Road Maps, Dead Ends, and the Search for Fresh Ground: How Can We Build the Socialist Movement in the 21st Century?

By Dan DiMaggio
Cultural Logic, 2010

“It is easy for good to triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the Mafia.” – Kurt Vonnegut

For the past seven-plus years I have devoted much of my life to effort to build a socialist movement in the United States. As a member of one of the many tiny socialist groups on the U.S. left, I have organized dozens of anti-war, labor solidarity, immigrant rights, and other rallies and campaigns.

I have toured the country to speak at college campuses about socialism. I have set up numerous study groups and conferences and written and edited hundreds of articles for socialist publications. Most people might say, “Dan, you’re crazy if you think that socialism can be achieved in a country like the United States!” But despite the challenges, I hope to continue doing this for the next 50 or so years.

Lately, though, I’ve started to wonder just how the **** a viable socialist movement can actually be built in the U.S.

Read more HERE. (pdf)

Chile rising

Fault Lines follows Chile's student protest movement and examines the underlying issues driving the anger.

Al Jazeera
January 3, 2012

Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades.

The students are demanding free education, and an end to the privatisation of their schools and universities. The free-market based approach to education was implemented by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet in his last days in power.

The protests are causing a political crisis for Sebastian Pinera, the country's president. But what are the underlying issues driving the anger?

As the demonstrations in Chile coincide with protests erupting globally, Fault Lines follows the Chilean student movement during their fight in a country plagued by economic inequality.

A Movement Without Demands?

By Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean
Possible Futures
January 3, 2012

The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want? Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants! In part because of the excitement accumulating around the gap the movement opened up in the deadlocked US political scene—having done the impossible in creating a new political force it seemed as if the movement might even demand the impossible—many of those in and around Occupy Wall Street have also treated the absence of demands as a benefit, a strength. Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice.

China’s coming crises

Patrick Bond
Triple Crisis
January 4, 2012

With economic crashes and ecological calamities so prevalent in 2011, concluding with a do-little November G20 meeting in Cannes and a do-nothing December climate summit in Durban, January has opened with intense fear of eurozone deterioration. In this uncertain context loom the two most potent forces shaping the period ahead: China’s capital accumulation process and class struggle.

Because of the country’s uneven and combined development, within an extraordinary boom we can see the beginnings of a potentially world-scale bust, plus prodigious socioeconomic battles from below alongside brutal attacks on the environment such as coal-fired power and the Three Gorges Dam (notwithstanding exceptional ‘green economy’ advances).

Three Sask. CEOs make top 100 list

CBC News
Jan 3, 2012

Three of Saskatchewan's top executives have made the list of the highest paid 100 CEOs in Canada, ranked by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The highest paid CEOs in Saskatchewan in 2010 are Potash Corp.'s Bill Doyle, Cameco's Gerry Grandey and Viterra's Mayo Schmidt.

Schmidt: Only $4,548,711/year

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Doyle was eleventh on the list with a salary of $11,601,796. Grandey was fifty-fifth making $6,826,500. Schmidt came in eighty-ninth with a total of $4,548,711 a year.
 

Grandey: Laughs to the bank

Though Doyle's salary didn't change much from what he was reported to have made in 2009, Grandey topped his yearly salary by more than $2-million, while Schmidt took a hit of about $200,000.

Doyle: Makes ends meet

The average CEO yearly salary in Canada was reported to be at about $8.38 million in 2010.

Privatizing Education in Saskatchewan

Green Party of Saskatchewan
January 3, 2012

Mother Theresa Middle Jesuit school benefits

Regina, Saskatchewan - Green Party leader Victor Lau called on Education Minister Donna Harpauer today to reverse the government's recent decision to privatize basic education.

"Public funding of private religious schools is piece-meal privatization. A select few will benefit from extra money to supplement their private tuition fees. The students in the public system will continue to lose ground."

"The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has shown continually through their Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) that broadly funded public education systems tend to create the best education outcomes. Minister Harpauer's refusal to follow best practices in basic education is jeopardizing our children's future."

"The Green Party promotes decentralized decision making within the public system. Parents, particularly those without means to afford private tuition, need more control over educational choices for their children. Creative solutions that give more local control can be found in other provinces; we should follow their example. One Saskatchewan means great education for everybody."

In the Year of the Pig (full movie, 1968)

Yahoo movies

Celebrated and controversial documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio made IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG, criticizing American involvement in the Vietnam War, during the height of its intensification in 1968.

Like his other constructed documentaries, de Antonio takes newsreel and archival footage, along with existing interviews, and uses them to explore the history of Vietnam between the Second World War and the civil war that America would become involved with. Using the very words of those who escalated the conflict against them, de Antonio's film condemns the American involvement in the war by providing disturbing footage of its terrible consequences.

IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG is the forerunner to the political documentaries of the George W. Bush period.

Is Socialism Utopian?

By Bill Fletcher Jr
Ask a Socialist
December 15, 2011

“Utopian” has almost become a put-down or a suggestion that one is being unrealistic, if not naive. But I would argue that socialists must be utopian, not in the sense of expecting fundamental change instantaneously, but in the sense of holding in their very being the deep desire for the realization of a world completely unlike our own. It is that for which generations have fought and it is that ideal that has kept many a freedom fighter going despite tremendous adversities.

What is especially interesting about the history of capitalism is that with its rise there also emerged the impulse towards alternatives. These alternatives were not necessarily elaborated as eloquently as were the theories behind capitalism and, specifically, democratic capitalism, but they were nevertheless important. The oppressive and often criminal nature of rising capitalism brought with it revolutionary movements that challenged either the system itself or components of the system. These revolts took various forms, such as the slave revolts that spanned the entire period of the African slave trade.

Germany: Neo-Nazis Target Left Party Officials

By Markus Deggerich
Spiegel Online
January 2, 2012

Barely a week goes by without a neo-Nazi attack on politicians from Germany's far-left Left Party. Extremists smash the windows of offices or private homes, daub graffiti on walls, cut car brake cables and make anonymous death threats. In response, authorities are beefing up security for senior party officials.

Gregor Gysi, the parliamentary group leader of the opposition far-left Left Party, feels surrounded by neo-Nazis whenever he visits his constituency office in the Berlin district of Niederschöneweide. The area is a bastion of right-wing extremists who have been renting more and more office space and shops nearby. "They want this to become 'their' street," says Gysi, adding that they damage or daub graffiti on the windows of his office almost every night. "But I won't let them drive me out," he vows.

Music in the struggle: Chile 2011

Chilean students take on the government with a million strong march

This Year, Put the Country Ahead of the Party

May I suggest a resolution for 2012? Defeat Stephen Harper's government.

By Murray Dobbin
TheTyee.ca
2 January 2012

As we enter the new year, the prospects for defeating the Harper government in 2015 seem uncertain at best. And yet if those who care about the country were musing over a new year's resolution, that would be it, a dedication to this single overarching purpose. Even if Harper is soundly defeated in the next election, it will take a decade to reverse the damage he has already done. If he wins a second majority, it will take a generation or more.

There is a deep malaise in Canadian democracy rooted, it seems, in a profound alienation from politics and radically lowered expectations of what is possible from government. Much of this is the result of a deliberate strategy of voter-suppression employed by the Conservatives, a strategy of making politics so offensive and good government so unimaginable that millions of people simply tune out, as if it has nothing to do with them.

Cuba Va! January 1... the 53rd anniversary of the Cuban revolution

“The present is struggle. The future is ours.” - Che Guevara

The End of the Strike?

What is the future of labour’s time-honoured tactic?

By Hans Rollman
Briarpatch magazine
Nov 1, 2011

Less than two months into their majority mandate, the federal Conservatives passed legislation that left the Canadian labour movement reeling.

The Harper government’s use of back-to-work legislation to force an end to labour disputes at Air Canada and Canada Post was just the latest blow, however, to the labour movement’s most time-honoured tactic: the strike.

The use of strikes by unions to pressure employers in labour disputes has been steadily undermined in Canada in recent decades, not only by the use of coercive legislation to end – and at times pre-empt – strikes, but also by the increasing presence of transnational corporations (TNCs) with sufficient economic power to sit out strikes in a given country, or import replacement workers when local regulations allow.

Contracorriente: Discussion with Michael Lebowitz

Interview by Aurelio Alonso
Cuba — February 2010

Michael Lebowitz is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Some of his recent books include Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class, Palgrave Macmillan (2003), Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century, Monthly Review Press (2006) and Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, Monthly Review Press (2010).

2011's reasons to be cheerful

By Keith Flett
Morning Star
30 December 2011

The year-end articles which fill the media at this time of year have noted in the most part that it has been a momentous year.

Comparisons have been made with 1968 and, reaching back, to 1848. Most have taken the comment little further than that.

However the veteran Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has given an interview to the BBC which situates the question in a sounder historical framework.

Hobsbawm argues that the events of 2011 are similar to those of 1848 because they started with people, often middle class, on the streets making protests.