Portside

Efforts to define and manipulate the definition of “family” in immigration matters are not new. For more than 100 years the government has done so, often reflecting political exigency and racial bias rather than the real needs and desires of families.

From the Combahee River Collective Statement: "We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously."

This is the spirit of the Quinceañera at the Capitol event: to celebrate the resistance to SB4 by highlighting our commitment to our communities and culture. After all, SB4 isn’t just about politics: it will sow fear and distrust into our communities and break apart our families. To resist this harmful and hateful law, we will draw on the incredible power within the very communities that SB4 will affect.

A South African court ruled that the trade union federation Costau is guilty of hate speech and anti-Semitism because of its support of Palestinian rights. The union denounced the ruling as an attack against workers’ rights to offer solidarity, freedom of expression and the struggle for justice and dignity for all.

Reader Comments: Capitalism in our Future?; Bosses - Like Dictators - and now one is our President?; More on School Charters; Trump's Made in America or Working Class Internationalism?; Looking at Radical History - Black Panther Party, Paul Robeson, Peekskill, Dashiel Hammett, IWW; UN and Banning of Nuclear Weapons or a Return to "Duck Under Your Desk?"; South Africa, Israel; Rasmea Odeh; Resources; Announcements; and more...

Many Portside readers follow developments in the international socialist movement, including recent developments in South Africa. Here is the declaration from the recently concluded Congress of the South African Communist Party. Some readers may find it a hopeful sign of the SACP's returning to its role as a critical partner in the governing coalition with COSATU in the governing coalition. Others may feel that the SACP is not being critical enough. What do you think?

It was the left who diagnosed the ills of globalization. So why is the right eating our lunch? Today global capitalism is in a period of long-term stagnation following the global financial crisis. The newer protests represent a far broader disenchantment with capitalism than the protests of the 2000s. The building blocks of an alternative economic model are there - sustainable development, de-growth, and de-globalization.

Why should 20 million Americans working at full-time jobs (sometimes two or three jobs) receive such pitiful incomes that they are forced to rely on food stamps while their CEOs grow ever wealthier?

Democrats should be running on their own wedge issues and saying look, the Republicans want to take Medicaid away from your family, from your neighbors, from your friends. If you’re here in Appalachia and say you don’t know someone covered by Medicaid, that’s not true. Democrats should be using that issue like a damn cudgel and beating Republicans with it in 2018.

Here is yet another entry in the history of how the blacklist impacted Hollywood during the McCarthy era, and how artists resisted through their art.