Labor

Labor And The State

April 7, 2017 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Recording of a panel hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, April 8, 2017, at the 9th Annual International Platypus Convention. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists William Pelz Djamil Arbia Brit Schulte Description The bourgeois revolutions strove to subordinate the power of the state to the interests of civil society. Yet the revolutions of 1848 disappointed, resulting in the recrudescence of the state, which rose above society to maintain “order. [Read More]

Public Fora Labor

The politics of work

December 1, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON SEPTEMBER 20 2013, the Platypus Affiliated Society organized a panel discussion entitled *The Politics of Work* for the *Rethinking Marxism* conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The discussion was moderated by Reid Kane of Platypus. The panelists were asked to respond to a prompt of ten questions that included provocative quotations by Joan Robinson, Fredric Jameson, and André Gorz. This prompt asked each panelist to consider the adequacy of the Left’s historic and ongoing attempts to understand and transform social relations of work and unemployment. [Read More]

Rethinking Marxism The politics of work Labor

The Politics of Work

Chicago

November 6, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

A panel event held on November 5, 2013, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Bill Barclay Democratic Socialists of America/Chicago Political Economy Group Lenny Brody Justice Party/Network for Revolutionary Change Leon Fink Professor of labor history, University of Illinois at Chicago Description Capital is not a book about politics, and not even a book about labour: it is a book about unemployment. [Read More]

Chicago Political Economy Group Democratic Socialists of America Justice party Labor Karl Marx Marxism Network for Revolutionary Change Work

The Labor Left After Politics and After Utopia

April 6, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

A panel held on April 6 2013, at the 2013 Platypus International Convention at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Steven Ashby (University of Illinois Chicago) Sam Gindin(Socialist Project) Andreas Karitzis (SYRIZA) Description The emergence of modernity was accompanied by the emergence of labour, its discontents, and the expression of these discontents. From the late 18th century to the present, these expressions have assumed many and often opposing forms, and these in turn have been absorbed by many and often opposing interpretations. [Read More]

Platypus International Convention Platypus International Convention 2013 Labor Socialist Project SYRIZA

Defining Democracy: The Labor Movement and #Occupy

March 31, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Panel held on March 31st, 2012 at the Fourth Annual Platypus International Convention, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists John Peterson (International Marxist Tendency) David Moberg (In These Times) James Manos (Occupy Chicago Labor Committee) Description In 2009 President Obama’s auto bailouts became a major flashpoint between the left and the mainstream of the labor movement. The majority of the left, including UAW dissidents, felt the auto bailouts were a missed opportunity to retool our manufacturing base, and a miserable half-measure. [Read More]

Occupy Platypus International Convention 2012 Democracy In These Times International Marxist Tendency Labor Labor movement Occupy Occupy Chicago Occupy wall street Organized labor OWS

Book Review: Robert Fitch, _Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America's Promise_

April 8, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

New York: PublicAffairs, 2006 ONE HAS TO ADMIRE THEIR PERSISTENCE. Labor Notes, the flagship journal of the domestic labor Left, professes itself to be “the voice of union activists who want to put the movement back into the labor movement.” Though stylistically about as riveting as the phonebook, for more than three difficult decades Labor Notes has critically observed and recorded organized labor’s endemic corruption, democratic shortcomings, and gross ineptitude in organizing workers in the private sector, where today only 7. [Read More]

A Philip Randolph AFL AFL-CIO Labor Labor movement Labor Notes Robert Fitch

Labor struggles today

A report on a recent civil disobedience action in Chicago

October 10, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2009, approximately 900 Chicagoans rallied on the sidewalks in front of the Park Hyatt Hotel near the Magnificent Mile. At the height of rush hour, about 200 members and community allies of UNITE HERE Local 1, Chicago’s hospitality workers’ union, arrived at the scene and blocked all four lanes of Chicago Avenue by sitting down in rows and linking their arms. As the demonstrators chanted “Whose streets? Our streets! [Read More]

AFL-CIO Chuck Hendricks Labor Barack Obama SEIU Unite Here Workers United

Book Review: Randi Storch. Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928-35.

October 10, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. It was not the economics of Communism, nor the great power of trade unions, nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by the similarity of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred peoples into a whole. —Richard Wright, Black Boy RANDI STORCH’S RED CHICAGO takes to task prevailing caricatures of American Communism during the so-called “Third Period” of the late twenties and early thirties, a period in the history of American Communism frequently criticized for its growing ideological rigidity, its organizational Stalinization, and its ultimate failure to revitalize the flagging world revolution and to check the threat of fascism. [Read More]

AFL-CIO American Communist Party Communism Labor Trade Union Unity League Chicago

Left behind

The working class in the crisis

July 1, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON APRIL 23, 2009, a panel discussion titled Left Behind: The Working Class In The Crisis was held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The panelists were Abraham Mwaura of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, who has worked as an organizer at the Republic Windows and Doors Factory; Aaron Hughes, representative at the International Labor Conference, Arbil, Iraq, and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War; James Thindwa, Executive Director of Chicago Jobs with Justice; and Chuck Hendricks, an organizer for the labor union UNITE HERE. [Read More]

Exchanges History of the Left Labor Left Behind Unions Working class

The necessity of leadership

December 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

TO CHANGE THE WORLD, we need a movement. This movement must be made up of millions of people and thousands of organizations. These organizations must build and push the movement forward. How do we get to this point? We have to start with leadership. From 12 to 155 As a union organizer, I train workers to lead their shop floor and industry wide struggles. In the case of my union, we call the leaders in the shops “committee members. [Read More]

Activism Labor Labor movement Leadership Movement Organization Power Reflections Unions Workers