Portside

The callousness of America's political and business leaders is shocking. A new report from UNICEF, on the well-being of children in 35 developed nations, turned up some alarming statistics about child poverty. More than one in five American children fall below a relative poverty line. The United States ranks 34th of the 35 countries surveyed, above only Romania and below virtually all of Europe plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. (The Washington Post)

Previously Portside published Michael Brie's, The Tragedy of Party Communism and responses from three socialist activists - what lessons there may be to draw on, and which to forget. Here are additional responses from Nina Udovicki, Gilberto de Leon, Dynamite Hallinan and Scott Tucker. Those responding see capitalism as a system that needs to be abolished and socialism as an alternative - A socialism that is different from the past, and democratic.

Obama's strategy is to change Cuba, not through regime change, but by promoting capitalism within the country through support of a petty bourgeoisie. The fundamental objective of US policy has always been to bring Cuba back into the capitalist orbit. Today in Cuba a socialist state is actively promoting cooperatives, thereby devolving economic power to people at the grassroots level. There is a rejuvenation of civil society underway - a socialist civil society.

Two weeks ago Portside published an essay by Michael Brie, The Tragedy of Party Communism. Here Kurt Stand, David Cohen and Jack Radey reflect on their participation in the socialist movement, what lessons there may be to draw on, as well as which to forget. For today's and tomorrow's socialists, they see socialism as a system that could be reformed, capitalism a system that needs to be abolished.

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.

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.

The European debt crisis has little to do with poor budgeting and everything to do with crony capitalism.

Inherent Vice is perhaps the most brilliant depiction of the construction of neoliberal hegemony and the harsh end of the dreams of the 1960s generation. It speaks powerfully to the here and now, indicting the nostalgic escapism that yearns for “the sixties” and showing that this epochal world as commonly imagined never existed.