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• The Courage of Nuit Debout

  This letter was first published in Le Monde. Translated by David Broder.
  
  
  (via Wikimedia Commons)
  
  As a rule, crises open up the terrain of the possible, and the crisis that began in 2007 with the collapse of the subprime market is no exception. The political forces that upheld the old world are now decomposing — first among them social democracy, which has since 2012 entered a new phase in its long process of accommodation to the existing order. As against these forces, the National Front has diverted part of the anger in society to its own advantage. It has adopted the pretense of an anti-systemic stance, even though it challenges nothing about this system, and least of all the law of the market. 

  Such is the context in which Nuit Debout was born — a movement that now marks the first month of its existence. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the opposition to neoliberalism has taken various different forms: the “Bolivarian” governments in Latin America in the 2000s, the “Arab Spring,” Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish indignados, Syriza in Greece, the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns in Britain and the USA…. Future historians delving into our era will doubtless say that it was particularly rich in social and political movements.

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  By / 04 May 2016 / comments

• VIDEO - Between the Lines: Policing the Planet, with Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn, Arun Kundnani, and Joo-Hyun Kang

  
  
  

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  By Colin Beckett / 03 May 2016 / comments

• The Dynamics of Retreat: An Interview with Robert Brenner

  Bhaskar Sunkara’s interview with Robert Brenner, on the forces that made and unmade the American welfare state, was first published in Jacobin.
  
  
  (The Memorial Day Massacre: Chicago police attack Republic Steel strikers)
  
  Bhaskar Sunkara: When people think about the New Deal, there are two main accounts. In one of them, Franklin Roosevelt is the hero, leading a band of workers against the big capitalists who had just driven us into an economic depression. On the other extreme, there are those who make it seem like Roosevelt was acting solely in the interest of elites smart enough to want to save capitalism from itself. Which is closer to the truth?
  
  

  Robert Brenner: I would say that the key to the emergence of the New Deal reforms was the transformation in the level and character of working-class struggle. Within a year or two of Roosevelt’s election, we saw the sudden emergence of a mass militant working-class movement. This provided the material base, so to speak, for the transformation of working-class consciousness and politics that made Roosevelt’s reforms possible.

  Following the labor upsurge and radicalization that came in the wake of World War I, workers’ militancy tailed off, and the 1920s saw the American capitalist class at the peak of its power, confidence, and productiveness, in total command of industry and politics. Manufacturing productivity rose more rapidly during this decade than ever before or since, the open shop (which banned union contracts) prevailed everywhere, the Republican Party of big business reigned supreme, and the stock market broke all records.

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  By Robert Brenner / 03 May 2016 / comments

• Haymarket and Its Context (Part 2)

  Read Part 1 of this May Day excerpt from Philip S. Foner and David R. Roediger's Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day here.
  
  
  
  Set in this context of continuing struggle over the working day, the FOTLU’s decision to press on with its bold 1884 plan to enforce the eight-hour system with a mass strike on May 1, 1886, was not extravagant. The demand was well timed — raised during a depression which made unemployment an issue and maturing during a recovery which made workers readier to strike without fear for their jobs. Of the seventy-eight FOTLU unions polled in 1885, sixty-nine supported the May 1 plan. Working-class militancy meanwhile grew in early 1886 as the Knights of Labor led the Southwest strike against Jay Gould’s railroad empire and attracted hundreds of thousands of new members.

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  By David Roediger Philip S. Foner / 30 April 2016 / comments

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