Against the Current
Published bimonthly since 1986, AGAINST THE CURRENT is a Solidarity-sponsored analytical journal for the broad revolutionary left. The Sept./Oct. issue features Malik Miah on How Race Fuels the Rightist Agenda, Kit Adam Wainer on Obama's Race to the Top vs. Teacher Unions and Susan Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber interviewing Venezuelan activists Gonzalo Gómez, Stalin Pérez Borges and Luis Primo on the processes of deepening the revolution. Coverage of The Mexican Revolution at 100 continues, featuring an interview with Adolpho Gilly and articles by Dan La Botz, James D. Cockcroft, Heather Dasner Monk, Fred Rosen and Scott Campbell.
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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.
Put a Socialist in the Senate!
Dan La Botz, a 64-year old Cincinnati school teacher, has filed petitions with the Ohio Secretary of State to become the candidate of the Socialist Party for the U.S. Senate. La Botz, who needed 500 signatures to get on the Socialist Party primary ballot, filed petitions with approximately 1,200 signatures on Thursday, Feb. 18. La Botz, a long time labor and social movement activist, is the candidate of the Socialist Party of Ohio which is the state organization of the Socialist Party USA.
Read more...Keep up with the campaign!
Campaign website- DanLaBotz.com
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."
Brown and black buttons demand: "Bring all 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.
These 2 1/8" buttons read, in Spanish and English: ¡Alto a las deporaciones - Legalización para todos! Stop the deportations - Legalization for all!
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)
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- A Great Variety of Morbid Symptoms, Seen in the Reflecting Pool Yesterday
by John B. Cannon posted on 08/31/10
- Education in the Crosshairs: Thoughts on the New Student Movement
by Nick posted on 08/13/10
- Don't Just Snap, Organize... Let's "Slater" together!
by La Botz for Senate posted on 08/12/10
- Pakistan: Over 20 million people affected by the flood
by Dianne posted on 08/11/10
- Stop police harassment of anti-facists in Russia!
by Isaac posted on 08/8/10
- As Santos Becomes Colombian President, U.S. Bases and Tensions Remain
by Dianne posted on 08/5/10
- Immigrant Rights Protest at Mets Game - Exciting organizing!
by Nate posted on 08/2/10
- Enough Is Enough... We’re Human Beings
by Joanna posted on 07/23/10
- The Sentencing of Lynne Stewart
by Dianne posted on 07/21/10
- NY Governor candidate Howie Hawkins Opposes Increased Jail Time for Lawyer Lynne Stewart
by Howie Hawkins posted on 07/19/10
from the Webzine
- Closets
11 hours 33 min ago - Closets
12 hours 14 min ago - Article Review
1 day 9 hours ago - you did a wonderful job.
2 days 9 hours ago - Douceur.
1 week 7 hours ago - abortion& disabled people
1 week 2 days ago - Sending money to Pakistan within next month
1 week 3 days ago - The reason the ad doesn't say
1 week 3 days ago - Stalinist Slsnders...
2 weeks 3 days ago - Santos charges course; U.S. and Rightwing outfoxed
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Barbara Zeluck Presente!
Our comrade Barbara Zeluck died June 5, 2010. She was a lifelong socialist and founding member of Solidarity. Barbara had a long and active life, unwavering in her support for radical social change and movements that she felt were dedicated to mobilizing the working class and raising class consciousness. She always believed that a better world was possible. Read More...
One Year of Obama and the Democrats’ Debacle
Last fall, in the discussion that produced our analysis of “Obama After 200 Days,” we said it would be premature to speak of a “crisis” for the administration. A year after the euphoric 2009 inauguration, it no longer looks premature. People who looked to Obama and the Democrats for leadership are bitterly disappointed, and a very peculiar brand of rightwing politics has seized the initiative.
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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.”
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.orgRead 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...
Our History Recovered
Against Capitalism:
The European Left on the March
William A. Pelz
Peter Lang Publishing Group: New York, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfort, Oxford, Vienna, 2007. 259 pages, hardcover $39.95.
FOR THIRTY-SIX YEARS since its apogee in the late 1960s during the worldwide movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam, the global Left, including the Left in the United States, has been in decline. Globally, perhaps the most significant causal factor accelerating decline at the beginning of the 1990s was the collapse of the Soviet Union as a perceived alternative to dominant capitalist economic and governmental modes.
As a consequence of the decline of the Left amidst an ascendant, apparently unassailable capitalism, generations that have come to the fore since the mid-1970s have little or no historical memory of the massive struggles between the capitalist class and the working class that occurred between 1871 and 1921. A collective amnesia has contributed to the present incapacity of the working class to mount effective struggles against capitalist oppression at the point of production as well as in a whole series of other political, economic and social arenas, leaving the United States largely unchallenged as the global master, presently evidenced by its continuing (and seemingly endless) occupation of Iraq.
To be sure, many hundreds of excellent history books have been written about past working-class struggles and the origin and development of the Left in response to the emergence of modern capitalism, especially in Europe, where Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed the first systematic analysis and critique of capitalism and thereby launched the modern Left. But many of these books are now out of print or otherwise not readily available.
It is imperative to eradicate the current amnesia, and to restore and bring to the fore the collective historical memory of the Left. Contributions to this process must be strongly encouraged and warmly welcomed. Such is the case with William A. Pelz’s first-rate summary of the history of the European Left from the Paris Commune in 1871 through the early 1920s. He covers a particularly pivotal 50 years in the more than 150-year history of the modern Left in Europe.
Against Capitalism is well-written, eminently readable, and superbly grounded in a broad range of pertinent scholarly literature. In this short, compact historical summary, Pelz has chosen wisely which aspects of the formative period of the European Left to highlight.
He begins his account with the First International and the Paris Commune, moving to the rise of trade unions in England, France, and Germany and the founding of the Second International. He discusses extensively the various political currents that comprised the Left, including anarchism and syndicalism as well as socialism.
Unlike many earlier histories, Pelz specifically discusses women and socialism. While focusing on the situation in Germany and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, he also pays careful attention to the rise of social democratic parties in more than a dozen other European countries.
His discussion is not confined exclusively to working-class struggles, ranging as well over anti-military, anti-colonial and other salient struggles. In the runup to the First World War, he portrays the divisions among the Left over the impending war and ultimately the failure of all components of the Left, save tiny minorities in Russia and elsewhere, to oppose the war.
Pelz then shifts his attention to developments in Russia that eventually resulted in the victorious Russian Revolution in 1917. He concludes by both discussing the encouraging opportunities open to the Left in the wake of the war, and its failure to extend the socialist revolution beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. One cannot put down Pelz’s volume without eagerly anticipating his next book, which no doubt will take up the role of the European Left amidst the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany, the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of World War II.
Pelz states that Against Capitalism is a “modest work dedicated to all those ordinary women and men whose names are now lost to history, who struggled for a more just, equal world. Their dreams have not been realized but neither have their struggles been in vain.” How true — and how very good that, thanks in part to this book, new, young readers can become aware of those struggles.
from ATC 132 (January/February 2008)
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