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.
See the latest issue...
View the archives...
Subscribe!
Write a letter to the editor...
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)
Donate
Solidarity depends on the generous contributions of its friends and allies to continue its work. Please consider giving!
User login
- 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
- I like your blog,and also
14 sec ago - Closets
12 hours 44 min ago - Closets
13 hours 24 min ago - Article Review
1 day 10 hours ago - you did a wonderful job.
2 days 10 hours ago - Douceur.
1 week 8 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
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.”
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...
Mayor Bloomberg's war against the homeless continues
The June 24th New York Times reported that, in yet another effort to apply a “market based philosophy” to the problems of the poor, NYC's Bloomberg administration would seek to decrease funding from nonprofit shelter providers unable to place their clients within 6 months.
By the same token, the clients could be ejected for infringements such as refusing to accept a subsidized apartment. Apparently this rule holds even if the apartment has poor conditions or isn’t large enough to accommodate the client’s entire family.
Mayor Bloomberg is running for his third term after ramming through city legislation to overturn term limits. Despite this, and despite his recent angry outbursts at reporters – one of which was aimed at a blogger in a wheelchair who accidentally dropped his recorder during a press conference – his campaign is widely considered to be uncontested. (He's spent over $19 million so far).
He has won endorsements from liberal celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg – who hosted a June 8th event billed as an “intimate, candid, one-on-one, tete-a-tete, no-holds-barred conversation with our favorite candidate for Mayor” -- and openly gay politicians like City Council Speaker Chris Quinn.
Today he snagged an endorsement from the Irish Voice, which cited his “incredible philanthropy” as one reason for the endorsement. (On the other hand, the Village Voice speculated that the lengthy interview that the press-adverse Bloomberg granted the Irish Voice could’ve had something to do with it.)
In the midst of all this, Bloomberg’s war against the poor and homeless continues unabated.
Deputy mayor Linda Gibbs tapped into the Bloomberg administration’s brand of sadistic neo-liberal psychology to explain their most recent policy move of decreased funding and eviction: “We want them to overcome homelessness more quickly. We believe they are in shelter far longer than they need to be.”
Advocates responded that it’s probably not a good idea to throw people out in the street with no place to go.
To this Gibbs insisted that “the families need to understand that they can’t just thumb their nose at the rules and have no consequences.”
It was only six weeks ago that the City started trying to collect rent from shelter residents with jobs.
Homeless people and their allies know this is nothing new. That doesn't make it less infuriating.
Homelessness as a Disorder?
"They" should "overcome homelessness more quickly." How brilliant! As if homelessness were a medical or psychological condition, or an addiction, like gambling. Maybe our beneficent City managers should prescribe a drug for it!
And it's too true that the sad character of our times is boldly on display in this "election". The Council might bicker against the Mayor on this or that. Mainstream organizations might take issue with a policy of his. But when it comes down to it, these folks have always-already compromised their integrity and humanity and hitched their horses to Bloomberg. So the Council abolishes term limits, and there's a gleeful NARAL President on Bloomberg's TV ads now reminding us how confident she is that he understands and defends women's rights.
(On the term limits and election, the Indypendent ran a cool article proposing that - as Bloomberg is already guaranteed victory - we just bypass the formalities of actually having an election and instead demand the millions he's paying for ads and glossy mailings and robocalls go to providing needed public services in NYC. http://www.indypendent.org/2009/05/14/bill-the-billionaire/#hide).
Bloomberg represents, in stark form, something interesting about neoliberal ideology. It's pretty philosophical for him, in fact. The ideology can bend this way or that on the more social issues, and has no problem supporting some human rights in their narrow, legalistic form. The real thing for neoliberalism, as he reminds us all the time, is class. Or rather, neoliberalism's total erasure of class or structural inequality as a category of it's thought structure. It's all about choice, "opportunity", and the individual's rights and responsibilities.
A good example. In the 1960's LBJ, a Liberal of the classic variety, declared a "War on Poverty" and it was actually possible to talk about public and state provision of collective welfare programs. Cut to today, with a global economic crisis and unemployment at its highest levels in generations. And what does Bloomberg, a neoliberal, do? Opens up "financial empowerment" offices. Instead of public programs to provide meaningful support for people, we get people passing out shitty brochures in spiffy offices, "counseling" the poor and indebted on their need to make lifestyle changes, work and sacrifice harder, and "seize opportunities" for "financial freedom".
Old school liberalism minimally understood class inequality and at times was compelled to appeal to the poor with almost real programs. (Of course, only so long as profit margins allowed, and so long as the working class and poor agreed to never independently organize.) Neoliberalism, though, is contemptuous of the poor and the worker, actively strips away minimal supports from them, and vindictively punishes the dispossessed in order to reinforce the ideology of "individual opportunity" at every turn. It's actually possible for the neoliberal to say publicly, as Bloomberg did recently, that "one can argue that if you make more money, you deserve more money."
another example of poverty as pathology
I'm glad that we still have social services in this city, but the "financial empowerment centers" (described below) seem to understand poverty as a function of individual incompetence rather than as a social condition.
Credit counseling can be useful, but budget management doesn't mean anything when you don't have any money. And is anyone offering free counseling to notoriously mismanaged government agencies like the MTA?
Anyway, here's what the Mayor's press release said:
"At a time when many New Yorkers are finding it harder to make ends meet, the counselors at the City's Financial Empowerment Centers will help with money management, budgeting, financial planning, credit counseling, negotiating with creditors, finding affordable banking services, government benefit screenings and referrals to other services and organizations."
Post new comment