Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher, and historian living in Buffalo, New York. He is a regular contributor for Truthout and a contributing writer for LittleSis.
Across the US, students organizing against Israel’s assault on Gaza have made essential use of power research, uncovering financial ties between the Pentagon and campus labs and mapping out connections between university trustees and the war machine.
The labor movement and the Palestinian solidarity effort have common enemies, and not just on principle. Some of the biggest donors to the pro-Israel electoral machine are also financing the United States’s union-busting infrastructure.
As autoworkers are worked to the bone and face factory closures, dynastic billionaire and Stellantis chairman John Elkann is hanging out on his yacht and attending fancy art galas. No wonder the UAW is on strike.
The past two years have seen a wave of graduate worker strikes, new organizing drives, and big union election victories. The independent, left-wing United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America has played an outsize role in this upsurge.
While the armed forces carry out the mission of US imperialism, millions of working people sit at the heart of that machine, drawn to become soldiers by the promise of economic stability. A Left looking to rebuild links with the working class can’t avoid them.
The practice of “salting,” covertly getting a job with the intention of organizing a workplace, is receiving renewed attention lately. During the Vietnam War, activists used this tactic to build the antiwar movement within the ranks of the US military.
Sam Amato spent over a decade working as a barista for Starbucks near Buffalo, New York, and loves the company. But after he joined a union drive with Starbucks Workers United, he says the company didn’t care about his years of service — and fired him.
The Chicago teachers’ strike is about who will shape Chicago: billionaires who buy politicians to privatize schools, or working-class communities who want affordable housing, decent jobs, good schools, and justice. Here are some of the private equity barons and luxury developers in Chicago whom the teachers are up against.
Fifty years ago today, the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam protests swept the entire United States and showed that the antiwar movement was undeniably mainstream. Soldiers who had fought in Vietnam weren’t pitted against that movement — in fact, many were actually part of it.
A look at the radical Vietnam-era research collective that exposed US companies profiteering off the war.
It’s not just the Koch brothers: a state by state look at the forces driving school privatization.
How a group of researchers helped strengthen and scale up the anti–Vietnam War movement.
How SNCC’s research department helped civil rights organizers fight Jim Crow.
Trump’s pick for attorney general has close ties to the worst of the Islamophobic far right.
In 1996, thousands of trade unionists and activists decided to build an independent party. Why did the effort fail?
It’s about more than fast-food workers. Fight for 15 is taking on an economic model built off poverty wages.