Popular Power

From Union Renewal to a Self-Managed Society

Municipal trash workers protest in Johannesburg, South Africa. In the face of fiercely expanding inequality and anti-unionism in the US there is a great deal of discussion across the left of how to revitalize unions. While we see glimmers of hope in the recent strike wave of teachers and innovative forms of unionism such as with […]

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Love and Fire: Boots Riley on Art, Labor, and Mass Movements

The Coup’s 2012 album, also titled “Sorry to Bother You” (intended to be the film’s soundtrack, before the screenplay started getting the attention of various famous musicians like Janelle Monáe, who ended up on the film’s actual soundtrack) came with an insert featuring this short treatise laying out Boots Riley’s communist political praxis. For much […]

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Is Student Activism Enough?

By Patrick Berkman Freddie DeBoer has a blogpost up at Jacobin, titled “Student Activism Isn’t Enough.” It’s classic Freddie: write an entire essay shitting on student activism, then closing it by saying actually, student activism is pretty great and important, keep it up! DeBoer claims “the university can’t be the key site of left-wing (or any other) […]

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A Year In Popular Power #4 – Burgerville Workers Union

Stephan is an organizer and fast food worker with Burgerville Workers Union (BVWU) in Portland, OR. The union has led an innovative campaign along the model of “solidarity unionism” to become the first recognized fast food workers union in the country using store based committee building, multiple strikes shutting down stores and other actions. BVWU […]

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A Year In Popular Power #3 – “Don’t be a scab!” Graduate Student Strikes

Tariq is a graduate student, teaching assistant and union member of Graduate Employees Organization or GEO Local 6300, which represents 2,700 graduate and teaching assistants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In February 2018, the union led a successful two-week strike pushing back against the administration’s threat to take away tuition waivers and […]

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A Year In Popular Power #2 – Stopping ICE Raids with the Koreatown Popular Assembly

Stopping ICE Raids with the Koreatown Popular Assembly. Markie is a dispatcher with the Rapid Response Network that mobilizes to respond and stop ICE raids in the working class, immigrant neighborhood of Koreatown in Los Angeles. This was formed as a project of the Koreatown Popular Assembly, which through a series of meetings made defense […]

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Resist, Occupy, Produce: Cooperatives and Argentina’s Occupied Factory Movement

What can US revolutionaries learn from factory take-overs and worker cooperatives in Argentina? Two South African writers with Zabalaza (ZACF) look at the example of Argentina’s recuperated factory movement whereby workplaces facing closure during the economic crisis were seized and then operated as cooperatives. The authors looks at their relationship to social movements, their anti-capitalist […]

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“Let’s Go For It”: Interview with a Striking AT&T Union Steward

This past month thousands of AT&T workers across the country have gone out on short, locally-organized Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strikes in protest of company intimidation during contract bargaining and other issues. Two separate contracts for the workers organized under the Communications Workers of America (CWA) at AT&T expired on April 15 but negotiations continued […]

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