For the past twelve months, the spirit of revolt and revolution has swept the planet. One Arab dictator after another has fallen. The world has watched as hundreds of thousands “fought like an Egyptian” in Wisconsin. The European masses have protested by the millions against the most vicious austerity in decades. The Occupy movement channelled the frustration of a generation and sparked the imagination of millions.

On February 10, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 and the Export Grain Terminal (EGT) conglomerate announced that the company had finally agreed to recognize the union’s right to represent workers at the company’s new grain port in Longview, Washington. The announcement followed a concerted struggle by longshore workers in this normally quiet corner of the Pacific Northwest, who were accompanied by mass solidarity pickets organized by the Occupy movement.

Domitila Chungara was the daughter, and later wife, of a miner and a leader of the women in the mining community. She was arrested and tortured during the 1967 San Juan massacre, when the army opened fire on miners and their families, killing many and injuring even more, including women and children. She went on to become a symbol of the struggle against the military. Here we provide a comment by Darrall Cozens and an article by the comrades of El Militante-Bolivia.

On Sunday February the 12, the long-awaited opposition primary elections took place in order to select the candidate who will face Hugo Chavez in the presidential elections due for October this year. Cápriles Radonski, the present governor of Miranda state won a clear victory with 62% of the vote, compared to only 28.9% for his contender Pablo Perez, present governor of Zulia state.

A series of concessions by labour leaders across the country has put a dampener on the mood of the labour movement recently.  Workers have been told that all they can hope for are reduced benefits, less job security, and they should be thankful to even have a job.  However, a wildcat strike by hundreds of Air Canada workers across the country have shown that in spite of a timid leadership, workers are prepared to mount a massive fight against the bosses’ austerity agenda and flex their collective muscle.  More importantly, this show of strength can actually work and result in victory for workers.

Thomas Mulcair, the former Quebec Liberal and so-called “modernizer”, has been elected leader of the federal New Democratic Party. He gained 57% of the vote on the fourth and final ballot, defeating six other candidates in the process. Many in the party fear that he will take the same route as former British Labour leader Tony Blair. However, this will not be easy for him. There is little enthusiasm for Mulcair in the party and only 50% of the membership found a reason to vote for any of the candidates. The reality is that there were very few ideas discussed in the campaign and Mulcair’s victory was no way inevitable. A genuinely left-wing candidate could have galvanized the

On Thursday, March 22nd, around 300,000 students, teachers, and workers took to the streets of Montreal in a massive demonstration of historic proportions. On that day, 308,723 students were united in a strike across the province. The march was joined by buses from all over Quebec which brought students from universities, CEGEPs, and surprisingly, even a significant contingent from high schools! Workers’ unions, from the metallos to the nurses to the teachers and others, also came out, flying their union flags.

In their relentless quest for profits, big business must continue to drive down workers' wages, benefits, and conditions—and unions are in their way! Recently, the Indiana state legislature and governor made it the first industrial state in the Northeast/Midwest to adopt so-called "right to work" legislation. This law is intended to weaken and destroy the unions. This is a warning to the labor movement!

We are republishing this letter, written by Iranian-Canadian activists, who are demanding that they not be excluded from the anti-war movement, and that support for Iranian revolutionaries not be silenced.  This letter was addressed to leaders of various Canadian anti-war organizations in the aftermath of an anti-war protest in Toronto on Sunday, 4th March 2012.  A Persian translation follows the English letter.

Controversy has erupted over the Obama Administration’s directive that all employers, including religious employers, include birth control coverage in their insurance benefits. This once again reminds us that the hard-fought struggles for reproductive freedom and women’s rights in America is far from over.

We recommend a viewing of this 30 minute documentary on poverty in the USA by the BBC’s Panorama team. Millions unemployed. Millions hungry. Millions homeless. Millions without access to health care. These are the facts of life in America at a time when corporate profits, worker productivity, and income inequality are at record highs.

It’s official; with Obama’s State of the Union address, the 2012 election race is underway. But does this really mean that "the era of the 1% is over," as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has asserted?

We all observed dramatic battles by organized labor in 2011. There were the broad militant struggles in Wisconsin by public workers responding to the vicious attacks from right-wing Republican Governor Walker. During the summer, CWA & IBEW members went on strike against Verizon. They battled against the demand for givebacks from the very profitable Verizon company. In Ohio, the labor movement mobilized its forces to repeal anti-labor laws by referendum and won a terrific victory, gaining 61% of the vote.

We republish here a graph that was originally published in the New York Times, based on figures from “The State of Working America” by the Economic Policy Institute. It covers the period from 1913 to the present, with a focus on the period after 1947. This is significant because 1947 can be considered the starting point of the post-Word War II economic boom, a period during which the capitalists were extracting so much profit from the workers that they were able to throw them a few extra crumbs. The mass workers’ movements in the 1930s and the strengthening of the unions after the war had taught them a few lessons about how to try to maintain relative class peace.

“Marx was right!” For Marxists, this is not a particularly profound revelation. We have long known that the German revolutionary's analysis of capitalism was as fundamentally sound as the capitalist system itself is fundamentally unsound. But let's face it: for decades, we've been in a small minority, fighting against the stream and against the odds. After spending a long time in the “wilderness,” that is beginning to change. The fact that the more serious capitalist economists are forced to admit the correctness of ideas they once ridiculed is an important symptom of a transformation in public consciousness./(Editorial for Socialist Appeal USA Issue 65/)