Kellogg’s workers held a 78-day strike over the company’s two-tier wage system. Reported from Battle Creek.
labor / workers
Free speech and revolution
December 13, 2021Workers are key in the fight for freedom of speech as is the need for theory grounded in a philosophy of freedom.
Readers’ Views: November-December 2021, Part One
November 19, 2021Readers’ Views on Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives 2021-2022; Labor shortage?; Workers as reason; Support El Milagro workers!; Detroit women’s march; Chapelle’s sexism; Afghans dead and buried; Betrayal of Haitians; and Which side are you on?
Handicap This!: November-December 2021
Handicap This! takes up an inhuman “assisted suicide” bill being debated in the House of Lords in UK; the working conditions of caregivers; the effects of COVID-19 on government-funded caregiver agencies in Ireland; and the danger the Taliban pose for disabled people in Afghanistan.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Automation and the New Humanism
November 14, 2021Questions raised by the actions and words of the workers in today’s militant labor insurgency demand a philosophical response. Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. began with taking seriously what workers have raised since the onset of automation in the coal mines: What kind of labor should a human being do?
A call for solidarity from Sudan
November 11, 2021Call from The Sudanese Workers Alliance for the Restoration of Trade Unions to engage in a protracted struggle against the military coup, to engage in civil disobedience and a general strike until the downfall of the counterrevolution.
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.
Call for solidarity from Sudan
October 26, 2021A call for solidarity from the Sudanese Workers Alliance for the Restoration of Trade Unions against the counter-revolutionary coup by the al-Bashir Security apparatus and the warlords who traffic in the suffering of the people.
Nationwide walkout of Nabisco workers
September 12, 2021Nabisco workers nationwide struck over horrendous hours and shifts.
Rideshare & truck drivers fight bosses
September 10, 2021Rideshare drivers struck on July 21; and trucking bosses want robots behind the wheel.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: A Post-World War II View of Marx’s Humanism, 1843-1883; Marxist Humanism, 1950s-1980s
September 8, 2021This essay probes ways to make new beginnings in a period of reaction. It includes some of the themes of her work toward the book she had tentatively titled “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: ‘The Party’ and Forms of Organization Born out of Spontaneity.”
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.
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2021-2022: The dialectic of crises worldwide is testing liberation struggles
As another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swells, too many people are stuck in a recurring nightmare. The world faces multiple existential crises–a global state-capitalist system shot through with racism, xenophobia, sexism, heterosexism, ableism and authoritarianism. That calls for the confluence of labor and liberation struggles through a unifying philosophy based in the dialectic of liberation in those movements.
Autonomous trucks vs drivers’ pay
July 29, 2021Large trucking companies are teaming up with others to inaugurate test runs of “Autonomous Relay Convoys” where an autonomous truck is programmed to follow a human driving a leader truck, as a way to eliminate human truck drivers and lower wages.
Volvo workers defy UAW to resume strike
July 5, 2021UAW workers on June 7 resumed their strike at the Volvo Truck Plant in Dublin, Va., the day after rejecting for the second time the tentative agreement that Local 2069 Bargaining Committee presented to them. The vote to reject, like the vote on May 16 to strike, was by more than 90%.
Forcing workers back to unlivable wages
July 4, 2021Missouri is one of 25 states on track to reject by July 2021 the $300 a week federal supplemental unemployment insurance. The payments issued to shore up the economy in response to the pandemic, and in fear of unrest that unemployment levels unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s might create, were not scheduled to end until September.
Chinese youth, labor and Marxism
A U.S. youth looks at the “lying flat” movement in China seeing it as a revolt against the capitalist mode of production and the alienation, sexism, racism and depression that it brings….Soon the Chinese Communist Party will see the Subject is not the Party or capital but human beings.”
The injustice of India’s surging COVID-19 deaths
In person report of the COVID-10 pandemic in India which is in the throes of a second wave. There are horrific scenes of people dying due to the lack of medical oxygen, hospital beds and so on. There is neither enough space for the dead in the crematoriums and graveyards, nor enough wood for the pyres.
Colombian strikers reject dispossession and repression
June 29, 2021In-person report on the revolt in Colombia and the history of displacement, repression and revolt from which it flows.
Peru: Election conflict during COVID
A Peruvian post-presidential election battle is raging between Pedro Castillo, a union activist and former schoolteacher, and Keiko Fujimori, a right-wing neoliberal and daughter of the jailed authoritarian former President Alberto Fujimori.
Colombia: The struggle for a better country
June 17, 2021In-person report on the revolt in Colombia and the history of displacement, repression and revolt from which it flows.
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!
World in View: Africa in the crosshairs of world imperialism
The capitalist world remains in a deep crisis and now faces a crossroads. U.S., Chinese, and European imperialism all have aging populations and mounting debt . They need to find new sources of labor and natural resources to plunder. Africa, with the youngest population of any major region and abundant mineral wealth, is a target.
The Bay Area celebrates May Day
May 4, 2021A participant describes the May Day demonstrations in San Francisco Bay Area, especially in San Jose.
Coming soon: ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
March 11, 2021Announcement and pre-publication offer for a new publication, ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
Unemployed workers organize and march, demanding relief
Newly organized as Northern California Unemployed Committee, people marched to draw attention to the disparities within capitalism exacerbated by COVID-19. They demanded the federal government stop taxing unemployment benefits and that it restore the $600 per week unemployment supplement.
Thoughts from the outside: Lucky I have a job?
What 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.
Karen Lewis, 1953-2021
The City of Chicago lost a powerful voice for teachers, and for workers in general, with the death of Karen Lewis, former President of the Chicago Teachers Union.
Youth: Learning from Amazon protest
A young revolutionary writes about participating in a protest for the first time, in solidarity with Alabama Amazon workers.
Battle for living wage
The fight for a living wage continues, after Republican and Democratic senators killed the $15 minimum wage provision in the relief bill.
Review: Lessons of the pandemic, 1918-1919
This review of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,” by John M. Barry, views the 1918 deadly flu pandemic with eyes of today’s COVID-19 reality.
Readers’ views, January-February 2021: part one
January 31, 2021Readers’ Views on: Trumpist Coup and Fascist Threat; Black Revolt and Social Movements; Right’s War on the Mind; Love Is Love; The Unfinished Battle; Women’s Liberation; What Is Capitalism? What Is Socialism?; Ray Bazmore
Woman as Reason: Sarah White (Sarah Hamer) 1958-2020
January 30, 2021The movement lost a powerful voice for workers’ liberty, self-development and freedom when Sarah White died of a heart attack on Oct. 5, 2020.
Double scourge of fascism and COVID-19 shakes the world: Vaccine rollout inflames global inequalities
Vaccine 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.
Uber and Lyft put drivers in peonage with the passage of Proposition 22
November 29, 2020Proposition 22 will allow app-based transportation and delivery sector employers to keep classifying their employees as private contractors. They will not have to offer workers any of the benefits afforded to employee-classified workers under state law.
P.O. workers thwart Trump’s vote thefts
November 28, 2020Postal workers were at the front line of resistance to Trump’s rigging of the November 3 election.
Readers’ views, November-December 2020: part one
Election battles, reaching for the future, and the pull of the past; Sabotage of the post office; Food recycling workers strike; Anti-labor statue downed; Oil and biden; COVID-19: where’s the vision?; Racism and fascism; Polish women’s revolutionary moment; News & Letters is back in print!
Workers oppose China’s forced labor camps
Labor unions and human rights groups demand action against China’s incarceration of Uyghurs and forced labor.
Black-led revolt ensures defeat of Trump’s racist campaign
November 27, 2020Racism and the resistance to it permeated the election, from the Trump campaign’s appeal to white supremacy to the outpouring of Black organizing and votes, energized by the new stage of revolt sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. However, grave questions remain about where the U.S. and the world are heading. Movements from below will be challenged to resist the calls for “unity” under the capitalist umbrella and to continue to deepen their revolt against a “return to normal.”
Trump re-election battles concentrate system’s myriad crises
October 24, 2020In addition to pandemic, climate, and economic disasters, we face the specter of pre-emptive counter-revolution. Self-activity of masses in motion is needed not only to defeat Trump but to move beyond society that breeds Trumpism.
Amid election battles, masses demand no return to normal
August 29, 2020Nationwide Black-led revolt and white supremacist backlash, class struggles and the ravages of a pandemic and economic collapse are taking place amid election battles and attacks on democracy.
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.
The Gig Economy’s Highway toward Increasing Surplus Labor
July 14, 2020A veteran of working in the gig economy shares first-hand experience and analysis.
COVID-19 has generated a lot of “free time” for workers, but how can we create full, human “free time”?
May 12, 2020The measures adopted in the face of the spread of COVID-19 in the world have caused billions of people to suddenly have excess “free time.” But this is not a full “free time,” conducive to the enjoyment and development of new skills, but a “time without work” that is exacerbating the enormous economic contradictions already existing in our society. Is it possible to imagine and bring about a form of free time that is truly human time?
Global pandemic indicts capitalism
May 2, 2020The economic system leaves us all vulnerable and requires sacrificing healthcare workers, delivery drivers and other people doing essential work. I hope that this experience wakes more people up to the dangers and inhumanity of living under capitalism.
Virus makes nukes doubly deadly
Nuclear power corporations are exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic. The refueling and repair season occasions cross-country travel by teams of workers risking spread of the virus.
Meatpacking workers sacrificed
May 1, 2020Workers in meatpacking plants across the country are being sacrificed to what Karl Marx called capital’s “werewolf hunger for surplus labor” as packing companies try to reap the benefits of the prevailing level of automation—but substituting intensified sweated labor for the capital investment of automation. If workers die from COVID-19, the capitalist doesn’t care.