Capitalism would have us believe we need our bosses. Envisioning a post-Capitalist society implies challenging this proposition. This volume, edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, reveals the history of workers who dare to disagree.

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, have been a recurrent theme — sometimes implicit, often front and center — of U.S. politics throughout the past decade. How to interpret and understand them has been a crucial question. In the tragedy’s immediate aftermath, the George W. Bush administration struck a theme that resonated with the American public: the attacks constituted an out- of- the- blue declaration of war against an unsuspecting and entirely innocent victim, namely, the United States. “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world,” the president told the nation on the evening of the attacks, as he promised a “war against terrorism.”1 This initial historicizing of the 9/11 attacks soon became embedded in other official speeches and documents and in the public mind. It possessed not only a congenial explanatory power but also an enormous power to mobilize. It fueled a war in Afghanistan and subsequently, with leaps of logic, the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Continue reading: http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/2011/111/5.full.pdf+html

This pamphlet was produced by the Public Sector Campaign of the Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly, September 2011.

“The Great Recession – the product of government incompetence and corporate greed – should have lit a fire under workers everywhere. It hasn’t. Politicians should be on the defensive. They aren't. We are. Employers should be making concessions. They don’t. We do. Their lawyers should be grovelling. Instead, our leaders are cowering. Their silk ties should feel tighter. Instead, our boots feel heavier. Their nights should be sleepless. Instead, our dreams are crushed.

Capitalism is not the only form of economy. Alternative economies—people’s economies—exist in which human needs and relationships are more important than competition and profit.

Forms of solidarity economy built on the principles and values of cooperation, equality, self-determination and democracy, exist and are taking shape in many parts of the world. These forms include household economies, barter economies, collective economies including cooperatives, worker-controlled economies, subsistence market economies, community budgeting, participatory budgeting, community-based local currency exchange systems, and ethical trading, among others. Labor organizations have also provided spaces for building capacities in the struggle to defy capitalism.

The paper aims to contribute to the discourse on alternatives to capitalism. We go about by first examining recent works dealing with the issue of alternatives to capitalism (and neoliberalism). We define `alternative’ as an on-going multi-dimensional, non-deterministic process of people’s economic and political struggle beyond the capitalist logic, whether macro, meso or micro, to change their circumstances and simultaneously transform themselves in the process. Full development of human potential based on equality, solidarity and sustainability through democratic participatory processes is at the core of an alternative.  Then, we look at how various forms of peoples’ solidarity economies and state-initiated democratic participatory schemes become spaces or provide spaces for the development of counter-consciousness (outside the capitalist `common sense’) and concomitantly build capacities for the development of projects, initiatives and economies beyond the capitalist logic. By addressing changes in the mode of production and the labor process within their spaces, we argue that many of these organizations, projects and initiatives, are the ‘materialization’ or actual
manifestation of non-capitalist alternatives.

Contrary to a well-known English dictum, stoical if self-exonerating, all political lives do not end in failure. In postwar Europe, it is enough to think of Adenauer or De Gasperi, or perhaps even more impressively, Franco. But it is true that, in democratic conditions, to be more popular at the close than at the outset of a prolonged period in office is rare. Rarer still – indeed, virtually unheard of – is for such popularity to reflect, not appeasement or moderation, but a radicalisation in government. Today, there is only one ruler in the world who can claim this achievement, the former worker who in January stepped down as president of Brazil, enjoying the approval of 80 per cent of its citizens. By any criterion, Luiz Inácio da Silva is the most successful politician of his time.

Given the overwhelming harm being done to the world’s environment and to its people, it is essential today to consider how we might organize a truly ecological civilization—one that exists in harmony with natural systems—instead of trying to overwhelm and dominate nature.

The current political conjuncture is dominated by enduring struggles and new dilemmas for the Left trying to stop the bleeding. The enduring financial crisis has posed the matter starkly: is neoliberalism in terminal crisis and over, or are the ruling classes intensifying its distributive norms and its political form? The outcome of the May Federal election revealed some of the same patterns: an historical consolidation of the hard Right Conservative government of Stephen Harper, and an unprecedented electoral surge for the social democratic NDP (and however harsh one is on the nature of contemporary social democracy, it is the first time that any political party in North America who has its ideological roots in socialism has captured such a significant part of the electorate and emerged as the second party).

This research note examines whether the status of EU-U.S. military relations confirms the increasingly popular notion of a transnational capitalist class, integrated on a global scale and accompanied by the cessation of interimperialist rivalry. It focuses on two cases: formation of the European Security and Defense Policy and the setting-up of an EU armaments policy as well as the respective transatlantic struggles over the nature of these two policies. It concludes by highlighting empirical inconsistencies in the transnationalist argument, as demonstrated by the continuation of transatlantic competition over the formation of a separate EU military-industrial identity.

This event was a book party for the publication of Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell edited  by NikHil Pal Singh.

Jack O’Dell is a legendary strategist and organizer, whose career spans the National Maritime Union in the 1940s, the underground left in the South in the 1950s, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Freedomways in the 1960s, and the Rainbow/PUSH campaigns of the 1970s and 80s.

We are trapped in a state of limbo, neither one thing nor the other. For more than two years, the world has been wracked by a series of interrelated crises, and they show no sign of being resolved anytime soon. The unshakable certainties of neoliberalism, which held us fast for so long, have collapsed. Yet we seem unable to move on. Anger and protest have erupted around different aspects of the crises, but no common or consistent reaction has seemed able to cohere. A general sense of frustration marks the attempts to break free from the morass of a failing world.

Both scholars and activists have tended to periodize the feminist movement into the so-called first, second, and third waves of feminism. The “first wave” is characterized by the white suffragette movement; the “second wave” is characterized by the formation of the National Organization for Women, abortion rights politics, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendments.

There is a widespread belief that capitalism is responsible for the huge improvements in health that have occurred over the last century and a quarter. Capitalism is seen as the supreme engine of growth, and growth is seen as the crucial condition for health improvement. But it is not. Poor countries can and sometimes do have better health than rich ones. The US is held up as a ‘world leader’ in medicine when it is really a world leader in healthcare market failure, spending almost a fifth of its huge national income to produce overall health outcomes little better, and in some respects worse, than those of neighbouring Cuba, with a per capita income barely a twentieth as large. ‘Breakthroughs’ in health science and technology – in nuclear medicine, genetic medicine, or nanotechnology – are treated as triumphs of capitalist investment in research. But most innovative medical research is actually done in state-funded medical schools and research laboratories.

We are overdue for a new strategy. Labor and the Left are at low points in long declines. One cause has been adherence to a failed strategy. We need to acknowledge that reality and answer two linked questions. First, what part of getting into this situation was our own doing? Second, what changes in labor’s and the Left’s strategy could revive the two groups and rebuild their coalition into a powerful political force? To answer the first question: labor’s and the Left’s strategic attitude toward capitalism undermined both partners and their coalition. To answer the second: changing their attitude toward capitalism could, I believe, revive them significantly in the near future.

The end of 2008 marked the ten-year anniversary of Hugo Chávez's first electoral victory (December 6, 1998), which initiated a new period marked by the emergence of progressive and left governments in South America.

This review article appeared in Science & Society, Fall 2009.

Part I
Steve Brier: This is obviously a time of great insecurity and distress both emotionally and physically and of great confusion politically and ideologically across the globe. The realities we confront are imposed by a world capitalism that is at the same time vigorous and expansionist and in decline and crisis. How do we understand this current moment and the profound distress it is creating across the globe? How do we understand it and relate to it?