Portside

Victor Grossman reports from Germany, giving a European left perspective on the recently concluded G20 Summit in Hamburg. Was anything accomplished in polished conference rooms and luxurious hotel suites carefully protected from the wild, fiery street scenes? Was it worth hundreds of injured police officers and arrests and millions in damage? His answer: maybe.

Airline travelers are willing to compromise on personal comfort and convenience in return for lower fares and regularly scheduled flights. But I doubt the flying public would agree to deeply discount their own safety by letting the government hack away at an essential industry standard designed to protect flyers from inexperienced pilots.

China Miéville looks at the Revolution as a hopeful flashpoint that briefly showed the promise of socialist transformation, before descending first into an authoritarian nightmare and then today's corrupt capitalism. Written with an urgency designed for our era of struggle absent clear political ideologies or unified mass socialist organizations, Mieville focuses on the revolutionary moment, using his skill as a story teller to see the participants in real time.

Isolated examples exist of union resistance and victory. Important as these are, they do not yet approach the scale needed to respond to the challenges that labor faces in the coming years. But they show that it is still possible to strike, and it is still possible to win. In each case, building workplace union culture and organization was key. Broadening this model outwards could provide ways of reversing labor’s fortunes.

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"On Tuesday, the U.A.W. said a petition for a union election had been filed by employees at a Nissan plant in Mississippi with more than 6,000 workers. They asked for a vote within a month."

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was a well-known Cold War era CIA-sponsored organization whose role was to promote an international anti-communist, pro-US cultural policy. This latest study examines the well-funded and influential intellectual periodicals the CCF bankrolled all over the world.

We white radicals have a particular responsibility and crying need to organize as many white people as possible to break from imperialism and to see that their long term interests, as human beings and for a livable future for their children, lie in allying with the rest of humanity.

Drawing inspiration from the Highlander Folk School (1932-present), Citizenship Schools (1957-1965), and Freedom Schools (Summer 1964), the founding members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) believed that a learner-driven, politically relevant, and transgressive education that empowers youth to expose the existential contradictions of their own lives creates the conditions necessary for a world in which both Black and non-Black liberation is possible.

Led by the Resurrection Project, a group of young people will stage a series of overnight campouts in South Side neighborhoods. The campouts are scheduled to coincide with the very times when gang violence might otherwise be likely to happen. Their grassroots counter-programming? First a peace march through the area, followed by free food, music, sports, bonfires, workshops for employment, financial literacy, and peacemaking, an