 2021 has now exploded to the north. Fueled by a confused swirl of resentment against the array of pandemic protocols that all advanced capitalist states have invoked…

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant on the coast of California. Wikipedia SPEAKING AT THE Glasgow Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 26), U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases to at least half of 2005 levels by 2030. The ambitious goal is necessary to limit the…

Campaigning for Teamsters United: A coalition of forces brings down Hoffa’s old guard and opens the door to stronger bargaining and new organizing. BIG CHANGES ARE afoot in one of the largest labor unions in North America. Last November, following a three-year campaign, the Teamsters United (TU) slate led by Sean O’Brien defeated the Teamster Power…

In a context of increasing repression and against all odds, the Council of State yesterday, Thursday 20 January 2022, ordered the temporary suspension of our party’s activities and the closure of our premises. This is a serious precedent against multipartyism and an intolerable additional attack on democratic freedoms in our country. It should be…

Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the legal concept of intersectionality in order to analyze how a person could face multiple oppressions. WHO WOULD EVER think that the issue of public education — aside from masks — in the time of a pandemic would be one of the central issues for voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and many other states? Commentators and…

Russian tanks, troops along border with Ukraine. Image from National News Agency of Ukraine (Ukrinform). The following notes are a followup to the previous post Ukraine Crisis in Imperial Context. The author claims no special political or scholarly expertise on Ukraine. I’m simply trying to pursue the logic of the situation to the two possible conclusions…

UAWD supporters leafleting at the Ford Rouge plant, UAW Local 600 A Short Guide to UAW Acronyms and Terminology AC: The Administration Caucus, the ruling caucus UAW-wide, on the IEB, at the Regional Director level, and in most locals. AWC: Auto Worker Caravan, autoworkercaravan.net, founded in 2008 to protest financial-crisis era concessions and make…

On January 1, 2022, the government of Kazakhstan lifted price ceiling on liquified gas, which led to an immediate doubling of its price. The next day protests broke out in the oil-producing city of Zhanaozen and spread quickly to other cities, including Almaty, Kazakstan’s largest city. The protests targeted inequality, corruption and democracy, as…

As “our democracy” disintegrates, the House Select Committee “investigates” the J6 riot. Its report is promised “by November,” right when the barely-Democratic-majority Congress disappears… The January 6, 2021 Trump riot at the U.S. capitol should have blown the right wing out of the water. A year later, it’s quite the opposite: U.S…

Sixty-eight percent of Hondurans turned out to vote in the November 28, 2021 elections, with 53.4 percent supporting Xiomara Castro for president. She will become the country’s first woman president, but more importantly her election is a break from the last 12 years of authoritarian regimes. This impressive victory after the 2009 U.S.-backed military…

The cause of socialist democracy lost a giant last week with the death of Michael Hirsch, a comrade with family roots in the Jewish working class of New York City as well as in the global youth radicalization of the 1960s. Calling him as a giant is partly tongue-in-cheek: Mike stood over six feet tall, and it comes as little surprise to learn he played…

M1A1 Main Battle Tanks during a NATO Training. Russia can’t allow NATO bases in Ukraine. (Photo: Chad McMeen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) The following notes were initially intended as part of a followup to the article Biden’s Foreign Policy by Dianne Feeley. I’d like to develop an overview of layers of imperialist actions with their…

He Glasgow Conference (COP26) should have given priority to 1) making good on the promise of the “developed” countries to contribute to the Green Climate Fund, from 2020 onwards, at least one hundred billion dollars a year to help the global South meet the climate challenge1; 2) forcing these same countries to intervene financially to cover the…

Muhammad Aziz outside the courthouse after his conviction in the killing of Malcolm X was overturned. (Photo: Seth Wenig/AP) “I do not need this court, these prosecutors or a piece of paper to tell me I am innocent,” said Muhammad Aziz, who spent two decades in prison. Incredibly, a federal judge in Manhattan, New York, vacated the charges and convictions…

Readers of the Solidarity Webzine will know that on November 19, 2021, a nearly all-white jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin, found Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager, not guilty of homicide in the August 25, 2020, killing of two Black Lives Matter protesters and the wounding of another. The article below analyzes the verdict and its significance. As the article…

The “Shell River Seven” Mary Klein, Winona LaDuke, Barbara With, Trish Weber, Kelly Maracle, Cheryl Barnds and Flo Razowsky practice 1855 treaty rights on the Line 3 escarpment at the Shell River. They were arrested on July 20, 2021 and face criminal trespassing charges in Wadena County. LaDuke’s attorney has made a motion for change of venue…