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"
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.
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.
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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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. Read more...
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 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.
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...
Hunger - Art and Politics come together [movie review]
Submitted by RedStar504 on April 7, 2009 - 2:32pm
In our times, it is rare that art and politics come together well. Too often what we classify as “art” is either aesthetic rich and content poor, or some sort of insider joke, something made valuable mostly by its inability to be understood by anyone but the members of selective, small cultural and intellectual circles.
Likewise, in our era political statements are too often crude and artless, lacking not only aesthetic sensibility but also immediacy and emotional power.
"Hunger," by filmmaker Steve McQueen and playwright Enda Walsh, is art at its finest, a moment where form and content are woven together. The film is an account of the prison struggles in the late 1970's-early 1980's waged by imprisoned IRA members to demand status as political prisoners and enact prison reform. At its center is the figure of IRA leader and martyr Bobby Sands, who died in 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike.
Hunger, while being unapologetically political, avoids the common failings of much political art. It neither waters down the realities of the political struggle nor lapses into preaching. It is both personal and political. The struggles of the prisoners, who at different points refused prison clothes for blankets and refused to bathe or have their hair cut (the so-called “dirty protest”) are anything but glorified. The filmmaking is brutal in its accounts of the boredom, the filth and the violence of the prison protests. What does emerge is a powerful account of the personal sacrifice IRA members underwent to achieve their aims, the unshakable discipline of the IRA, and the raging inhumanity of the official response by authorities.
IRA violence is not glossed over. In one memorable scene, a prison official, visiting his elderly and senile mother, is shot point-blank by an IRA assassin, covering the mother with blood. In all of these moments the filmmaking ultimately honest, particularly in its portrayal of violence; instead of the victor, the camera shot is on the dead and those who have been physically and emotionally brutalized.
Neither is Sands' death glorified. The easy answer of a martyr's story is missed, instead the moments of Sands slipping into death are both brutal and intensely personal. The final shots are not of Irish flags, or marches, or even of other human beings. Instead they are memories from Sand's youth, alone in the forest, stressing if anything the intensely individual experience of death, even while Sand's mother watches.
This film has won a number of awards, including the prestigious Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It is a pity that Hunger is not screened more widely in the United States, the nation with the world's largest and greatest per-capita prison population, where we so recently have created our own Caribbean Gulag. Perhaps the discipline and intensity it portrays would be out of place in a nation lulled to sleep on the intellectual junk-food diet of reality TV. Perhaps for this reason, if no other, Hunger should be seen by Americans.
[Christian Roselund, a friend of Solidarity's New Orleans branch, wrote this review]
Submitted by RedStar504 on April 2, 2009 - 2:37pm.
Patois, the 6th Annual New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival is currently underway, running through April 5. It includes dozens of inspiring shorts and full length films. Check it out!- Robert C.
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.
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!
"Hunger," by filmmaker Steve McQueen and playwright Enda Walsh, is art at its finest, a moment where form and content are woven together. The film is an account of the prison struggles in the late 1970's-early 1980's waged by imprisoned IRA members to demand status as political prisoners and enact prison reform. At its center is the figure of IRA leader and martyr Bobby Sands, who died in 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike.
Hunger shown in New Orleans as part of Patois Film Festival
Patois, the 6th Annual New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival is currently underway, running through April 5. It includes dozens of inspiring shorts and full length films. Check it out!- Robert C.
http://patoisfilmfest.org/
great review
Going to have to see this one.
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