USA/Canada

From the US rank-and-file magazine Labor Notes. Read the original article online here . Union-dense Lorain County, Ohio, is now home to an independent labor slate of two dozen newly elected city councilors—recruited and run by the central labor council there. All labor’s candidates had strong showings last month, and all but two were elected. “This was a step we took reluctantly,” said Lorain County AFL-CIO President Harry Williamson. “When the leaders of the [Democratic] Party just took us for granted and tried to roll over the rights of working people here, we had to stand up.” A series of...

The Marxists Internet Archive has uploaded the journals of the Independent Socialist Clubs and the International Socialists, organisations which continued the revolutionary "third camp" socialism of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper. In the late 1930s and early 40s, the Trotskyist movement (particularly in America) was split by a debate about whether the Soviet Union could be characterised as some form of "workers' state", or whether its society was based on exploitative class rule (variously characterised as "bureaucratic collectivist" or "state capitalist"). The "third camp" socialists were those...

In Solidarity recently we have discussed how political Islam can be both a “sigh of the oppressed” and a reactionary, right-wing movement. The Christian right in the USA shows the same paradox more extravagantly. Thomas Frank, in his study of the rise of the right in Kansas, found that in Olathe, a poor Kansas City suburb which is a bastion of the right, “each of the conservatives I spent time with was either a blue-collar worker or married to one” He talked with one of the leaders of the right, Kay O’Connor, a working-class woman. She supports tax cuts for the rich. “Progressive taxation is...

Strikes and protests were held at 1,500 Walmart stores across America on “Black Friday” (the Friday after Thanksgiving), 29 November. The actions were part of a long-running campaign by unions, workers’ centres, and labour-movement coalitions against low pay, union busting, and exploitation at Walmart stores. The number of stores which saw protests more than trebled from the 2012 Black Friday day of action, although some estimates suggest the number of Walmart employees involved (rather than workers and activists from other workplaces and areas) did not increase. Many attribute this to the...

A speech by Max Shachtman, candidate of the Workers Party for Mayor of New York City in 1944. It was reproduced as a mass circulation pamphlet. WHAT DO THE SOCIALISTS WANT? What is socialism? What do the socialists want? The simplest way to find the answer to these questions is to ask yourself: "What do I want? What do the tens of millions like me throughout the world want?" Everyone has different tastes, different ambitions, different hopes. But almost all are agreed in wanting durable peace in a world free of the scourge of war; security and prosperity in place of unemployment and low...

Kshama Sawant, a revolutionary socialist, has been elected to the city council of Seattle, United States. Kshama’s platform included support low-paid workers’ fight for a $15/hour minimum wage, increased rent controls, and a tax on millionaires. Her victory is all the more impressive for the fact that she beat a heavily-favoured Democratic incumbent, who had been a sitting councillors for 16 years and who had significantly greater financial resources. Sawant said: ““These exciting results show a majority of voters are fed up with the corporate politicians who have presided over the widening...

The US Army which won World War Two, and prided itself on its victory over the Nazi racists, was itself segregated. African Americans were hived off into separate units, often working as cargo handlers or cooks, and commanded by white officers. Not until 1948 did the US government decide to desegregate its armed forces. Not until after the end of the Korean war, in 1954, was desegregation carried through. Since the defeat of radical reconstruction in the Southern states after the US civil war of 1861-5 which abolished slavery, the now-formally-free African Americans in the South had faced an...

Western democracies have prided themselves in applying humane standards to the treatment of prisoners of war. This treatment is encapsulated in the Geneva Convention, first formulated in 1864 and modified since, most recently in 1949. They have also signed up to the UN Convention against Torture. These conventions have been flouted by some democratic states (France in Algeria, Britain in Northern Ireland, USA in Vietnam, ...). The US explicitly banned torture and harsh treatment by military interrogators after the Vietnam war, introducing the Army Field Manual on Interrogation (FM 34-52) in...

In about a month, the world will remember the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy fifty years ago — on 22 November 1963. It’s easy to predict how the media will play this — people will talk about where they were when Kennedy was shot, there will be some speculation about what might have been had he lived, the old conspiracy debate will resurface, and there will be lots of film footage of the American Camelot, with the President’s photogenic family once again put on display. The Left is likely to engage in a bit of myth-busting and no doubt articles will appear about the dark side of...