Ursula Huws reflects on the history of 'prefigurative' approaches and community ownership models in the UK - and how these can be used to rethink public ownership amid the current cost-of-living crisis.
It is one of the great ironies of our time that, just two decades after capitalism became the singular global mode of production, as capitalist accumulation and…
Yates takes a decidedly unorthodox approach. He spends a fair amount of time explaining the importance of reclaiming common spaces and “commoning” practices….
Notes on Class Struggle Unionism under Biden
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden meets with union leaders outside at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Harrisburg, Pa., Monday, Sept. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
This expands my remarks in a panel with Joe Burns, Donna Murch, and Paul Kirk-Davidoff, organized by Tempest, about class struggle unionism under Biden. Opening and closing remarks of on May 30, 2021 were recorded.
The history of our tendency (I say “our” because I identify Tempest as part of that family tree) offers powerful insights about this moment. In my remarks I look back at the tradition of the Third Camp, articulated in publications of and about the Workers Party (WP) and Independent Socialist League (ISL), as well as my involvement in Berkeley with the Independent Socialist Club (ISC) and the International Socialists when it first formed.
“Completed ‘under the difficult conditions created by the pandemic’ (xiii) the 2020 edition of the
Socialist Register seeks to ‘analyze the nature of digital capitalism and its contradictions’ (ix), doing so ‘within the history of technological change’ (x). In selecting this topic, the late Leo Panitch and Greg Albo’s goal was to highlight the extent to which ‘digital technology has become integral to capitalist market dystopia’ (ix), a necessary task given the prevalence of ‘cyber-utopian’ (ix) and ‘techno determinist’ (x) thought in the public and private realms. This kind of ‘celebrant’ ideology, which Robert McChesney (2013) outlined so well recently, provides a social license for centi-billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos to continue to have a disproportionate say in directing investments, allocating resources and setting the terms of production. In laying out this agenda, Panitch and Albo rightly place greater emphasis on ‘c