Videos from Solidarity's Educational Conference

November 14-15 in New York City, Solidarity held a successful conference featuring engaging talks on a number of topics. Click here to view these videos from "Their Crisis, Our Movements"

- Crisis of Capitalism, Challenge to the Movements (David McNally, New Socialist Group)
- The New Imperialism and The Global Fightback (Vivek Chibber, Christy Thornton, Jonah McCallister-Erickson)
- The State of Resistance in Communities & the Workplace (Normahiram Perez, Steve Downs, Penelope Duggan)
- Race and National Liberation Under Obama (Glen Ford, Lalit Clarkston)

Against the Current

Published bimonthly since 1986, AGAINST THE CURRENT is a Solidarity-sponsored analytical journal for the broad revolutionary left. The January/February issue begins with an editorial on the road from Copenhagen with a second editorial on Obama's war in Afghanistan. Articles include Bushra Khaliq on how climate change adversely effects women in the Global South, Adaner Usmani on the official narrative about Pakistan, Micah Landau and Rene Rojas on the 11-month Stella D'oro strike and Malik Miah on how the recession has disproportionately impacted African Americans. ATC 144 features "African-American Struggle, Yesterday and Today" with Derrick Morrison on Post-Katrina New Orleans and a number of reviews by activists and scholars.


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International Viewpoint is the monthly English-language magazine of the Fourth International. IV is a window to radical alternatives world-wide, carrying reports, analysis and debates from all corners of the globe. Correspondents in over 50 countries report on popular struggles, and the debates that are shaping the left of tomorrow.

Buttons to Build the Movement

Order these eye-catching buttons to spread the demand for social and economic justice. If you don't have paypal, email us!


Reads Bail out People, not Wall Street!. Around the edge, these 2 1/8" buttons read "Free Health Care," "Defend Public Services," "Living Wage Jobs," "Free Higher Education," "Troops Home Now," "Rebuild the Gulf Coast," and "Affordable Housing."

Bright orange 1 1/2" buttons boldly demand: "Bring the Troops Home Now!" Wear one everywhere to start a conversation about why US occupation can never be a force for liberation, and people's needs should come before the massive military budget.

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Produced during the massive immigrant rights demonstrations of 2006, these 2 1/8" buttons read, in Spanish and English: ¡exigimos Paz, Legalización, y Trabajos para Todos! we demand Peace, Legalization, and Jobs for All!

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Blocked Reform: Obama After 200 Days

The Obama presidency, contrary to the hopes of many, has not produced a big political space for the left, let alone “a seat at the table.” Most visibly, it has been the right wing that succeeded in seizing the initiative, in some truly grotesque ways that have thrown a real light on the deep paranoia and straight-up white racism that persists in this society, and on the ways it can be opportunistically pandered to and manipulated.
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Regroupment & Refoundation of a U.S. Left

As part of the preparation for our 2008 Convention, members of SOLIDARITY have begun a political document describing some perspectives for socialist renewal in the twenty-first century. We welcome responses to this initial draft of the document. Some of the themes here have also been developed in Solidarity's Founding Statement and our 1997 pamphlet, “Socialist Organization Today.”

— Introduction
— Social Movements over the Last Two Decades
— Regroupment, Refounding and the Arc of Resistance
— Refounding a New Left: Next Generations & Their Experiences
— The Tasks and Possibilities of a U.S. Refounded Left
— Refounding the Left: Taking Our Past Into Our Future

New Pamphlet: Hell on Wheels

New from Solidarity! Long time transit worker activist Steve Downs has written a pamphlet charting the twenty year story of New Directions, a rank and file caucus in New York City's transit union that he helped build and develop - including the challenges of keeping the rank and file democracy movement alive after New Directions won control of the local.

Read an interview on Zmag.org
Read a review and order your copy today!

From Abortion Rights to Reproductive Justice

New from Solidarity's Feminist Commission, this leaflet responds to the right wing attack on reproductive freedom and argues that the movement must go beyond "pro-choice" to true reproductive justice. This socialist and anti-racist feminist agenda would take up issues such as access to health and child care, forced sterilization, and the division of "productive" and "reproductive" labor.
Download the pamphlet...

Additional Resources on Ecosocialism

Solidarity held a 3-day conference on Socialism and Environmental Justice in NYC July 20-22. Joel Kovel, author of the "Why Ecosocialism Today?" article, and other socialist, labor and environmental justice activists presented on topics ranging from the Uneasy Alliance of Labor and Environmental Justice to Feminism, Reproduction and the Environment. Please check out the 'Themes and Questions' the conference was focused around and further resources below.

Capitalism and the Environment

Is environmental destruction inevitable under capitalism? What are some proposals to reform/control capitalism in favor of the environment? Can they work? Why/why not?

Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature
— interview with John Bellamy Foster

Ecology, Capitalism and the Socialization of Nature
— interview with John Bellamy Foster

Why the market cannot solve the environment crisis
— Tony Iltis (Green Left Weekly (June 2007)

Garbage Capitalism’s Green Commerce
— Heather Rogers (Socialist Register 2007 - not online)

The Ecological Question: Can Capitalism Prevail?
— Daniel Buck (Socialist Register 2007 - not online)

How do we evaluate the alternatives to capitalism that are floating around the radical environmental movements? What is proposed and how do we assess this from the point of view of an intersectional approach? (By an intersectional approach, we mean looking at racism, sexism, and heterosexism as well as class exploitation to see how an alternative to the current system would work).

Ecosocialism Now
— Joel Kovel (New Socialist)

Chapter 9: Ecosocialism, in The Enemy of Nature
— Joel Kovel

Ecosocialism and Democratic Planning
— Michael Lowy (Socialist Register 2007 - not online)

The Limits of EcoLocalism: Scale, Strategy, Socialism
— Greg Albo (Socialist Register 2007 pp. 350-360 - not online)

Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice

What are the main issues in environmental racism? How has the movement for environmental justice responded to these issues?

Principles of Environmental Justice

Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987-2007 Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the US (to access and print pdf file, follow links at top of page)

Brief history of the Environmental Justice movement, in chapter 4 of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago
— David Nabuib Pellow (MIT Press, 2002)

Race, Waste, and Class: New Perspectives on Environmental Justice
— Michael K. Heiman (MIT Press, 2002)

The New World War: Water
— Veronica Lake

Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University

What challenges have faced community-based movements against environmental racism? What strategies have been used to successfully meet these challenges?

Divide and Conquer: The Fight For and Against the Robbins Incinerator, from Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago
— David Nabuib Pellow (MIT Press, 2002)

When People of Color are an Endangered Species, from De Colores Means All of Us
— Elizabeth Martinez (South End Press, 1998)

Warren County Revisited, from Transforming Environmentalism
— Eileen McGurty (Rutgers U Press, 2007) [read this with “When it rains I get mad and scared: women and environmental racism,” from Crazy for Democracy by Temma Kaplan (Routledge, 1997)]

Labor/Movements and Environmental Justice

What successful coalitions have been built around labor and environment and what accounts for success? What accounts for failure?

Policies for Green Collar Jobs Campaign
— Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Green Collar Jobs for Urban America
— Van Jones and Ben Wyskeda (YES Magazine, Winter 2007)

Securing Our Children’s World, Our Union and the Environment
— United Steelworkers

Labor and Environmentalism (website)

Environmental Justice for Whom? Class, New Social Movements, and the Environment: A Case Study of Greenpeace Canada, 1971-2000
— John-Henry Harter (Labour/Le Travail, issue 54 - not online)

Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment (website)

How have unions/workers’ centers/environmental justice organizations thought about the connection between workers’ rights and empowerment and environmental protection?

Safety of recovery and reconstruction workers: NOLA, 2005

Trailer Park Organizing Comes together with ‘Guest Workers
— People’s Organizing Committee Newsletter (December 16, 2006 - not online)

New Jersey Work Environment Council (website)

Models and Organizational Differences in the Environmental and Environmental Justice Movements

How do mainstream environmental organizations and environmental justice organizations differ in terms of the organizing model they use, levels of participation of working class people, how they relate to other movements?

Vanity Fair: The Unbearable Whiteness of Green
— Van Jones

Why is the Green Movement so White?
— Van Jones

“The Environment Movement: Failures and Successes” and “Civic Environmentalism”
— Van Jones (Rachel’s Environment and Health News, September/October 2001 - not online)

It’s a survival issue: the environmental Justice Movement Faces the New Century
— Colorlines (July 2000 - not online)

How do the different kinds of organizations in the environmental justice movement relate to each other? (e.g. are there important differences among non-profit organizations, what sorts of organizations seem to maintain a more radical practice and why?)

“Native Organizing Before the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” from The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
— Madonna Thunder Hawk (South End Press, 2007)

Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (website of organization in Chicago)

Southwest Organizing Project (website)

People’s Organizing Committee (website of organization in New Orleans)

Gender and environmental Justice

Working-class women (white and women of color) seem to be more prominent in environmental justice organizing at the community level than in many other movements. What accounts for this? What happens to women’s leadership once the movement expands beyond the local level?

Katrina Hits Cancer Alley: interview with environmental justice activist Monique Harden
— Ben Greenberg, Dollars & Sense (March/April 2006)

Community Organizer: Cynthia Peters interviews Klare Allen
— Z Magazine Online, (July/August 2004)

Chapter 3, “When it rains I get mad and scared: women and environmental racism,” from Crazy for Democracy
— Temma Kaplan (Routledge 1997)

What are some gender differences in the impact of environmental degradation on working-class communites? How, if at all, is the environmental justice movement addressing these differences?

“Gender, Asthma Politics, and Urban Environmental Justice Activism,” from New Perspectives on Environmental Justice ed. Rachel Stein
— Julie Sze (Rutgers University Press, 2004)

“The Role of Gender, Race/Ethnicity and Class in Activists’ Perceptions of Environmental Justice” from New Perspectives on Environmental Justice ed. Rachel Stein
— Diane-Michele Prindeville (Rutgers University Press, 2004)

Local actions, global visions: Remaking environmental expertise
— Giovanna Di Chiro (Frontiers (v. 18, iss 2, 1997)

A Plan to Challenge Women’s Oppression within Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund
— Second Lines (June-July 2007), newsletter of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund