Tag: Organizing

Feb 14 2011

Anatomy of a Struggle: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers

If there is ever to be any effective pushback against the hegemony of capital, we will need bases of power, organized expressions of sustained popular resistance to exploitation and repression.  The contemporary political landscape of neoliberal media message management, social atomization and political alienation  can seem harsh and desolate for those of us looking for direction, for effective means of participation and expression of solidarity.

Today I’ll take a look at the struggle of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for some measure of justice and dignity in the fruit and vegetable fields of Florida, their history, the impressive solidarity network they have built, some recent victories, and some ongoing and upcoming efforts and actions that offer us all an opportunity to participate in solidarity.

Jul 30 2010

Good Reason to Try Again

While the Netroots Nation 2010 conference was happening in Las Vegas last weekend, another conference, even more important IMHO, was occurring in Albany, New York.  The United National Anti-War Conference brought together a broad coalition of peace, anti-war, social justice, labor, ethnic, and other activists for the purpose of finding a new mode and presentation for our many, many righteous grievances.

From Glenn Ford to David Swanson to Noam Chomsky to Medea Benjamin, the hard core community of dissent and change gathered to explore why we have not been able to attain our goals and look for more productive roads to success.

Glenn Ford, one of my favorites, Editor of the “Black Agenda Report”, and an attendee at the conference reported on July 28th:

A renewed anti-war movement is under construction, one that breaks decisively from the Cult of Obama, demands an end to all U.S. aid to the Israeli “apartheid regime,” and calls for “immediate, total and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, mercenaries and contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and the immediate closing of all U.S. bases in those countries.”

…snip

The mission [of the nearly 600 delegates] is to rescue the anti-war movement from the rubble of its collapse with the ascent of Black Democrat Barack Obama to the presidency.

Ford goes on to name the anti-war defectors:

Leap with me beneath the fold…

Apr 19 2010

The Beginning of the Age of the Individual

Last week I read a brief blurb in Politico, in which a scholar expressed his opinion as to why labor union membership was in sharp decline.  The scholar stated that, in his opinion, the decrease was a result of the fact that people are now inclined to think more individually than communally.  He added that this trend will become more, not less pronounced with time.  Backing up this claim, he noted how, these days, people get jobs by packing their resumes full of exhaustively long lists of individual accomplishments.  Americans have always been resistant to thinking as a group and placing group priorities above individual gain, but with the death of labor, one of the most notable exceptions to the rule, expect more problems to manifest themselves that have their nexus due to a hyper-individualist attitude.

Feb 05 2010

Greensboro Again: A Little-Noted Lesson

This week marks 50 years since the Greensboro, NC, sit-ins, the historic protest which launched the Black Freedom Struggle in this country onto a new trajectory. We are seeing a lot of celebration of the courage of the four students who first sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter and of the chain reaction it set off.

I posted such a tribute here my own self two days back. In the course of refreshing my fading memory, via Google, to complete that piece, I found another facet of the Greensboro story. It’s one I had never come across, and one that will, I think, resonate with anyone who has spent much time in the activist trenches.

Many of us know the story of how four students on February 1 became dozens and, by February 4, hundreds, as students across North Carolina and the South girded to emulate them and launch the wave of struggles that finally killed Jim Crow.

The other side of the story has to do with the five months it took to crack the management at Woolworth’s and S.H. Kress and the rest of the Greensboro power structure.

The multiplication of protesters in that first week is now at the heart of the legend. But that level of activity was hard to sustain, especially as the students’ demands remained unmet and white hostility grew more intense.

Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil remained part of the organizing core from Day One. McCain recalls:

What people won’t talk (about), what people don’t like to remember is that the success of that movement in Greensboro is probably attributed to no more than eight or 10 people. I can say this: when the television cameras stopped rolling and we didn’t have eight or 10 reporters left, the folk left. I mean, there were just a very faithful few. McNeil and I can’t count the nights and evenings that we literally cried because we couldn’t get people to help us staff a picket line.

I don’t know about you, but I can recall lulls in more than one campaign for justice when fatigue, frustration, setbacks and doubt had me in tears. When it happens again, and it will, I hope I remember to draw on this part of the lesson of Greensboro, not the audacity and the courage of the students, but the dogged persistence of the core they built.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

Dec 29 2009

The Yell Softer Thesis

Karmafish at MLW says in the Question of the Day: “Yell Louder!”

Well, no, its not a question.

There are certain people who seem to think that we need to yell louder.  It’s as if they believe that if we wish to bring about positive fundamental change to the American system of governance than what is needed is… well… more yelling.   We need to yell and scream and rant and rage.  We need to jump up and down and shake our fists and howl at the mooon.

But, ya know what?  I’m tired of yelling.  I’m tired of listening to people yelling.  I’m tired of pretending that yelling somehow gets us anywhere.  I’m tired of self-righteous assholes, who barely know what the hell that they’re yammering about, insisting to the rest of us that their every syllable is right and true and good… while any who may oppose them, or merely even question them, are wrong and false and bad.

This is one reading of the “Yell Louder” text. I had a different one.

Oct 12 2009

Weekly World Activist

A weekly roundup of the news made by of, by and for the active engaged progressive people of the world.  

HEAD LINES

Canada:  Nickel Mine Strike

libcom:

After months of unresolved bargaining a strike began on July 13th at the Sudbury mine in northern Ontario, Canada, after employers Vale Inco refused to alter its original demands for concessions. United Steel Workers union members (USW Local 6500) in Sudbury and Port Colburne in Ontario and Voisey Bay in Labrador responded by voting 85% in favor of strike action.

The strike affects 3,073 employees at Vale’s integrated mining, milling, smelting and refining operations in Sudbury, 116 employees at the Port Colborne refinery and over 200 at Voisey Bay. The concessions demanded by the company include a drastic change in pension benefits for new hires (the pension Fund is $725 million in deficit), changes to seniority rights and a cap on the “Nickel Bonus”. “This bonus was negotiated in earlier years to allow the company to benefit from relatively lower wages when nickel prices were depressed and workers to benefit when the price was high. Nickel bonuses – once used to placate underpaid unionised workers – in recent years suddenly paid off ‘big’

May 23 2009

Owe My Soul to the Company Store

Some of you may remember Tennessee Ernie Ford’s old song. I do. When I was a kid we spent summers in eastern Kentucky with my Aunt and grandparents, Dad sometimes took us out to an old strip mine to shoot tin cans with his pearl-handled six shooters, and learn some history while we were at it. Back in the day, he told us, the coal barons had a clever scheme to enslave the local populations who worked to dig out the coal from its natural habitat.

Oct 13 2008

On the possibility of calling a general strike

Original article, titled The General Strike and the “Communist Party” by Ted Grant (originally published in Militant (July 1971)) via the Ted Grant archives:

The possibility and the problems of a general strike are coming up for discussion among advanced militants in the trade union movement all over the country. Even ordinary trade unionists not particularly active in the trade union and Labour movement, in response to the economic and political situation, are raising the question in their factories and workplaces, and union branches. Resolutions are coming before union conferences.