
Organizing to Win a Green New Deal
The labor movement has to be central to winning a Green New Deal and reversing climate change. Recent labor victories show how we can do just that, from the ground up, and quickly.
William G. Martin teaches at SUNY-Binghamton and is co-author of After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment (2016) and a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier; he covers local justice matters at www.justtalk.blog
The labor movement has to be central to winning a Green New Deal and reversing climate change. Recent labor victories show how we can do just that, from the ground up, and quickly.
In what may be the first coordinated strike at a US Amazon facility, fifty Somali-American workers walked off the job in Minnesota recently to protest work speedups. And organizers say it won’t be the last strike.
The original New Deal was a bold, visionary effort that transformed the economic and political life of the country. The Green New Deal could do even more.
We can’t win socialism without workers fighting back. The rank-and-file strategy gives us the tools to do that.
With the end of Mueller’s inquiry, our long, national hallucination is finally over. But the damage done by neocons and liberal conspiracy theorists is just beginning.
Though often forgotten today, the National Negro Congress forged a black-led, labor-based coalition in New Deal America that fought white supremacy and the economic exploitation that undergirded it.
After months of frenzied speculation and breathless commentary, Robert Mueller has turned in his report. But the political landscape some said it would upend is basically unchanged.
The far right swept to record success in last week’s Dutch elections. Yet the vote also saw Geert Wilders’s PVV overshadowed by more traditionalist reactionary forces.
Eric Hobsbawm wasn’t just a historian of the twentieth-century communist movement: he was part of it.
Labor is struggling with how to build international working-class power. The United Electrical Workers offer a model of just that.
The far-right EKRE party tripled its vote in this month’s Estonian elections. It could soon be in coalition government — and Estonia might start looking like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
The gilets jaunes have put the social ills of rural France at the heart of public debate. These areas aren’t “backward,” they’re suffering from decades of attacks on social welfare and living conditions.
In the 1970s, Canada’s working class was at the height of its power, combining shop-floor militancy, political ambition, and intellectual confidence. Canada’s liberal elites, led by Pierre Trudeau, were determined to crush it.
Paul Krugman and other critics of Medicare for All are relying on falsehoods to promote a “Medicare for America” faux-alternative.
The investigation into the murder of Marielle Franco keeps bumping up against the most powerful people in Brazil — like President Jair Bolsonaro. They don’t want us to find out the truth.
The Tories are incredibly racist, and have been forever, and somehow they’re still getting away with it.
The City University of New York system has been ravaged by austerity. Educators have gone on strike throughout the country, but CUNY employees are hamstrung by anti-strike laws. CUNY’s biggest union wants to change that.
After flip-flopping on health reform for years, Beto O’Rourke claims his public-option bill is a path to Medicare for All. It isn’t — the bill’s means-tested approach will pit working people against each another, keep private insurance companies afloat, and stop M4A’s momentum.
Thirty-five thousand students in Quebec went on strike this week. Their demand is simple: interns must be paid for their labor.
Mega-companies like Amazon and Walmart are already using large-scale central planning. We can wield that tool for good. Socialists need to renew our embrace of democratic planning and fight for a real alternative to capitalism.