The issue of growing inequalities of inÂcome and wealth in the advanced capitalist world over the past four decades has been the subject of both social scientific research and political struggle. On the one hand, there is an extensive literature that amply documents the growth of inequality globally since the mid-1970s. While ideologues of neo-liberalism have attempted to dismiss this evidence or diminish its importance, [1] there is a consensus among social scientists that inequality has been on the rise. [2]
One Step Up, Three Steps Down
12 September 2014, byInequality has become a heated political issue with the eruption of the Occupy movement, followed by the spread of minimum wage struggles — including the election of socialist candidate Kshama Sawant to Seattle city council — and union organizing efforts and strikes in the fast food industry and the infamous anti-union Walmart.
The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
8 September 2014, byUp to now, we cannot agree even on how to name the explosion of popular movements in the Arab world from 2011-13 and beyond: Arab Spring, Arab revolution(s), Arab uprising(s)? Indeed, these events are too close to us, are too unfinished, and are too important in terms of their regional and global impact for any such consensus to have formed. What is clear is that these were political revolutions in some cases and that they swept across an entire region, from Morocco to Iraq. Their impact was also global, as seen in the Occupy movement, the Spanish indignados, Gezi Park, and elsewhere.
An Impatient Life: A Memoir
8 September 2014, byDaniel Bensaïd’s memoir of a life as a socialist in France provides an engaging account of a revolutionary life during the 1960s and after, finds William Booth
Ernie Tate’s memoirs from the fifties and sixties
6 August 2014, byThe following review, by Ian Birchall, a prominent Marxist scholar and former long time leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain will appear in the next issue of Revolutionary History [3] which will be devoted to writings of Clara Zetkin, previously unavailable in English.
Daniel Bensaïd: Repeated disappointments
6 August 2014, byLast week it was reported that British gross domestic product had finally recovered to the level attained in 2008 before the financial crisis. So the ‘longest recession for 100 years’ is officially over. [4]
Astonished by the present – The impatient life of Daniel Bensaïd
28 July 2014, byLet us start, like Dante, in the middle. At age twenty-two, Daniel Bensaïd (1946–2010), a French-Algerian-Jewish philosophy student, vaulted eagerly onto the world stage of the international youth radicalization of 1968. His political stardom came by way of a leading role in the actions igniting the largest general strike in the history of France. At the suburban campus of the University of Paris at Nanterre, Bensaïd joined with his German-Jewish classmate Danny (“The Red”) Cohn-Bendit (b. 1945) to form the March 22nd Movement. This was a surprising partnership of anarchists, situationists, Trotskyists, and Maoists who seized an administrative building to proclaim demands addressing class discrimination and bureaucracy in the educational system. Bold for its time, the Nanterre occupation is customarily credited with detonating the chain of student strikes and protests climaxing in the sensational actions in Paris six weeks later: The May 6 demonstration of 20,000 at the Sorbonne and the May 10–11 all-night battle on the Left Bank.
“Revolutionary Activism” 1955-1970 – Learning from our history Volume 1, Canada 1955-65 268 pp, C$15.00. Volume 2, Britain 1965-70, 395 pp, C$21.00 London: Resistance Books, 2014.
28 July 2014, byThe two volumes reviewed below were launched at a meeting attended by about 70 persons in Toronto on June 11, sponsored by the Centre for Social Justice and Socialist Project. The meeting, introduced by Greg Albo, was chaired by Carolyn Egan of the United Steelworkers and the Toronto & York Region Labour Council.
Among the speakers were Bryan Palmer, the prominent labour historian; Chris Schenk, recently retired Research Director of the Ontario Federation of Labour; myself; and the author, Ernie Tate. The following is an expanded version of Richard Fidler’s presentation.
Disability and labor ?in the United States
20 May 2014, byKim Nielsen tackles two different tasks in A Disability History of the United States: telling “the history of people with disabilities,” and also telling “the history of the concept of disability.” Her book traces how communities assigned value to individuals from precolonial times to today, and how individuals collectively challenged the rhetoric, paternalism, and outright hatred hidden behind the ideals of individualism and independence. In the process, Nielsen’s book actually elaborates the history of labor in this country. A Disability History is a valuable contribution to understanding the labor movement of Black, white, immigrant, and women workers who participated in work, school, child rearing, and war—despite the increased institutional forces that attempted to make them invisible and to exploit them. In this sense, Nielsen’s contribution to a growing body of disability studies and to labor history is much needed and highly recommended.
Can capitalism prevent catastrophic climate change?
20 May 2014, byIt is now too late to stop global warming. Even if greenhouse gas production stopped today, two centuries of emissions will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans will rise, with increasingly severe effects on climate and weather, no matter what we do.
Footnotes
[1] For the latest attempts to dismiss the overwhelming data on inequality, see Chris Giles, “Piketty Findings Undercut by Errors,” Financial Times, May 23, 2014 and Neil Irwin, “Obama’s Top Economist Has Problems with Piketty’s Book,” New York Times Website, May 7, 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/u...
[2] For a synthesis of the research on inequality in the United States, see Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (New York: Sage Publishers, 2014).
[4] The Guardian July 25. The ‘longest recession for 100 years’ tag was used by the Daily Mail (May 9 - then reporting that it was ‘about’ to be over).
