I woke up Friday morning to the news that my country decided that it no longer wants to be part of the European Union. With a large turnout of 72% of the eligible electorate, the vote went 51.9% in favour of leaving against 48.1% for remaining – 17.4 million against 16.1 million, in case you wondered.
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During the first Democratic presidential debate, a friend of mine posted on Facebook: “Sanders did it! He said working class! Everybody drinks!”
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Academe is a privileged place. It was designed to serve and continues to be dominated by people from educated, well-off backgrounds. Its hierarchical rituals and values define the university as separate from and more “refined” than the so-called “real world.”
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On the afternoon of Memorial Day, 1937, at least 1,500 striking steel workers and their supporters marched across a sun-drenched field in the southern reaches of the City of Chicago, intent on vindicating their right to set up a large picket line the main gate of a plant owned by the Republic Steel Corporation and thereby pressure that company to recognize and bargain with their union.
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For years now I’ve been showing students and friends the polls that show an increasingly favorable view of socialism especially among low income, young African-American and Hispanic youth.
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The timing couldn’t have been more apt: a trans-Atlantic conference on the rise of the right, just days after Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee. Leaders from the labor movement in ten nations gathered to strategize in the face of the new threat from the right.
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On July 27, 1919, Marcus Garvey, the African-American nationalist then nearing the height of his influence, rose to address a crowd of almost 6,000 people who had come to dedicate Liberty Hall, on Harlem’s 138th Street, as the new headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
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My first face-to-face introduction to the solidarity economy in Southern Brazil was a visit to a recycling cooperative. Through hard work, the 16-member team had arranged for mountains of garbage to be dumped in their yard. Most of the coop members had worked alone previously, going street to street looking for plastics, paper, glass and metal, and then trying to sell their sorted waste to local companies.
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