Fair wages, a fair day’s work! Through their struggles within capitalism, it has often been possible for workers and citizens to secure themselves some share of the benefits of social labor. Capitalist globalization and the offensive of neoliberal state policies, however, have encroached upon all those gains from past struggles; and the answer to those who were surprised to find those victories ephemeral was the mantra of TINA — there is no alternative | more…
In the summer of 2005 Venezuela commemorated the bicentenary of Simón Bolívar’s oath, made in the presence of his great teacher, Simón Rodríguez—a man who later in Paris, well before Marx, frequented socialist secret societies and returned to South America only in 1823. Bolívar’s oath took place on August 15, 1805, on the outskirts of Rome. Already the place itself—the hill of Monte Sacro—which they had chosen together for this solemn occasion, was indicative of the nature of the young Bolívar’s historical pledge. For precisely on the hill of Monte Sacro, twenty-three centuries earlier, the rebellious protest of the plebeians against the patricians in Ancient Rome, under the leadership of Sicinio, was supposed to have taken place. At that time the rebellion of the Roman populace is said to have been brought to an end by the rhetoric of that notorious pillar of the established order, Senator Menenius Agrippa, who was preaching the forever familiar wisdom of the ruling classes according to which the people “not destined to rule” should willingly accept “their place in the natural order of society.” | more…
What has been left out of reports and analysis in both the mainstream press and among anti-imperialists and leftists about the triumph of Evo Morales’s election as president of Bolivia is the role played by the over three-decade-long international indigenous movement that preceded it. Few are even aware of that powerful and remarkable historic movement, which springs from generations of grassroots organizing | more…
After five hundred years of domination and colonialism, more than fifty years since the introduction of universal suffrage, and following five years of intense social struggle, the indigenous majority of Bolivia, for the first time in December 2005, elected one of their own as president — the coca grower leader and head of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) Evo Morales. The victory — winning more than 50 percent of the vote — was more than an indication of the rejection of twenty years of neoliberal rule. Peruvian activist Hugo Blanco summed up the significance of this event when he wrote, “the new president is not the result of a simple ‘democratic election’ like the many that frequently occur in our countries, it is an important step in the path of the organized Bolivian people in their struggle to take power into their own hands.” | more…
Nearly six years since Argentina’s worst economic crisis in 2001, both the level of popular participation in struggles and the breadth of the political spectrum have been radically transformed. There has been a resurgence of struggle inside the workplace and Argentina’s working class has turned to its historical tools for liberation: direct democracy, the strike, sabotage, and the factory takeover. Labor struggles in public hospitals, public universities, the bank sector, recuperated enterprises, and the Buenos Aires subway have resulted in new visions and victories for the country’s working class | more…
In May 1968, I received a call in San Francisco where I worked for the local public television station. From Havana, Dr. Rene Vallejo, Fidel Castro’s doctor and confidante, said: “Come down with your crew as soon as you can.” In other words, Castro was ready to cooperate on a film portrait for public television. We arrived shortly thereafter and waited for seven weeks. What follows is a diary and commentary about the jeep trip with Fidel through Oriente Province in July 1968 | more…
Hans Koning died April 13 in his Connecticut home at the age of eighty-five. Monthly Review Press had the distinction of publishing three of his books. One of them, still a classic in many high schools, was Columbus: His Enterprise — Exploding the Myth, the first trade book to challenge the U.S. origin myth. That myth says that this nation was founded by brave white men fleeing oppression — not by genocide, enslaved labor, and imperialist expansion. Originally published in 1976, the U.S. Bicentennial year, it was reprinted in 1992, the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, when it sold 30,000 copies. MR Press also published The Conquest of America: How the Indian Nations Lost Their Continent (1993) | more…
The Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) is experiencing right now what the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) had to learn after the accession to power of a Red-Green Coalition in 1998: People’s parties are elected because they promise to reconcile the interests of businesses, working people, and the receivers of any sort of social assistance. They lose approval if they pursue policies that one-sidedly benefit the corporate sector. Although cabinet ministers occasionally bemoan the exorbitant salaries received by top managers and the unpatriotic behavior of a company that decides to relocate, most voters do not fail to notice that such company policies are encouraged by a politically driven redistribution of income in favor of profits. People who expected more socially oriented policies from the CDU are turning away from that party, but only some are turning toward the SPD. The latter gained somewhat in recent polls and was able to win state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, but it still is nowhere near its former approval rates. Moreover, the relative distribution of votes hides the absolute decline in voter turnout | more…
There is hardly a struggle aimed at upholding and extending the rights embedded in the U.S. Constitution in which the Center for Constitutional Rights has not played a central role. Whether defending the rights of black people in the South, opponents of the war in Vietnam, and victims of torture worldwide, or fighting illegal actions of the U.S. government, the CCR has stood ready to take on all comers, regardless of their power and wealth. When the United States declared that the Constitution did not apply to detainees at Guantánamo, the CCR waded fearlessly into battle, its Legal Director declaring that “My job is to defend the Constitution from its enemies. Its main enemies right now are the Justice Department and the White House.” | more…
Rank-and-file rebellions began rumbling in the coalfields from Pittsburgh and down the Ohio River after 1964, when dissident miners first challenged incumbents in international and district United Mine Workers (UMW) elections. Concern and anger also seethed through the coalfields of southern West Virginia during those years, particularly over black lung, a painful and often-fatal occupational disease. Doctors Isadore E. Buff and Donald Rasmussen helped spark those rumblings with speeches in union halls, schools, and churches | more…
Denise Bergman, Seeing Annie Sullivan (San Diego: Cedar Hill Books, 2005), 100 pages, paperback, $15.00.
The part of the story that is well known is that, at the age of twenty and freshly graduated from the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, Annie Sullivan traveled to Tuscumbia, Alabama to become the teacher to the blind wild child Helen Keller. Through persistence, patience, and tough love Sullivan finally broke through to where Keller connected words and objects and entered the realm of language. Inseparable until death, anticapitalist and antiwar Sullivan and self-identified socialist Keller worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the issues facing blind people. Yet, the image and legacy of Keller greatly overshadows that of her teacher. Despite Keller’s attempt to direct attention to Sullivan in her book, Teacher, Sullivan’s pre-Keller life remains largely shrouded | more…
Mainstream, or more formally, neoclassical, economics claims to be a science. But as Michael Perelman makes clear in his latest book, nothing could be further from the truth. While a science must be rooted in material reality, mainstream economics ignores or distorts the most fundamental aspect of this reality: that the vast majority of people must, out of necessity, labor on behalf of others, transformed into nothing but a means to the end of maximum profits for their employers. The nature of the work we do and the conditions under which we do it profoundly shape our lives. And yet, both of these factors are peripheral to mainstream economics. | more…
