Portside

There are some new things on Portside that we are pleased to be able to call your attention to.

LeftRoots, an organization of Leftists engaged in mass organizing in the USA, is committed to developing individual and collective skills necessary to formulate, evaluate and carry out strategy to build 21st century socialism. Points of unity, organizing and study are integrated to strengthen efforts to challenge capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy hetero-patriarchy and create strategies for cultivating democratic, protagonist-lead and transform social movements.

“It’s ugly, it’s vicious, it’s brutal” describes Israel in Palestine — and why Gaza is “the hood on steroids” says Cornel West speaking with Stanford Professor David Palumbo-Liu about the divestment effort and Palestinian activism. The interview ranges from how the issue of Israel-Palestine is registering not only with young people, but also with older progressives and intellectuals, and about the linkages between civil rights struggles in the US and abroad.

In January 2015, the International Campaign for Responsible Technology (ICRT), the GoodElectronics Network plus more than 60 expert allies from 15 countries met, discussed and drafted a CALL concerning the hazards of chemicals used in the global electronics supply chain. "A Challenge to the Global Electronics Industry to Adopt Safer and More Sustainable Products and Practices, and Eliminate Hazardous Chemicals, Exposures and Discharges" is organizing for endorsements.

Seniors at Albuquerque's Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School voted online to hold a Communist-themed prom they quickly dubbed “prom-munism.” Meanwhile, caught between a rock and a Marxist place, school officials seem for now to be hedging their bourgeois bets.

This weekend, thousands of people -- including one-fifth of the U.S. Congress and President Obama -- are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the famous Selma to Montgomery march. The irony is rich: The 1965 Selma march -- and the violent "Bloody Sunday" caused by Alabama troopers -- is credited with speeding passage of the Voting Rights Act, Yet voting rights in the South and the Voting Rights Act itself are in their most precarious position in half a century.

The attack on voting rights has spread to virtually every state in the country. From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-nine states (Idaho is the lone exception). Half the states in the country have adopted measures making it harder to vote. The Selma anniversary offers lawmakers a prime opportunity to move from symbolism to substance.

The following article was published in Pravda one week before the first celebration of the “Day of International Solidarity among the Female Proletariat” on March 8, 1913. In St Petersburg this day was marked by a call for a campaign against women workers’ lack of economic and political rights and for the unity of the working class, led by the self-emancipation of women workers.

Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America’s workers’ comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found. The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty.

This International Women’s Day, celebrate Henrietta Leavitt, who took us beyond the stars and into the galaxies.