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Category: Strategize!

  • How To Picket Stores That Sell Your Employer’s Products

    Picketing stores that sell an employer’s products can publicize a strike and hurt earnings. It is also a good way to generate community support. Although the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) usually bars unions from picketing secondary (i.e., “neutral”) employers, a narrow legal exception applies to retail stores and distributors—provided the union does not interfere with operations, only asks the public not to buy struck products, does not ask customers to stop doing all business with the retailer (unless the store only sells struck products), and does not demand that the store stop buying products from the struck employer.

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  • COP26: On The Outside, Always Looking In

    “It wasn’t long until I realized why this was the case: even if I came from a country that is continuously being ravaged by the climate crisis, I wasn’t the target audience of this conference. I wasn’t white, I did not come from a position of power or wealth, and I wasn’t significant enough to be let inside the negotiations. I did not belong in this theater of performative climate “action”. So much for COP26 being the most inclusive COP ever.”

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  • Black Radical Internationalist Traditions

    In the 1950’s and 1960’s, it became a juxtaposition of highly educated workers for the most advanced productive forces on the planet, but developed within the unresolved, deeply violent, four hundred year-long colonial and racist architecture of the US. It was externally influenced by the period of the explosion of national liberation socialism that began with the Chinese revolution and was punctuated by the defeat of the US empire by the Korean and Chinese revolutions and at great costs to their peoples. The 1950s were capped off by the historic 1959 victory in Cuba, whose significance reverberates to this day in all of our lives.

    Many of the most significant and radical intellectual and revolutionary formations of the US were born between the years 1959 to 1967.

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  • “Terror” Designation Of Rights Organizations Should Not Deter US-Based Activism

    It was a move quite aptly characterized as “authoritarian and repressive” by Palestinian poet and writer Mohammed El-Kurd in The Nation. On 19 October, the Israeli settler-colonial state designated six Palestinian human rights groups as “terror organizations.” At the time, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz claimed that Addameer, Al-Haq, Defense for Children International – Palestine, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees are tied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP.)

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  • Let’s Find Alternatives To Striking

    While the LO, TCO and Saco top officials suffer from consensus fundamentalism, opposition among the grassroots often suffers from a fixation on strikes. Among the grassroots labor movement in Sweden, a call for big strikes or even a general strike is often heard. Strikes were called in response to the current attack on the Swedish Employment Protection Act, low wages, and attacks on the right to strike. In 2019, an attempt was made to stage a symbolic strike to highlight the climate crisis. As far as we are aware, no workplace was shut down. It should be acknowledged that sometimes we SAC members also have gotten lost in strike fixation and have tried to rush strikes into existence. An example is a strike in defense of the Unemployment Insurance Funds in 2006, which were being attacked by the Swedish government. It ended in a painful defeat.

    The post Let’s Find Alternatives To Striking appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • How To Fight For A Better World When Hope Feels Scarce

    This question of what we do doesn’t exactly feel like it gets at the heaviness that’s in me, that’s in us. I’ve spent the last three years asking, in the face of enormous difficulty, “What do we do now?” and I’ve learned that coming up with a smart answer to that question may offer some high for a period of time, but it’s pretty clear it can’t sustain us.

    I think that’s because the significance of what we’re staring down doesn’t just beg questions about potential shifts in strategic emphasis, it also raises much deeper questions about what we do when hope is scarce. What do we do when it’s quite reasonable to believe that things will get harder? When we assume that more of our campaigns will fail? When the suffering around us keeps increasing?

    The post How To Fight For A Better World When Hope Feels Scarce appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Labor Upsurge Of The 1930s And ’40s In The U.S.

    Union growth tends to take place in huge waves. As the most astute analysts have noted, during normal times very little seems to happen. Then, often unexpectedly, enormous gains are made. To be sure, there is plenty that organizers can do during the quieter times, not only to make important, if seemingly small gains, but also to prepare for the massive gains that will come with the next upsurge. It is our belief that most workers want and all workers need and benefit from unions. But what holds back union growth during normal times?

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  • Is Sabotage Needed To Save The Earth?

    Imagine you are a climate-change campaigner. You’ve studied research findings and know that unless greenhouse gas emissions are greatly reduced very soon, future generations will likely suffer catastrophic impacts. You’ve protested for years, yet governments and companies continue to invest in fossil fuels, and emissions keep going up. You are especially annoyed at those who are rich and privileged and who seem not to care that with their SUVs and international flights they are causing more damage to the climate than thousands of ordinary people in Bangladesh or Burundi. You don’t want to give in to desperation. You want to do something to bring a halt to a crime in the making.

    The post Is Sabotage Needed To Save The Earth? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • 2.4 Degrees Is A Disaster – But COP Won’t Stop It

    Regardless of the outcome of COP26, one inevitability is that the rich and powerful celebrate whatever the conference produces as vital progress. Only a disaster on the level of COP15 in Copenhagen might put a stop to the self-congratulatory triumphalism. Already, though, most observing the negotiations with a critical eye are highlighting how inadequate their product will be. Ed Miliband has said we’re ‘miles from where we need to be’ and Greta Thunberg declared COP26 to be a ‘failure’.

    These condemnations are backed up by analysis from Climate Action Tracker (CAT), assessing governments’ short-term commitments for the next decade. Its study reveals that our trajectory coming out of COP26 would take us to a devastating 2.4oC warming by the end of this century.

    The post 2.4 Degrees Is A Disaster – But COP Won’t Stop It appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Farmers In Solidarity With Striking Workers

    It’s going to be a very good year for the top dogs and shareholders at Deere & Co. The Iowa-based equipment manufacturer says it earned more in the first nine months of its fiscal year than during its best year in 2013. The corporation’s third-quarter results are nearly $4.7 billion. John May, the company’s CEO, made over $14.7 million in total compensation in 2020. Reports are that his salary increased 160 percent during the pandemic while laid-off manufacturing workers saw ​“incentive” pay cut. 

    On October 14, 10,000 unionized skilled manufacturing employees at Deere & Co. initiated their right to bargain by rejecting the contract put forth by management and going on strike. Does it surprise anyone that skilled workers went on strike after the company agreed to bump pay by little more than $1 per hour over the next 6 years?

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  • COVID Hit The Working Class Hardest, But The Traditional Left Is Deaf To Their Problems.

    The ruling class across Europe and in the US would rather see people divided than united against oligarchy, that’s why Left populism coupled with the working-class outlook represents a greater threat to the establishment. In the aftermath of the recent German Federal election many people were wondering how Die Linke (The Left) had become so relegated to the sidelines as to lose 30 seats and become the smallest party in Germany’s parliament.

    The post COVID Hit The Working Class Hardest, But The Traditional Left Is Deaf To Their Problems. appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Why Defending Nicaragua Is Important

    Since at least the start of the 21st century, if not earlier, two global trends have emerged very clearly. Firstly, increased North American and European aggression overseas has been accompanied by increased economic and political domestic repression in the US itself and its allied countries. This domestic repression has reached unprecedented levels over the last two years,

    Secondly, despite the apparent demise of Western led economic globalization, North American and European corporate influence under various guises has co-opted international policy making and governance, as writers from Cory Morningstar  to Iain Davis  have reported in detail for many years.

    In the context of these and other trends, Nicaragua’s resolute defence of its national sovereignty and its very successful economic, social and environmental policies have made this tiny country of around 7 million people the target of US and allied country aggression.

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  • Who Will Pay For The Damage From Climate Change?

    To people in developing countries, it seems clear, the wealthy countries that caused most of the problem of climate change should pay the most to adapt to it and to solve the problem.  But instead, countries like the United States lecture low low-emitting countries to do more while they extract their resources and destroy their forests.

    For example, Nicaragua was an outspoken critic of the Paris climate talks because they did not go far enough. It is one of the countries most impacted by climate change, yet its own greenhouse gas footprint is one of the smallest.  Nicaragua initially insisted that the Paris Accord did not reduce emissions enough (a position that was later adopted by a majority of countries and the IPCC).  Dr. Paul Oquist, Nicaraguan Minister and envoy to the talks, insisted in Paris that developing countries should receive the billions of dollars promised by the big greenhouse gas emitters to pay for greenhouse gas mitigation programs. 

    The post Who Will Pay For The Damage From Climate Change? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Great Recoil Of Neoliberal Globalization

    The current political era is best understood as a “great recoil” of economic globalization. It is a moment when the coordinates of historical development seem to be inverting, upsetting many of the assumptions that dominated politics and economics over the last decades. This moment corresponds to the “second movement” socialist economic historian Karl Polanyi described in his book The Great Transformation, when phases of capitalist expansion recede and are met by “societal responses.”

    According to Polanyi, in phases of profound crisis like that opened by the 1929 Wall Street Crash, society tends to act defensively, erecting forms of social protection against a capitalist logic that has manifestly failed to deliver prosperity, yet becomes even more aggressive in its attempts to extract profit.

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  • Chile, Two Years After The Popular Uprising

    That October 18, 2019 was a blow that, in one fell swoop, brought down the deceptive façade of the conservative regime and inaugurated a new stage in the history of Chile. The enormous injustices maintained and deepened during the very slow (and failed) “democratic transition” initiated in 1990 were exposed. The explosive combination of free market without anesthesia and a democracy lacking in substance and completely delegitimized—thus becoming a rapacious plutocracy—was able to stay afloat thanks to the resignation, demoralization and apathy of the citizenry, skillfully induced by establishment politicians and the media oligarchy, partners of the ruling class. The spell was broken on October 18.

    The post Chile, Two Years After The Popular Uprising appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Why Activism Needs To Be Part Of Any Meaningful Climate Education

    Last month, crowds of young people and supporters gathered in 1,500 locations around the world for one of the largest youth-led climate protests since countries began emerging from the most restrictive phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many students skipped school or staged class walkouts to participate in the Sept. 24 day of action, the latest surge of activity from the school strike movement that launched in late 2018.

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  • Workers Have Leverage

    The capitalist vultures are wheeling low, but they’re finding slim pickings to choose from these days.

    “No one wants to work!” The bosses whine about a worker shortage—though it’s one they brought about.

    Eighteenth-century British economist Adam Smith noted how common it is to hear complaints about workers coming together to fight for their interests, and how rare it is to hear about all the scheming the bosses do to plunder workers’ labor.

    “Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate,” Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations.

    That scheming is the background to the current labor shortage.

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  • Teaching Politically and the Problem of Afropessimism

    In education, as in so many other disciplines, one of the increasingly dominant phrases is “anti-Blackness” and the theory of Afropessimism. The two foundational theorists here are Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. For Wilderson, Afro-pessimism contends that “Blackness cannot be separated from slavery,” and that “the Slave’s relationship to violence is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint,” whereas “the human’s relationship to violence is always contingent.”

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  • Climate Justice Must Be A Top Priority For Labor

    Today’s existential crisis for humanity is the immediate need to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. All of us have to. Everywhere. For workers and for our communities there is no more pressing matter than this.

    We need to begin a discussion among co-workers, creating demands and acting on them at the workplace and bargaining table. We need to show up at local union meetings, central labor councils, and town halls supporting demands that move us toward a fossil fuel-free future.

    At the same time, we need to protect the incomes and benefits of workers affected by the transition off of fossil fuels and to make sure they have real training opportunities. And we need to restore and elevate those communities that have been sacrificed for fossil fuel extraction, production, and distribution.

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  • When McDonalds Came To Denmark

    Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.

    In these discussions, relatively little is said about how this all came to be. This is sad because it’s a good story and because the story provides a good window into why Nordic labor markets are the way they are.

    McDonalds opened its first store in Denmark in 1981. At that point, it was operating in over 20 countries and had successfully avoided unions in all but one, Sweden.

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  • Occupy Wall Street Trained A Generation In Class War

    When Occupy Wall Street was evicted from its home base in Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, by the NYPD in a paramilitary-style operation under cover of the night with a press blackout, the obituaries were being written.

    The day before, Occupy Oakland, which vied with New York as the leader of the leaderless movement, was evicted for the second and final time. A convergence to shut down the New York Stock Exchange on the two-month anniversary of OWS, on November 17, fizzled. Lacking a base of operations, two thousand Occupy protesters at most showed up and were bloodily swept away by police from Wall Street and an attempted reoccupation of the park. Over the next few months, Occupy camps were forcefully ousted in Portland, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, New Orleans, and Los Angeles with hundreds of arrests.

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  • The Limits of “Lived Experience”

    Online, the “left” continues to find itself in a never ending series of bad faith arguments around self-determination. Many terms/frameworks that may have had a subversive character within their original context when first articulated, have now been incorporated and distorted by liberalism encouraging radical individualism and anti-materialism. More and more, analyses that are dependent upon identity and “lived experience” are propped up, ultimately resulting in ad hominems, mud-slinging, intellectual dishonesty, and the inevitable tried-and-true anti-communism.

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  • Think Outside The Protest Box

    Protest. Petition. Call your senators. Nothing changes, right? No matter how large our demonstrations get, no matter how many millions of people write and petition politicians, no matter how many people get arrested in front of the White House or at our state capitols, it seems that our (supposedly) elected officials keep turning a blind eye and deaf ear to our cries for change. In fact, there’s even a study out that shows that in 20 years on 2,000 different bills, we, the People, got our bills through Congress a whopping 0.0 percent of the time.

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  • WGAE Tensions Reflect an Age-Old Clash of Labor Visions

    The Writers Guild of America East has successfully organized digital journalism workers at numerous well-known outlets in the last several years, winning contract protections on things like requiring “just cause” for firing, diversity hiring and editorial independence. Who could complain about this? Plenty of people, apparently. The union’s governing council is going through a fraught election split between the Solidarity slate, which includes both digital journalistic writers and TV/film writers who defend the organizing drive, and the Inclusion & Experience slate, which believes that the organizing drive has steered the union away from its original mission of representing long-unionized film and TV writers.

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  • The Race Class Narrative Can Win

    The Race Class Narrative (RCN), developed by Ian Haney López, Heather McGhee, and Anat Shenker-Osorio, is a rigorously researched framework that addresses these concerns. We can use it to fight back against the ways that strategic racism is weaponized by the rich and powerful to protect their interests, scapegoat communities of color, and leave us all fighting for scraps. It is a narrative structure that reveals the strategy of the right and builds cross-racial support for progressive policies.

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  • Black Community And Climate Justice

    There is an easy correlation between the frequency and magnitude of climate-related disasters and the negative impact that has on human beings, especially on Black and Indigenous communities, who disproportionately due to accompanying social and economic-political disasters are usually at the forefront of these impacts due to many factors, including blatant political negligence.

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  • Millions of Workers Want a Union

    An important concept for us to remember is that any group of workers organizing together to improve working conditions is acting like a union. They may not have official recognition and a contract, but they are a union nonetheless, and they can organize to win things. Many workers don’t realize this. But they usually need some help to start organizing, since this is a challenging and risky endeavor with many ways to fail.

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  • A Meeting With Historical Combatants

    “Slipping through the crowd at a meeting of historical fighters anywhere in Nicaragua, one makes a deep journey into the open veins of the people of Nicaragua and Our America. Because in Nicaragua even under the stones you find history, heroism, conviction and faith that the world can be a better place and that it is possible to change society with the strength of everyone. But it is not just faith, it is concrete experiences of struggle for life and genuine peace.”

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  • A Meeting With Historical Combatants

    “Slipping through the crowd at a meeting of historical fighters anywhere in Nicaragua, one makes a deep journey into the open veins of the people of Nicaragua and Our America. Because in Nicaragua even under the stones you find history, heroism, conviction and faith that the world can be a better place and that it is possible to change society with the strength of everyone. But it is not just faith, it is concrete experiences of struggle for life and genuine peace.”

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  • Ordinary Nicaraguans Should Guide Progressive Left’s Stance

    Rather than acclaiming a country that is lifting itself out of poverty, it is apparently much more important to judge it against hypocritical Western standards about “democracy” and “human rights” while disregarding the government’s need to defend the country’s gains against attacks from Washington and elsewhere.

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