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 […]
Reflecting on 2015
A session of the annual conference (27-29 November) of the International Socialist Organisation of Aotearoa/New Zealand was devoted to a discussion of the national political situation. The following is an abridged version of the introduction given by Martin Gregory. Let’s start with the economy. In recent times, in terms of Gross Domestic Product, the economy […]
Socialist Summer Reading: the best of 2015
We asked writers, activists and intellectuals to offer their picks from this year for summer reading suggestions. Lyndy McIntyre In 2015, as movements against austerity and inequality gathered strength around the globe, the Living Wage movement blossomed in Aotearoa. The deeply counter-cultural movement depends on building strong alliances across faith and community groups and unions […]
