The Peruvian revolutionary peasant and indigenous rights leader Hugo Blanco, a long-time member of the Fourth International, died late last month. We translate and reprint a reflection on Blanco’s life from Pepe Mejía, a member of the editorial board of Lucha Indígena, a newspaper that Blanco founded.
The June 25 elections in Greece confirmed, but also reinforced, the harsh negative features of the results of the “first round” of the May 21 election. In the new parliament, the sum of the right and the far-right parties reached 200 seats (out of a total of 300), thus creating a correlation of parliamentary forces that is unprecedented in the years following the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1974.
Our work has been devoted to essentially arguing a negative point—that it’s fundamentally wrong to see any part of the Democratic Party as the road to social change. This viewpoint obviously poses a major question: if socialists shouldn’t be supporting Democrats, then what should we be doing instead? What is our alternative course of action?
UPS has told management and supervisors to be at work in early August to handle a possible strike. So there may be some serious contingency planning behind the “win-win” veneer. Interestingly, UPS competitors, such as FedEx, are positioning themselves to sweep in and grab UPS customers if there is a strike.
According to reports, he was also harassed by the Pakistani Foreign Office during his stay in Greece, and his phone was confiscated last spring.
Now that the election’s over, evidence is beginning to come in to judge the validity of the different perspectives. The Lavin interview is an important statement by a major ruling class player. It shows that those socialists who stressed the fundamental compatibility of Johnson with the Democratic Party and ruling class politics were on the right track.
The actual class balance of forces, the political balance of forces and the electoral balance of forces are different quantities and qualities to measure. They are interrelated and they influence each other, but they are not identical.
Industrial strikes are rare enough today. So when two occur within a few months of one another and literally a few minutes’ walk from one another, it’s worth paying some attention. This is what’s happening in Bedford Park, an industrial suburb just south of Chicago.
2024 will become, as every national election since 2016 has, a referendum on Trump and MAGA. In that circumstance, Joe Biden—despite holding the support of only about 40 percent of the public—will have to be favored by the Democratic Party for reelection, assuming a health crisis doesn’t derail the octogenarian president.
The film, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, available to view for free at your local PBS station until May 1, 2024, shows not only how U.S. corporations have historically used murderous violence to prevent workers from organizing into unions, but also why most workers are not aware of this history: The corporate media has systematically suppressed it from being reported to the public.
On June 1, the Supreme Court ruled that Glacier’s case could proceed in the Washington State Court System. This was a rejection of the union’s claim that its actions were protected by current labor laws.
The previous installment of this two-part series covered the emergence of independent working-class politics in the era of Marx and Engels. This article takes the history up to contemporary times to show how different conceptions of a working-class party reflect different conceptions of its ultimate aim.
The new young trade unionists desperately need the skills, knowledge, and toughness of the older generations. The old established unions need the drive, vigor, and esprit de corps of their new comrades. When these two trends merge, the labor movement will be back on the road—with a vengeance.
The social pillar that supported this political achievement of the Right was the mobilization of the ruling class and the affluent upper-middle classes, with their potential to pull along with them a certain broader audience.
On May 7, the Chilean right scored a major victory in elections to choose delegates to draft a new constitution for the country. The conservatives, who mostly want to maintain the current constitution drawn up under the Pinochet dictatorship, have more than the 60 percent support in the constitutional council they need to write the new constitution without having to offer any concessions to the left.
