Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To rebuild the trade union movement, to meaningfully defend the right to strike, and to begin a serious fightback against the imposition of the costs of capitalism’s crisis on the working class, we need to put our energy into workplace and community organising
On September 24, 2022, more than 30,000 people occupied the main roads of downtown Seoul, South Korea, for the nation’s largest climate justice march.
Workers and unions are among those who have the most to gain by climate protection that produces good jobs and greater equality.
While Washington struggles over job and climate programs, unions around the country are making their own climate-protecting, justice-promoting jobs programs.
Municipalist syndicalism broadly means democratizing unions as a means to democratizing local and regional public power. This is done through advancing an anti-racist dual power agenda for the labor movement by building and acting with communities of color on issues beyond the job.
The lesson here is straightforward. Building coalitions outside more narrow identity groups is essential to winning elections and later in the halls of legislatures and the offices of chief executives to enacting legislation.
Bullshit jobs are ones where the person doing them secretly believes that if the job (or even sometimes the entire industry) were to disappear, it would make no difference — or perhaps, as in the case of say telemarketers, lobbyists, or many corporate law firms, the world would be a better place.
Two ways we can honor unions at this time of trial are to ask others to join union picket lines and to learn from their innovations and successes for whatever campaigns we are committed to today.
Incipient anti-fascist coalitions hold the potential to call a new politics into existence in the United States. Socialist municipalism could be a means for both resisting the far right as well as articulating a libertarian socialist alternative. While there is much to critique in Bookchin — even from a municipalist angle — the basic guiding principles hold.
Forging a force that can effectively counter Trumpism requires change that will involve tension within each movement as well as between them, but that may be necessary if either is to have a future.
As capitalism continues to undergo economic and environmental crises, more common projects between the new economy and labor movements may lead to a revival within mainstream labor of the old cooperative commonwealth concept.
What it boils down to is ensuring an equal emphasis on the “worker” and “owner” of being a worker-owner.
