Socialism

This isn’t any article in particular, but rather a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to research leftist theory, or improve their praxis.

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In the 1940s, the Communist Party of Australia was approaching the peak of its power as the largest and most influential left-wing organisation in Australian history.

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A hundred years ago, Pennsylvania was crawling with socialists. Not just in big cities, but in coal towns, mill towns, and small boroughs that look a lot like today’s inner suburbs. Socialists ran city halls, sat in the state legislature, and focused on the basics: public ownership, decent services, and making life better for poor and working people.

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For months, tenants in dozens of rent-stabilized buildings owned by Pinnacle Group tried to do something New York housing law almost never permits: stop their landlord from selling their homes to another speculative owner.

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Each chunk of the city (Southside, Uptown, Whittier, and so on) has rotating shifts of dispatchers, who admin a running Signal call throughout operational hours. Sometimes, multiple dispatchers overlap to split up the extra tasks of watching the chat, relaying reports to other channels, and checking license plates. Dispatch also helps people evenly distribute patrols across an area, takes notes, and assists people through confrontations. All patrollers in cars and on foot and stay on the call throughout their patrol. There is a constant flow of information, allowing other cars to decide whether they are well-positioned to join in, take over tailing the car, or continue searching for additional vehicles.

Across industries, sectors, and geographies even the best organized unions struggle to stop owners from closing up shop. If the owners decide they’re done – if they can afford to decide they’re done – workers can’t force them to stay. The reverse is also true, however: when owners invest a whole bunch of capital in an enterprise, this gives workers a window of opportunity to organize themselves before the bosses make their investment back. So it was at Barboncino.

In 2024, media workers of the Ziff Davis Creators Guild (ZDCG, part of the NewsGuild of New York, local 31003) won pro-worker artificial intelligence (AI) language in their first successor collective bargaining agreement. Despite being a union of 62 workers among a corporate conglomerate of 4,000, we came together to fight the boss and set up AI guardrails.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory disrupted politics as they were and inaugurated a new moment for what politics can and should be. It was also “proof of concept” of what socialist strategy might achieve and forced the question: could Mamdani’s strategy be replicated elsewhere? Does NYC provide a roadmap to advance the socialist project nationwide?

With grocery giants ripping off Canadians, it’s time for a bold alternative: public grocery stores.

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