Socialism

On Saturday night, I witnessed a ballroom full of stout Midwesterners—railroad men and laborers, college professors and students, retirees and young parents—stand and say, in unison, “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” There, in the salt-of-the-earth town of Terre Haute, Indiana, I saw the line of solidarity that runs from America’s deep past into its future. It’s still running. Have no fear.

By now, San Francisco is famous not just for unaffordable rent, but also for its acrimonious debates about how to solve the problem. One well-funded contingent asserts it’s all about making it easier and cheaper to build privately owned homes, but as even the corporate media is now noting, we’ve done a lot of that, and housing isn’t forthcoming. In an unusually frank comment, an advocate for this market-oriented approach admitted at a public hearing, “One of the challenges we face in San Francisco is we need the rent to go back up to get housing to work” Clearly, private development is, at best, limited in what good it can do. We need something more.

The second election of Donald Trump hasn’t deterred Mogilles. She and so many other Southern workers — particularly Black and immigrant Southerners — have been fighting proto-Trumps and mini-Trumps for decades. They’re used to the politics of divide and conquer, to overt racism, to having to organize despite anti-union laws and state-level preemption of local attempts to improve lives. These workers have lessons to teach the rest of the country about resistance, survival, and building institutions that wield power effectively. They know better than anyone how to face a loss and come back swinging. They also understand, despite the region’s meager union density, the power of workplace organizing to fight political overreach by the forces of organized capital.

In a series of letters to Marty Glaberman and the Facing Reality Publishing Committee from the early 1960s, C. L. R. James refers several times to the urgent task of producing an English-language version of the hitherto untranslated Russian-language text, Октябрьская революция и фабзавкомы (The October Revolution and the Factory Committees, 1927). Writing from London – James had been deported from the United States in 1953 – in the aftermath of the breakup of the Correspondence Publishing Committee after a painful split, the Factory Committees text looms large in James’s attempt to guide what remained of that organization. James minces no words, describing the Factory Committees as “the proletarian counterpart (the modern historical symbol of our problems today, the practical concrete problems of the working class) [to what Marx’s] Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts represented in theory.”1

Cuba is, undeniably, a single-party state. No one outside the Communist Party apparatus holds much formal power. But it is also a country where, in 2019, a three-month nationwide debate helped shape a new constitution. That constitution reintroduced habeas corpus, set presidential term limits, banned discrimination, and enshrined both private property and the presumption of innocence. The government held over 133,000 community meetings where millions of citizens participated and submitted proposals for revisions. Citizens in each of Cuba’s 168 municipalities gathered to debate clauses, propose changes, and push Cuba’s National Assembly to amend the draft before it went to a referendum. The island went through a similar process to ratify its radically progressive Family Code in 2022, and is engaged in a similar process currently around reforming its Labor Code. Democracy in Cuba is participatory and municipalized, a different conception of democracy than those accepted by the Global North. That may not be satisfactory to critics and even to some Cubans, but it is a far cry from the system implied by calling Cuba a “dictatorship.”

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Assata Shakur, a famed political activist who was found guilty of shooting a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 and later granted political asylum in Cuba, has died. She was 78.

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Unions improve the lives of their members by raising wages, increasing overall economic security, making workplaces safer and generally giving workers a voice on the job. But less well understood are the contributions unions make to social well-being beyond their memberships.

Over 1,000 incarcerated workers fought the fires that devastated Los Angeles last winter. Each day, they earned less than a quarter of what the average non-incarcerated firefighter makes in a single hour. These miniscule wages save the state of California around $90 million a year. Meanwhile, due to the lack of basic worker protections afforded to incarcerated firefighters, they face a much higher risk of injury and exposure to harmful particulate matter than the average firefighter.

When the girls of Sugared + Bronzed — a salon chain specializing in spray tanning and sugaring hair removal — first heard about labor unions, we didn’t expect that workers like us could have a union of our own. Unions were for people who had dangerous jobs, ones that were physically demanding with chemical exposures, or for workers in the entertainment industry who put on a show for hours and hours every day. Our jobs weren’t anything like that!

On September 13, 2024, I sat on a steel cylinder stool and placed a plastic tray of food on a steel table in front of me in the mess hall of New York’s Green Haven Correctional Facility. I had arrived there the evening before, transferred from Sullivan Correctional Facility, about seventy miles west of Green Haven. JH, a man I had known from other facilities over the past nineteen years of my incarceration, sat across from me giving me the skinny on the joint. His taller-than-average frame shifted as he surveilled the area, giving an occasional nod.

Starting August 31, dozens of ships from the “Global Sumud Flotilla” will set sail in an effort to break the deadly blockade on Gaza. This exemplary mission, born of indignation and the refusal to remain silent in the face of the ongoing horror in Palestine, far exceeds previous ones in its scale: delegations from 44 different countries will participate, on several dozen boats. The first part of the flotilla will leave Spain on August 31, with another dozen boats planning to set sail from Tunisia on September 4. This initiative will include the Trotskyist Fraction, the International to which Left Voice belongs.

In recent years, colleges and universities have become a central hub for labor organizing. University staff, graduate workers, and contingent faculty have won significant labor campaigns, as have tenured faculty at public universities. And faculty at some private universities have revived and super-charged organizing within non-union chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Yet despite this organizing energy, tenured faculty at private universities have generally not unionized. Why is this?

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign demonstrates that in order for socialists to contest citywide elections, we must run campaigns that redefine and expand the Democratic electorate. At the core of this new coalition are newly politicized younger New Yorkers, rent-stabilized tenants, reengaged “Bernie millennials,” and voters drawn to Mamdani’s vision of affordability and to his commitment to standing up for Palestinian rights, with this last pillar particularly resonating with Muslim and South Asian communities.

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An MIT website asks “Why are long sentences evil?”, and we find the answer in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

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