John B. Cannon's blog

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.

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

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.
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.”

— 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...

John B. Cannon's blog

A Great Variety of Morbid Symptoms, Seen in the Reflecting Pool Yesterday

Submitted by John B. Cannon on August 31, 2010 - 3:45pm

New York Times: Glenn Beck Leads Religious Rally at Lincoln Memorial

I watched / listened to most of Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally while doing laundry and cleaning the house. The cheesiness of the voice-overs and unevenness of the speeches lend themselves to easy mockery, but the far right's ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, DC yesterday means that this is no laughing matter.

First, on the media coverage of the event: I'm struck by the extent to which the notion of "politics" is becoming largely incoherent; the NYT reports, with a straight face, that this event was about religion, history, or nationality rather than "politics." While speakers stayed away from the strictly partisan, this event was entirely about articulating and mobilizing a politics, both in the narrow sense (firing up the base for the mid-term elections) and the broad sense (laying out an ideology which can serve cohesive and expressive functions for a politics).

Oakland on the eve of the Mehserle verdict: between "Do the Right Thing" and "What is to be Done?"

Submitted by John B. Cannon on July 7, 2010 - 7:32am

After a number of delays, the jury in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the BART police officer who killed Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland in January 2009, is scheduled to begin its deliberations over again today, in Los Angeles.

The case has collective resonance because of a long history of systematic disregard for and collective punishment directed at Black and Brown communities in the East Bay by various police agencies. This is the underlying question to which we must return. However, public discourse has strayed a long way from this, in that the prospect of protests, upon acquittal or a manslaughter conviction rather than a second-degree murder conviction, have been put forth as a public safety crisis in and of themselves. This post is an attempt, along with many others, to analyze this manufactured crisis and to articulate the question of action which is part of it.

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March 4 Actions to Defend Public Education: a Partial Report and a Preliminary Rumination on Next Steps

Submitted by John B. Cannon on March 6, 2010 - 12:59am

I’m writing this while recovering from a good, long, and successful day on the picket lines at UC Santa Cruz, where, over the course of the day, more than a thousand students, workers, and teachers

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Resources - Follow the CA Student Movement Online

Submitted by John B. Cannon on February 25, 2010 - 5:27pm

This page, which I'll continue updating from time to time, is an attempt to aggregate sources of information that will help you keep up with what's happening in the California student / defense of public education movement.

While building occupations, strikes, sit-ins, and major protests are in progress, the best way to keep track is through Twitter. Observers will often post updates from their phones. If you're on twitter, you can follow the following lists:

The ca-education-struggle list, maintained by yours truly, is a relatively low-volume list of people who are tweeting largely about the CA student movement.

The cacrisis list is maintained by Angus Johnston, a student movement historian who also does the studentactivism.net blog. This list is much broader; it tends to be useful when struggles are particularly pitched and kind of scattered when they are not.

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University Students and Prisoners: Are We All in the Same Boat?

Submitted by John B. Cannon on January 24, 2010 - 7:59pm

In California today, we are facing an onslaught of austerity capitalism in the form of privatization / private accumulation, funding cuts, and neoliberal prioritization that effects public goods in

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The Healthcare Debate of 2009: the Role of the Left

Submitted by John B. Cannon on August 31, 2009 - 9:27am

The US Left has a few different tasks in regards to situations of national political importance; among them are 1) putting out our politics about the situation, including a critique of the current

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Vigilantism of the Few and the Many; the Darkness of Democracy in The Dark Knight

Submitted by John B. Cannon on August 14, 2008 - 8:05am

The Dark Knight is the pre-eminent summer action-superhero blockbuster of 2008, and will probably soon become the second grossing film of all time, behind

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Elliot Spitzer's "Corruption"

Submitted by John B. Cannon on March 19, 2008 - 11:44pm

I'm trying to figure out whether I think Elliot Spitzer actually did anything that we should call "corrupt." I'm sure he broke his marital vows, quite repeatedly it seems, and I get what the folks are saying that Silda shouldn't have stood by her man, literally, and looked crushed - she should have issued a statement dumping his ass. Then, at the same time, I feel like that kind of decision is between her and her God and her shrink and so forth and giving a feminist seal of disapproval to her actions seems kind of weird to me. Of course it seems even weirder that I should be in a position to comment on feminist seals of disapproval, so I might as well just work my way out of this particular thread.

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Obama's pastor was right

Submitted by John B. Cannon on March 17, 2008 - 10:47pm

Has anyone noticed how Obama and Clinton have been rushing to outdo each other in "rejecting and denouncing" controversial figures associated with their campaigns? First it was Obama, with Farrakhan. I was disappointed to see Obama "reject and denounce" Farrakhan himself - rather than rejecting and denouncing his anti-Semitic statements, which are worthy of being rejected. But I figured it was par for the course. Farrakhan has always been a lightning rod of presidential politics; Obama was really just distancing himself (again) from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Then there was Samantha Power, who is an annoying apostle of human rights liberalism, I believe, and I wasn't sad to see her go. Then there was Geraldine Ferraro, on the Clinton side, who doesn't seem to have aged gracefully, making remarks which might have had some core sense to them but were expressed in basically openly racist terms.

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"Two Buck Huck" and Class in the Republican Presidential Race

Submitted by John B. Cannon on February 19, 2008 - 3:52pm

Mike Huckabee is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee. Though he’s still in the race, Republican insiders have started endorsing John McCain by the droves. This includes many Republican leaders who don’t like McCain much (criticizing his “liberal” stances on immigration, tax cuts, and campaign finance), and some who have a lot of affinities with Huckabee’s base, such as Oliver North. Pundits who have been very critical of McCain, such as Rush Limbaugh, have been asked to tone it down in the name of party unity.

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