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THE CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION (CTU)—American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1 – conducted an unprecedented, bold, and possibly illegal one-day strike on Friday, April 1, 2016. The strike was initially called to protest threatened cuts in pay during contract negotiations and to send a message: “Continue like this and we will strike!” The CTU leaders changed that focus in the week preceding the strike; by strike day, it became a strike for increased state funding for education and all social services. [Read More]

AFTER THE OUTBREAK of the global economic crisis in 2008, Greece was actually the first Euro-area country where the neoliberal “shock doctrine” was imposed. (I thank Professor Vassilis Droucopoulos for his comments on an earlier version of this article.) This was an attempt to place the fallout of the systemic capitalist crisis on the shoulders of working people. These extreme austerity policies were disputed. A series of mass demonstrations and strikes ensued. [Read More]

ON APRIL 2, 2016, during its eighth international convention in Chicago, Illinois, Platypus brought together Jason Schulman of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Bernard Sampson of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), to discuss how the electoral campaign of Bernie Sanders matters for the Left. Coeditor of the socialist journal New Politics, Jason Schulman’s latest book is Neoliberal Labour Governments and the Union Response: The Politics of the End of Labourism. [Read More]

IN ONE OF HER EARLIEST INTERVENTIONS in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), participating in the notorious theoretical “Revisionist Dispute,” in which Eduard Bernstein infamously stated that “the movement is everything, the goal nothing,” the 27 year-old Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) clearly enunciated her Marxism: “It is the final goal alone which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle.”1 Critique of socialism What did it mean to say that socialist politics was necessary to have “class struggle” at all? [Read More]