Author: R

  • Mexican Labor Year in Review (2015)

    2015 was another in a series of very bad years for Mexico. Mexican working people continued to experience the difficulties of a stagnant economy, the violence of the drug war, repression of labor and social movements, and the rule of corrupt political parties. Few workers had legitimate labor unions with which to resist employer and…

  • Chevron Goes Another Round With Richmond

    Chevron is a company used to getting its own way, particularly in communities around the world where it operates major refineries. For the last eight years, progressive elected officials in Richmond, CA., and their grassroots organizational allies, have made doing “business as usual” a lot harder for Chevron in the East Bay, a corner of…

  • A Renewed Strategic Perspective on Socialist Work in the Labor Movement

    Preamble This February, the Solidarity Labor Commission held a two-day retreat at which we reflected on Solidarity’s labor work and the rank-and-file union perspective that has guided it for decades. This outline of a renewed strategic perspective is what emerged from our discussions. Although there is much here that is new, this perspective reflects our…

  • Descent Into Butchery: Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza

    There should never have been any doubt that another Israeli assault on Gaza would occur, with the inevitable accompanying mass atrocities. That’s not necessarily because it serves anyone’s strategic interests–but simply because Israel’s brutalities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the strangulation of Gaza by Israel, the new military-dominated regime in Egypt, and the latest collapse…

  • The People’s History: The Birth of the New Feminist Army in Texas

    An entire year has passed since the shouts heard around the world reverberated throughout the Texas Capitol and forced the state legislature to come to a screeching halt. Rise Up/Levanta Texas formed in late June 2013 as a grassroots response to a growing awareness that our bodies, stories, and voices were being made invisible within…

  • A Revolutionary in the Auto Plant: In Remembrance of General Baker (1941-2014)

    After a long and debilitating illness, General Baker died of congestive heart failure on May 18, 2014. Six hundred people attended his memorial service–held at United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 600, his local–six days later. Among the speakers were half a dozen UAW officers, including International President Bob King and UAW Vice President Jimmy Settles.

  • Justice for Galeano! Stop the War Against Zapatista Communities!

    The National Committee of Solidarity has endorsed the statement below from An Attack On Us All: On May 2, 2014, in the Zapatista territory of La Realidad, Chiapas, Mexico, the group CIOAC-Histórica [with the participation of the Green Ecological Party and the National Action Party (PAN)], planned and executed a paramilitary attack on unarmed Zapatista…

  • Working Class Organization and Strategy

    Labor activist/intellectual Kim Moody, author of In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization and Strategy in the United States and a founder of Labor Notes, and Sheila Cohen, author of Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power, and How to Get It Back and Notoriously Militant: The Story of a Union Branch, discuss the present state and the future possibilities of the…

  • After UAW Defeat at VW, Finding a Way Forward

    Last month, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election was held in Chattanooga, Tennessee to determine whether the United Auto Workers (UAW) would represent over 1,500 Volkswagen workers in the three year old Volkswagen Chattanooga Assembly Plant. The UAW lost the election, 712-626, after campaigning for a “works council” labor-management partnership model, which would legally…

  • The New “TINA”?: NUMSA and its United Front

    “There is no alternative to discarding the theories and practices of capitalism, if we must save the Earth and its living systems. No amount of cosmetic reforms either in the centre of the global capitalist system nor anywhere in its periphery can hide the most obvious fact today: at a time when humanity has the…