Greece and the international situation
The following was presented at the ISO national conference in November 2015 We are living in historic times. As if in the blink of an eye we have seen revolutions sweep the Middle East, only to descend into bloody civil war, the devastation of the Greek economy and the emergence in Greece, within five years, […]
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 […]
A Climate Catastrophe
Last year, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the world’s governments agreed to keep warming to a 1.5 degrees Celsius limit by a zero increase in carbon emissions from 2030. While they may have agreed to the target, there was no bite to the bark. Each country made a declaration to limit […]
Key’s crocodile tears over dairy disaster
Dairy farmers are hurting, the newspapers say, and politicians are lining up left and right to give them a helping hand. Labour says 25 percent of farmers could face losing their farms, but Mr Key said he was told it would be closer to 5 to 10 percent. Agriculture consultant Peter Fraser told Radio New […]
Review: Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)
Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement by Jane McAlevey, Verso, 2014. Workers today, in more cases than not, bear passive witness to a world where we have less power and a smaller share of society’s wealth than in generations. It’s rare for us to see any substantial challenge to […]
Facing hard reality, but not giving in to pessimism
In January this website published a talk I had given at the ISO annual conference in November 2015. The subject was an assessment of the current political situation in Aotearoa. It was a dour, sober account of unchanged weakness of the unions, Labour and the left and the corresponding strength of the Key government and […]
Local democracy under new attack
National’s and ACT’s long-running plans to cut out the district level of local government and institute Auckland-style regional supercities hit the buffers in 2015. Their local government reorganisation programme has been run through the government-appointed Local Government Commission. In June the Commission dropped supercity plans for the Wellington and Northland regions after it saw the […]
Defeat the Bill! The struggle against the Employment Contracts Bill, 1991
‘We’ll need to go on strike, an ongoing strike.’ That’s how Jane Otuafi, a delegate in the Engineers’ Union, responded in March 1991 to the recently elected National government’s plan for an Employment Contracts Act. [1] ‘A general strike is the only answer,’ job delegate Sa Leutele of the Northern Distribution Union agreed. ‘I’ve had […]
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 […]
