Rachel Himes is an organizer with NYC-DSA who coordinated the chapter's Bernie campaign, worked on its recent, successful campaigns for state senate and assembly, and is active in the chapter's Defund NYPD campaign. Himes is beginning a PhD program in Columbia's Department of Art History and Archeology. Himes assesses the state of the movement in the city, differences between this summer’s protests against the police and earlier ones, and the role socialists should play in this struggle.
We discuss the question of police unions in the broader context of the diverging fortunes of public and private sector unions in the U.S., the wave of labor organizing among essential workers during the last few weeks, and whether unionization is reducing the risk to these workers, especially minority ones. Jake Rosenfeld is Professor of Sociology at Washington University-St Louis. His new book You’re Paid What You’re Worth And Other Myths of the Modern Economy will arrive early 2021. He is also the author of What Unions No Longer Do (2014). ...
This podcast began during the summer with the premise that the mass death, disease and economic misery caused by the pandemic are themselves political forces. Now, as summer dissolves into fall, these forces are converging with the most consequential struggle for state power in recent U.S. history. My starting point for this second season of the podcast is that we, as socialists in the U.S., have to grasp both the promise and peril of this convergence. To the themes of the first season—labor, unions, protest, socialist education—the fall edition adds electoral strategy, a closer look into the connections between race and class in the U.S., and the pandemic’s impact in other countries. ...
Auto manufacturers in Detroit in the 1960s were among the largest private employers of Black workers. In 1969, black auto workers created the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. In this episode, Jerome Scott, a founding member of the LRBW, tells us about its motivations and accomplishments, why it was Black workers who began these revolutionary union movements, and how highly they valued political education and analysis. Jerome Scott is a member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, and a founding director of Project South Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. He is a founding member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Further reading: https://daily.jstor.org/league-revolutionary-black-workers/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-detroit-rebellion/ https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/458-detroit-i-do-mind-dying ...
