Portside

Two recent events – the second-round victory on November 22 of right-wing candidate Mauricio Macri in Argentina's presidential election, and the December 6 victory of the right-wing Democratic Unity Roundtable,[1] winning two thirds of the seats in Venezuela's National Assembly elections – have radically altered the political map in South America. Argentine Marxist Claudio Katz discusses what these setbacks for the left mean for the progressive “process of change.”

“When we talk to potential union members, we explain, ‘Your working conditions aren’t going to get better unless we act as a unit, as a union,’” Spink said. “We have to relearn the lessons of labor from the 1930s and 1940s – of collective action and collective message."

The law the Obama administration is following, immigrant advocates say, runs counter to the higher mandate the White House should be abiding by. International humanitarian law actually dictates that these desperate parents and children be granted protection from the persecution and violence they have fled in their home countries.

City regulators haven’t enforced a 2007 law that requires doormen, janitors and other service workers at taxpayer-subsidized apartment buildings to be paid wages comparable to union rates.

City regulators haven’t enforced a 2007 law that requires doormen, janitors and other service workers at taxpayer-subsidized apartment buildings to be paid wages comparable to union rates.

The anthropologist Sidney Mintz has died at the age of 93. His book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, used sugar as an entry point into a critical analysis of social institutions, in this case slavery, race, class, and global capitalism. The book continues to be relevant to those concerns as well as to today’s obsession with sugar consumption.

Ashley Smith interviews Ellen David Friedman about the recent crackdown on labor organizers in China.

Context is crucial to the politics of a narrative, always. In the context of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, and the increasing public focus on police brutality toward particularly African American communities in the U.S., it is important to ask how the fantasy of Luke Cage – a black man who is “unbreakable” – fits into the current socio-political landscape.

Experts on banking and labor markets offer their reasons for optimism and pessimism going into 2016.

If you’re no longer drawing lines on population but you’re selectively using criteria like age, that hits [the Hispanic] community very hard. Put aside the whole citizenship issue. The largest group of people who would be subtracted from the apportionment base would be children, and because [Hispanics] have disproportionately so many more children than the Anglo population has, that starts shifting seats all by itself, before you start to even consider citizenship.