If you're having trouble viewing this message, open it in a browser window.
|
|
|
|
Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter
January 16, 2016
This issue: Working Class Organizing
Working to change things for the better, fighting to prevent things
from getting worse, remembering the past to illuminate possibilities for
the future: as always, that is the focus of Other Voices.
In this issue, we pay special attention to working class organizing.
There can be no meaningful change without the active participation of
the majority of the population: working people. Yet much activism
ignores this obvious reality, while the organized labour union movement
has put much of its reliance on ‘professionals’ who see organizing as a
top-down technique rather than a grassroots movement. Several articles
in this issue look at aspects of these issues.
We also delve into the relationship between feminism and socialism,
and look at the so-called ‘sharing economy,’ which produces increasingly
exploited and precarious work, and immense profits for super-rich
corporate owners.
As always, we invite you to share this newsletter with your friends. You can forward this email, or send them the link to the Other Voices home page on the Connexions website at www.connexions.org/Media/CxNewsletter.htm.
If you'd like to subscribe and receive this newsletter by email every two weeks, please use this form.
Your feedback is appreciated - and so are donations to keep us doing what we're doing!
|
Topic of the Week
Labour Organizing
Working people face a continuous onslaught on their
livelihoods, working conditions, communities, and environment.
Organizing to fight back and bring about change is a crucial challenge.
Connexions features a wide range of reports, analyses, debates, and
resources from around the world, wherever working people are organizing.
Explore some of them here.
|
|
Having the Hard Conversations
An interview with labour organizer Jane McAlevey on
labour’s crisis of strategy and the difference between organizing and
mobilizing. She says “the problem when we’re doing just a mobilizing
model: all we’re doing is talking to the already-convinced and we’re not
doing base expansion. Real organizing is about focusing on people who
are not yet convinced and not yet involved in our movement.... to
rebuild a powerful movement... we have to focus on the people who are
not yet with us, and we’re not reaching them through Facebooking and
tweeting. Read more
Keywords: Labour Organizing - Oganizing
|
|
Essential reading on the Paris climate agreement
An annotated guide to thirty-four of the best articles on the COP21
Paris Agreement on climate change published in the immediate aftermath
of the agreement. Read more
Keywords: Climate Change - Global Warming
|
|
More than equality: reasons to be a feminist socialist
Hilary Wainwright reflects on the ways that feminism
transformed visions of socialism – and the ways in which a vision of a
feminist socialism still has not been realized. She says “I'm repeatedly
shocked by the fact that the relevance of feminism for the rethinking
of socialism hasn't been taken on board, and that the left has trudged
on as usual, making its usual mistakes, pretty much as if feminism had
never really done more than 'put women on the agenda'. The left adopted
policies towards women, but has not carried out a fundamental rethink of
socialism, which is what I felt feminism was enabling us to do.” Read more
Keywords: Feminism - Socialist Feminism
|
|
The Boy Who Could Change the World
Remembering the brief life of Aaron Swartz: programmer,
activist, entrepreneur, community builder. Aaron championed openness,
sharing, and collaboration, for their own sake, and because he believed
they brought out the best in others. Facing prison for the ‘crime’ of
sharing academic journal articles online, he committed suicide in
January 2013, at the age of 26. Read more
Keywords: Information/Access to - Online Collaboration
|
|
Uber and the Luddites
Just as power looms and other machines inaugurated a technological
revolution that ultimately produced more work for the many and greater
wealth for the few, so too modern technologies are enriching Silicon
Valley’s billionaires at the expense of drivers, delivery folk and all
manner of service workers. The sharing economy that is experienced by
consumers as a friendly convenience is a low-wage, precarious trap for
workers. It would sound all too familiar for the skilled cloth-makers
200 years ago who wanted machines to give them more leisure and
continued control over their work, but instead found themselves
subsidizing the profits of the machine owners in England’s “satanic
mills.” Read more
Keywords: Cooperatives - Luddites
|
|
Website of the Week
Labor for Sustainability
Labor for Sustainability sets out the problem it is
trying to address as follows: “While the economic and environmental
crises facing us are widely recognized, so far there has been little
success in putting the world on an alternative path that is sustainable
economically, socially, and environmental. Neither the labour nor the
environmental movements have been able to institute fundamental reforms
or move their agendas forward in any large scale or impactful way. And,
despite frequent cooperation on discrete issues, the two movements have
failed to coalesce around a shared vision for the future. Even when
their positions converge, their collaborations tend to be transactional
and seem to come out of different intellectual playbooks.” Visit their
website here.
Keywords: Labour Organizing - Environment/Employment Issues
|
|
Book of the Week
Red Rosa
By Kate Evans
A giant of the political left, Rosa
Luxemburg is one of the foremost minds in the history of revolutionary
socialist thought. To Marx’s biographer Franz Mehring, no one came as
close to the towering intellect of Marx himself. But she was much more
than just a thinker. She made herself heard in a world inimical to the
voices of strong-willed women. She overcame physical infirmity and the
prejudice she faced as a Jew to become an active revolutionary whose
philosophy enriched every corner of an incredibly productive and
creative life – her many friendships, her sexual intimacies, and her
love of science, nature and art. Always opposed to the First World War,
when others on the German left were swept up on a tide of nationalism,
she was imprisoned, and then murdered in 1919 fighting for a revolution
she knew to be doomed.
Red Rosa gives Luxemburg
her due as a radical and human being. In this beautifully drawn work of
graphic biography, writer and artist Kate Evans has opened up her
subject’s intellectual world to a new audience, grounding Luxemburg’s
ideas in the realities of an inspirational and deeply affecting life.
See more
|
|
Film of the Week
Dignity of the Nobodies (La dignidad de los nadies)
A film depicting the December 2001 rebellions in Argentina.
The film depicts the economic and social crisis facing the country, and
its impact on ordinary people, focusing on people from Buenos Aires'
poorest shantytowns, crumbling hospitals, and women middle class farmers
fighting multi-national banks that are shamelessly appropriating their
farmlands. See more
Keywords: Argentina - Community Organizing
|
|
Organizing
Keystone XL opponents need a jobs program
The victorious Keystone campaign also exposed the perennial
Achilles' heel of those who are fighting against climate change: We are
often painted by our opponents and perceived by the public as caring
more about the environment than about jobs. The neglected half of the
job for environmental advocates is to ourselves become the voice for job
creation. We need to develop robust programs to put unemployed
pipefitters, teamsters, and others back to work. Indeed, the
prerequisite for every environmental campaign should be a plausible and
detailed jobs program. The sustainability movement must be a voice for
workers, students, and others who want to both save the earth and
promote appropriate economic development. Read more
Keywords: Environment/Employment Issues - Environmental Justice
|
|
People's History
One by One, South Sudan Tries to Name Its War Victims
In South
Sudan, where a vicious civil war has been raging, no government office
or nongovernmental organization has kept a tally of the names of those
killed by government forces, rebels, and other armed groups. But in a
country in which automatic weapons are more plentiful than civil rights,
and local journalists are regularly under assault, a tiny civil society
group is trying to step into the breach by naming all of the names. It
began on the first anniversary of the civil war’s outbreak, when a small
group of volunteers unveiled a list of 568 names of the people - from
toddlers to centenarians - killed in the war to that point. Naming the Ones We Lost
was a first step in what the organizers knew would be a long journey to
grapple with the immense loss of South Sudanese life over the previous
year. Today, the project goes by a slightly different name, Remembering the Ones We Lost, and has a radically expanded mission with a recently launched website.
The goal of the website is nothing short of remarkable - it aims to
name all victims of conflict and armed violence in South Sudan since
1955. Read more
Keywords: South Sudan - Memorials
|
|
The Digital Dark Ages: Movies and Books Get Deleted as Selfies Pile Up
Historians and archivists call our times the “digital dark ages.”
The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the
Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of
the West for 1000 years. But don’t blame the Visigoths or the Vandals.
The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. The
irony is that, even as we’re generating more records than any
civilization ever, we’re destroying so much important stuff that future
generations will hardly know we ever lived. Read more
Keywords: Collective Memory - Information Destruction
|
Your support is needed to keep Connexions going
All of the
work of the Connexions project is done by volunteers, but our expenses
include rent, phone and computer costs and technical support, as well as
expenses related to our ongoing project of converting printed archival
materials into digital formats. You can make a one time or regular
monthly contribution through the donate page on the Connexions website.
|
Bequests
Many of us have made working for
social justice a lifetime commitment. If you are thinking about leaving
a legacy for social justice that will live on, you might want to
consider leaving a bequest to Connexions in your will. If you'd like to
discuss this option, please contact us: Connexions Archive and Library,
Toronto, 416-964-5735 or
see the Bequest page..
|
January 17, 2016
Role of Faith Group in Welcoming and Integration of Syrian Refugees
January 19, 2016
Film screening: The Price We Pay
January 23, 2016
Kinder Morgan Pipeline Rally
January 26, 2016
Postal Banking: Not Your Predatory Lender
January 27, 2016
International Day of Commemoration of Victims of the Holocaust
January 28, 2016
Stories of Ours
January 28-31, 2016
Guelph Organic Conference
The Connexions Calendar is an online calendar that exists to
advertise events that support social justice, democracy, human rights,
ecology, and other causes. We invite you to use it to promote your
events. Adding events to the Connexions Calendar is FREE. We'll give you
a username and password which you use to log on. Use the contact form to arrange for a username and password. Read more →
|
January 17, 1953
I.F. Stone’s weekly
In the midst of the McCarthy era in the United States, the
radical journalist I.F. Stone started I.F. Stone’s Weekly, an
independent radical source of news and analysis (published until 1971).
January 17, 1961
Murder of Patrice Lumumba
Patrice Lumumba was a Congolese independence leader and
the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo after
it gained its independence from Belgium. Considered too radical by the
Western powers and their local allies, Lumumba was seized, a few weeks
after becoming prime minister, in a coup orchestrated by the American
and Belgian governments. He was tortured and then executed by firing
squad.
January 18, 1943
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Beginning of the first phase of the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising. As Nazi forces prepare to ship more Jews from the Warsaw
Ghetto to extermination camps, Jewish resistance forces, organized in
the Jewish Military Union and the Jewish Combat Organization launch an
insurgency. Numbering between 400 and 1000 fighters, they build fighting
posts, engage German forces in combat, and execute collaborators. The
second phase of uprising begins on April 19, when German forces enter
the Ghetto, and continues until early May, when the resistance is
finally crushed.
January 22, 1905
Bloody Sunday in Russia
A peaceful demonstration of St. Petersburg workers, led
by a priest, assembles at the Winter Palace, hoping to present a
petition to Czar Nicholas II. They are singing hymns, dressed in their
best clothes, and carrying portraits of the Czar to show their faith
that the ‘Little Father’ will help them. Their trust in the Czar is
repaid with bullets: without warning, troops fire into the terrified
crowd; more than a thousand are killed. The next day, 125,000 workers go
on strike protesting the massacre: the strikes spread like wildfire,
and suddenly revolution is on the agenda. For the next two months,
Russia is engulfed in a revolutionary upheaval that threatens to
overthrow the regime, but ultimately falls short – for now.
|
Trying to change the world? We can help.
Getting your story across can be an uphill battle when your group is challenging the status quo. Our partner organization SOURCES can help you get your message out. As a SOURCES
member, you have an array of media relation tools at your disposal to
promote your events, books, articles, videos, etc. as well as tools to
get you in contact with those who can help you achieve your goals. The SOURCES news release
service is especially valuable for groups wants to inform the media
(and the public) about their issues. For more information about Sources please click this link.
|
Follow us on twitter to stay up to date with company news and other information.
|
|
Like us on Facebook to keep up with our news, updates and other discussions.
|
|
|
Copyright
Connexions 2015. Contents are licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial License. This means you are welcome to share
and republish the contents of this newsletter as long as you credit
Connexions, and as long as you don’t charge for the content.
Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter, is available online here
This issue was edited by Ulli Diemer.
Connexions
812A Bloor Street West, Suite 201
Toronto ON M6G 1L9 Canada
Phone: 416-964-5735
www.connexions.org
Enjoy this issue of Other Voices? Want to share with friends and family? Then we encourage you to share this link. All issues of OtherVoices are available on the Connexions website at www.connexions.org/Media/CxNewsletter.htm
If you don’t want to receive emails from us anymore, click here to unsubscribe.
|
|