A striking driver at an Amazon warehouse near Chicago speaks. We are demanding better pay, better working conditions, respect and to be treated as human beings.
Amazon
Readers’ Views: November-December 2022, Part One
November 11, 2022Readers’ Views on: Iran: Woman, Life, Freedom; Election Threats and Battles; Women’s Marches and Enemies; Sexist Supreme Court; Ukrainians Fight for Freedom; Para-Transit Disservice; Mike Davis; Labor Struggles, from Amazon…to the Bank.
Amazon Prime Day is for job actions
November 8, 2022On “Prime Day,” Amazon warehouse workers in Moreno Valley, Calif., filed enough signatures to schedule a union vote at their facility. On the same day, dozens of non-union Amazon workers walked out of warehouses in Stone Mountain and Buford, Ga., to rally for $24 per hour.
Film review: ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’
June 18, 2022Review of ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,’ states that it missed a great chance to be political in a meaningful way. Writer Katy Brand left out the hard part, creating characters who live in a safe world that doesn’t exist. You can’t comprehend prostitution, sex work and sex workers without talking about capitalism and how it alienates and destroys human relationships.
San Francisco holds May Day rally
May 20, 2022Participant report: the San Francisco May Day demonstration addressed labor organizing, bread and butter issues, and political repression in Iran and Turkey.
Workers self-organizing at Amazon
Workers at Amazon’s JFK8 facility on Staten Island voted in the first union shop in Amazon’s history. By talking to and supporting each other, the workers were able to stand up to unionbusters and create a union by self-organization.
Alabama coal miners keep strike alive
May 14, 2022By May Day 2022 coal miners at Warrior Met in Brookwood, Ala., had been on strike for a year and a month since they walked out April 1, 2021, to demand restoration of their wages, benefits and work rules. Strikers rejected a tentative contract as an insult. The company offered to restore just $1 more in wages.
Workers, from union to gig, reject rules that bosses try to reimpose
November 9, 2021Workers in the U.S. have made 2021 a year that ought to panic giant corporations and small store owners alike. The wave of strikes and other job actions this fall have exploded and not just in numbers.
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2021-2022: Part III. Economic contradictions
September 1, 2021The pandemic and the climate and ecological crisis struck when the world capitalist system had shown its inability to extricate itself from a prolonged economic slump. They deepened it. Despite the happy face that government and corporate economists paint, the opposite story is told by people’s lives.
The roots of May Day, its impact on Marx’s ‘Capital’ and today
June 13, 2021May Day and its celebrations became a good moment to explore the relationship between theory and the movement from practice by revisiting Marx’s intimate connection to the issues that led to May Day.
Editorial: Amazon union vote hides workers’ reality
May 8, 2021In the union vote at Amazon in Alabama, the overriding issue was the dehumanization of laboring activity underlying Amazon’s brutal working conditions. The tyrannical conditions begin from an algorithm that runs an army of robots that don’t get sick in a pandemic.
Readers’ Views: May-June 2021, part one
Readers’ Views on: Atlanta Racist Femicide; Women Rise in Australia; Chauvin and Racist Usa: Guilty!; Attacks on Civil Liberties; Black Lives Matter; Amazon Workers Resist; Berta Presente!; Burmese Masses Revolt; The Empire Strikes Out; Maâti Monjib Released!
Youth: Marx speaks to youth alienation
Young people keep taking matters into our own hands. Our time of total crises calls for a philosophy to help us understand the problems at the root of our misery and give us hope we can create a new society. This makes Marx a contemporary for youth, looking for a way out of life under capitalism’s hopeless future.
Thoughts from the outside: Lucky I have a job?
March 11, 2021What is essential for capital to reinforce its authority and what is essential for people to live as human beings are very different things. Seeing through the rhetoric of the “privilege of having a job,” the reality of life under capitalism becomes clear.
Rally for Amazon workers’ union drive
Participant report of a solidarity demonstration in Oakland in front of a Whole Foods store, as part of a national day of solidarity to support Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon workers struggling for union recognition.
Readers’ views, March-April 2021: part one
Readers’ Views on: Trumpism, Racism and the Specter of Fascism; Vaccine Inequality and Injustice; Organizing Amazon; Can Humanity Survive?; Criminal Injustice; Trust Women; Marx’s Humanism and Love; Why Read ‘N&L’?
Youth: Learning from Amazon protest
A young revolutionary writes about participating in a protest for the first time, in solidarity with Alabama Amazon workers.
Double scourge of fascism and COVID-19 shakes the world: Vaccine rollout inflames global inequalities
January 30, 2021Vaccine rollout has been mired in poor planning, profit-centered thinking and indifference, with discrimination both within countries and against poor countries. Worldwide, a rat race ensued.
The USPS is a continuing crime scene
August 28, 2020Postal workers find themselves on the frontlines of three fronts: saving their jobs under attack from the United States Postal Service under Postmaster Louis DeJoy; saving the USPS from the sabotage of DeJoy and Trump, and saving the integrity of U.S. elections.
III. Pandemic sets in motion the latent economic collapse
April 30, 2020Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part III: The Great Recession intensified the crises but also the revolt and, because of that, the counter-revolutionary trends that led to the Tea Party, Trumpism, and their analogues internationally.
Workers in revolt against Amazon, Uber, and Lyft
April 29, 2020Uber, Lyft, and Amazon workers struggle to hold their employers to account and demand protection from COVID-19 as well as a living wage and sick days.
Uber, Lyft, Amazon workers revolt!
April 2, 2020Uber, Lyft, and Amazon workers struggle to hold their employers to account and demand protection from COVID-19 as well as a living wage and sick days.
Pandemic as battlefield
March 30, 2020The battle against the COVID-19 pandemic is a battle over how society will change, mirroring the battle over how to confront and adapt to the climate and extinction crisis. Strikes are erupting across the world.
Readers’ views, March-April 2020: Part one
March 17, 2020Readers’ views on climate struggles; labor struggles; racist politics; election contradictions; Modi’s Kristallnacht?; anti-abortion terror; rewriting history; and women and culture.
Google and Amazon workers rebel
January 21, 2020Google and Amazon tech workers organize around the companies’ complicity in war, environmental destruction, and workplace safety.
They’ll be coming for the immigrants–and for you
July 22, 2019“We’ll be coming for you” begins with the immigrants of color but will not end there.
Amazon workers organize cross-border solidarity
June 27, 2019Excerpts of a talk by Polish Amazon worker/organizer Agnieszka Mróz, on a U.S. tour seeking cross-border solidarity among Amazon workers worldwide.
Karol Modzelewski, 1937-2019
May 10, 2019We mourn the passing of a great revolutionary, Karol Modzelewski, one of the leaders of Solidarity in Poland when it was a mass organization of workers against the state.
Editorial: Is nuclear war on the horizon?
March 6, 2019The retreat from even modest efforts to control nuclear weapons has brought humanity closer than ever to annihilation. President Donald Trump’s suspension of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Vladimir Putin’s Russia gins up an already accelerating new arms race.
III. The reality and the myth of contemporary capitalism
May 5, 2018We look at the world economic situation that must be changed: the role of state-capitalism, labor, climate change, the law of value, exploitation, alienation, and revolution and counter-revolution in Syria.
Workshop Talks: Workers not robots
October 26, 2015The workplace at Amazon.com is making employees physically and mentally ill which is a hallmark of production under capitalism. What happens at Amazon.com is not unusual and can be seen even in areas like healthcare, for example, at Kaiser.
Capitalism’s violence, masses’ revolt show need for total view
May 1, 2013The world today is riven between the creativity of masses in revolt and the violent degeneracy of counter-revolution, whose destructiveness even extends to the revived specter of nuclear war two decades after the collapse of the USSR. Such is the degeneracy of the globalized capitalist system, laden with destructive forces and sunk into structural crisis. The deep crisis is seen in the U.S. and abroad, economically, in unemployment and poverty, homelessness and hunger. It is seen politically, in new laws attacking workers and women, and new outbursts of racism. It is seen environmentally, with the advance of climate disruption and fake capitalistic solutions. It is seen in thought, as the lack of philosophy, of a total view, hampers the development of struggles from the U.S. to the revolutions of the Arab Spring facing counter-revolutions.