Lessons from West Virginia

The Great West Virginia Wildcat is the single most important labour victory in the US since at least the early 1970s. Though the 1997 UPS strike and the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike also captured the country’s attention, there’s something different about West Virginia. This strike was statewide, it was illegal, it went wildcat, and it seems to be spreading. West Virginia’s […]

Trump, fire and fury

The arrival of Donald Trump into the Whitehouse has escalated tensions on the Korean peninsula. In recent months, Trump has goaded the North Korean regime on an almost daily basis. In August, he threatened to unleash “fire, fury and frankly power” if the North does not halt their nuclear weapons programme. In September, at the […]

David McNally: from global slump to Trump

Long-time Canada-based activist and socialist David McNally is in New Zealand for both an academic conference and a socialist meeting at the University of Otago. Guy McCallum reports on McNally’s first New Zealand public talk: The Global Financial Crisis in 2008, one of many crises under capitalism, has led to austerity for the working class, […]

Against Trump: supporting the resistance

There has been a protest called in Wellington tomorrow in the wake of Trump’s victory. The Facebook event page gives details here. This is important. Leaving aside the more complicated questions about Trump’s victory, what is clear is that Trump’s campaign deployed racism, Islamophobia and the scapegoating of immigrants. It is clear that Trump is […]

Resisting the pro-police backlash after Dallas

THE POLICE KILLING of two Black men–Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, a suburb of the Twin Cities in Minnesota–last week horrified people around the world and brought protesters into the streets in large numbers across the country to proclaim that Black Lives Matter. Yet just as quickly, in […]

Making history or maintaining the status quo?

THERE’S NO denying that women could use a “historic” breakthrough. We could use quite a few, if anyone is offering. Contrary to those who argue that we live in a post-feminist era, where sexism is a thing of the past, women are still, by almost any measuring stick, unequal to men in U.S. society. Wages, […]

Don’t turn homophobia into Islamophobia

Nicole Colson reports on the outpouring of solidarity for the victims of a horrific mass shooting–and the need to challenge the tide of racist scapegoating of Muslims. HORROR. The word alone isn’t enough to describe the feeling as the country woke up to news of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. For three […]

Why voting Democratic hasn’t preserved choice

Elizabeth Schulte makes the case that a woman’s right to choose abortion won’t be defended by subordinating our struggle to the needs of the Democratic Party. DONALD TRUMP gave abortion rights supporters a frightening glimpse of what an administration he commands might do when he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews earlier this month that “[t]here has […]

From Slaveholders to Sanders: A Brief History of the Democratic Party

American socialist Bill Crane – in an article first published at RS21 – provides a brief history of the Democratic Party from its inception to the present, and asks how revolutionaries might relate to the movement behind presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The US Democratic Party is the oldest surviving modern political party.[1] In its longer than two centuries’ […]

When Black Workers Organized Against Jim Crow

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression by Robin Kelley. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this wonderful classic work of workers’ history was published last year. Robin Kelley has magnificently brought to light the little known struggles of communist party-supporting workers and sharecroppers, the majority of whom were black, under ferocious conditions of […]