The terrorist attack on Sept. 11 has shaken all of us. Few things will be the same. A sea change has occurred in our nation's life.
As Communists, we are charged with building unity of the whole working class. In the aftermath of welfare reform and with continued corporate downsizing, poverty is deep in times of plenty. Wages are stagnant despite record economic expansion. This is a challenge to the labor and people's movements and to ourselves.
Joining with Los Angeles and other Southern California areas, the greater Bay Area counties, where the population is concentrated in Northern California and the labor movement is strongest, helped give Gore a big win in the state. With the exception of one county with 50 percent, Gore took the greater Bay Area by margins of 60 to 76 percent depending on the county, helping offset more conservative areas of the...
Genesis is explained by the indisputable fact that tens of millions of women are found in every - or nearly every - arena of political, economic, and social life. Its genesis is explained by the indisputable fact that the role of women in social movements has grown enormously compared with only a few decades ago. Women are agents of progressive change.
When our topic is "women and socialism," should we speak about the past or the future? We Communists look to the future-socialism. And we have theory (Marxism) as well as our own experiences in political work, to draw on as we plan and one day bring about our socialism, our own socialist society.
Young women have been victimized on a number of fronts. With the new Bush administration and the right wing controlling a majority of seats in Washington and the economic crisis plowing full steam ahead the attacks on equal pay for equal work, reproductive rights, violence against women, welfare reinstatement, access to public education, and criminalization are among the other issues we're going to have to address.
The Coalition of Labor Union Women is the only national organization for union women. It is a "constituency group" of the AFL-CIO, with 20,000 members from 60 unions, organized into 75 chapters nationwide. CLUW "strives to make organized labor and the public more sensitive to the needs of working women and their families."
Many children in poverty live in single parent, female head-of-household families. In our state most of the 35,000 put off welfare now have an even more difficult economic and family situation. Most new jobs are low-wage, non-union service jobs, often temporary and part-time. The impact of the Bush administration policies plus new cuts in the safety net in Connecticut are leaving many families stranded.
I think we should look at this session as an exchange on what Districts need to be in this new period. We won't come up with all the answers this weekend but I want to continue to pose questions that stir up the pot of our thinking about our future work.
This important observation is timely in many ways for today. As we discuss the crisis at home we have to remember that in today's world, even more than in Marx's day,"poverty and restricted consumption," is a worldwide capitalist system of global proportions. Truly, global capital does now develop "as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society (or planet) would be their limit."