USA

In the late 1970s American manufacturing was in extreme difficulty. The Carter administration turned to a series of radical (for the American government) new inititatives including letting workers buy their workplaces when the owners wanted to pull out.

As General Motors reaped $8.1 billion in profit and paid its CEO $22 million, nearly 50,000 GM workers have been on strike since Monday. While workers gave major concessions during the previous recession the company is digging in it’s heels over wages and has even cut off healthcare plans for workers. Marianne Garneau of Organizing Work interviewed Lynn, a rank-and-file UAW and Black Rose/Rosa Negra member, on strike at a components plant in Rochester.

By abstaining from bourgeois electoral politics and building our own revolutionary organizations we are best placed to build our own political forces up to take advantage of the political crisis of bourgeois rule that manifests itself in disaffection from the ruling parties. For workers, elections are an exercise of ritual humiliation perpetrated upon them by those who exploit them.

In an article the mailroom tried to censor, Texas inmate Jason Walker describes the repression and retaliation directed against prisoners trying to get relief from the extreme summer heat.