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The labor movement has a new driving message for its legislative, educational and political work that should resonate with most American workers, especially those who have the least: Your pay is too damn low!

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka put it less colloquially this week than the New York gubernatorial candidate who once ran on a single message: "Rent is too damn high." Organized labor will put "a laser focus on raising wages," Trumka told reporters in Houston at the start of the winter quarterly meeting of the federation's executive council.

Whatever the words, the case for action is strong. Wages have stagnated for all but the rich for more than a decade and fallen for low-wage workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a leading research institution on labor markets. Adjusting for inflation over the past four years, hourly wages for workers in the bottom 30 percent have fallen an average of 68 cents an hour.

Those trends, mirrored by the top 1 percent capturing 95 percent of all the new income growth following the end of the Great Recession, explain why inequality is growing, according to University of California, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez.

However, as Trumka notes, the general public, as well as leaders from "the Pope to the president," have begun to express outrage over inequality. A minimum-wage boost has been increasingly on the U.S. agenda, with a $10.10 federal minimum proposed by Congressional Democrats and supported by Obama. Although the AFL-CIO is promoting the $10.10 minimum, Trumka says he favors a "living wage" standard set around $17 an hour, indexed to inflation.

"Wages are about what connects us all," he told reporters, suggesting that labor's campaign for a raise for all workers could bring old and new allies together in a powerful movement for economic fairness....(Click title for more)

Leslie Thatcher for Truthout: What motivated you to choose (of all things!) "corporate structure" in your search for a "powerful, attractive and credible vision of socialism?"

Richard Wolff: Chiefly because the internal organization of our workplaces has been so badly undervalued and thus so little transformed in and by socialist practices. This was true not only in the efforts to establish actual socialism but likewise in the theoretical and political projects for transition from capitalism to socialism.

Human beings spend most of their adult lives - the central parts of most days of most weeks - at work. How their work structures their interactions with other people (their interdependencies, interactions, freedoms and responsibilities) are crucial to everything from daily personal life to politics, culture ... everything. Socialists have focused on changing ownership of means of production - from private to social - and on changing the mechanism of distributing resources and products - from market to planning. Those foci meant that the internal organization of workplaces was neglected and/or treated as a secondary matter of what technology and efficiency require, something largely independent of the transition from capitalism to socialism.

I am convinced that to make the transition from capitalism to socialism requires a deliberate critique of how capitalism organizes its workplaces. It likewise requires a deliberate specification of how and why socialism organizes its workplaces very differently.

To drive the point home, let me add two further and closely interrelated considerations. First, most of the "actually existing" socialist experiments to date unraveled in part because they never transformed the organization of their workplaces. They more or less replaced private shareholders and boards of directors with state officials and they more or less substituted planned distributions of inputs and outputs for market exchanges. What they did not do was to radically alter the internal organization of workplaces in a specifically socialist way.

Second, by a "specifically socialist way" I mean pretty much what Marx specified in Capital. Marx stressed there that a central dimension of capitalism that he wished to see transformed was "exploitation." By that he meant the capitalist organization of the workplace. In that organization workers add more value by their labor than the value paid to them (wages, salaries) for that labor. Capitalists appropriate that "more," or what Marx called "surplus." To squeeze as much surplus from the workers as possible, capitalists control and make all the key decisions: what, how and where to produce and what to do with the surpluses they appropriate from the workers.

A transition to socialism would thus require the transformation of capitalism's exploitative internal organization of enterprises. In other words, the transition to socialism requires that workers not only produce surpluses, but also themselves appropriate and distribute them. Workplaces stop being conflict-ridden confrontations of two different groups of people - employers and employees - and become instead cooperatives in which the same people who produce the surpluses also - collectively and democratically - appropriate those surpluses. Workplaces are reorganized into workers self-directed enterprises (WSDEs). In WSDEs, workers (rather than capitalists) decide what, how and where to produce and what to do with the surpluses their labor generates.

Imagine a socialism for the 21st century that included among its central goals the democratic transformation of the workplace, a dramatic advance beyond the major 19th and 20th century versions of socialism.

Because I wanted to ground a basic critique of the corporate organization of production - the dominant form of capitalist enterprise in the world today - by focusing on its paradigm form, its textbook formulation without the many deformations and biases that shape its particular incarnations. I wanted to show the profound problems, weaknesses and flaws in its best form before examining the additional defects it often displays, such as the one you chose as illustration.

Indeed, it is often the basic corporate organization of the enterprise that positions and enables a CEO, for example, to produce such additional defects. In my view, what you call the idealized capitalist enterprise organization is already fundamentally anti-democratic in how it determines (1) who produces the net-revenues versus who disposes of those net revenues and (2) who does the work versus who decides what products will be produced with what technology and where. The actual specifics of many capitalist corporations are only that much more vulnerable to the basic critique....(Click title for more)

Michigan Rightwing Legislature Wants to Pass Bill To Fine Citizens Up To $1k Per Day For Picketing

Now that Viktor Yanukovych has gone, and new elections are promised, we need to assess the political and popular forces that succeeded in overturning Ukraine's political system.

Who were the protesters and what were their goals? At the barricades in central Kiev there were Ukrainian and EU flags, as well as portraits of the poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), considered as a spiritual father of Ukrainian identity, and of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) who was, depending on your point of view, either a great patriot or a Nazi collaborator. And there were pictures of five Ukrainian activists, treated as martyrs after they were killed during the clashes in Grushevsky Street.

Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev's Independence Square, the epicentre of the protests that had been taking place across Ukraine for three months, was filled with tents pitched by sympathisers from every part of the country: from Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, the strongholds of nationalism, but also from Lugansk and Donetsk, the big cities of the industrial east, which have always felt close to Russia. Cossacks wore their traditional costume. Women brought black bread and ham to the men standing guard. There was a pervasive smell of tea, cabbage soup and wood fires. During the week, the few thousand activists went about their day-to-day business; on Sundays, tens of thousands came to hear speeches by opposition leaders, pray and sing the national anthem, tirelessly.

The protest movement emerged in November last year, after Yanukovych suspended negotiations on a free trade agreement with the European Union (1). Independence Square was gradually transformed. The first to arrive were a few thousand pro-European partisans, but as repression began the square became a symbol of revolt against a corrupt and mercenary political system for many others - initially a revolt against the Yanukovych system, but also a rejection of the opposition parties, out of their depth in this crisis.

The involvement of several nationalist groups - a small but highly visible presence - and of ultra-radical, non-democratic movements without European sympathies has produced different reactions. Their presence was used actively by Russia, and to some extent by Yanukovych's government, to discredit the movement. But it also raised fears of a possible takeover of Independence Square by the far right - even though a popular movement was behind the protests and any attempt to categorise it in political terms would be an over-simplification.

Far right's inspiration

The far right is largely modelled on the nationalist movement that developed from the 1920s, when most of what is now Ukraine was divided between Poland and Soviet Russia. From the start it was shaped by a variety of influences: Italian fascism, the partial collaboration - for pragmatic or ideological reasons - of some of its representatives (such as Bandera) with Nazi Germany, the participation of several Ukrainian battalions in the massacre of Jewish and Polish civilians during the second world war.

Political scientist Andreas Umland, who teaches at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, said: "There are no objective historical accounts of Bandera's [career]. Russian historians portray him as a fascist ally of the Nazis, while Ukrainian historians praise him without reserve. His admirers on Independence Square take a naïve and biased view of him, which is a problem. But it seems equally biased and dishonest to call him a fascist, as the Russians do" (2).

Dormant during the Soviet era, the nationalist movement reappeared after independence in 1991, when the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU) was formed. Until the early 2000s, the SNPU was a marginal, xenophobic and ultra-nationalist organisation, and what little support it had was largely in the west of the country. Its leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, was elected to the Ukrainian parliament for the first time in 1998.

During the 2000s, the SNPU changed significantly. It shed its fascist trappings at its 6th congress in 2004, renaming itself Svoboda (freedom) and abandoning its neo-Nazi badge, the Wolfsangel (wolf hook), in favour of a more neutral symbol. According to Oleksiy Leshchenko of the Gorshenin Institute thinktank, these cosmetic changes "were intended mainly to reassure voters, but were also meant to improve Svoboda's image abroad."

In search of respectability, Svoboda established relations with other European far-right parties. Jean-Marie Le Pen, president of France's Front National, attended the 2004 congress as guest of honour. Svoboda also moderated its nationalist stance and references to Bandera - about whom Ukrainians do not agree - and gradually adopted a more general discourse, relatively common among the European far right, based on radical and vehement criticism of "the system"....(Click title for more)

The Urgency Of Venezuela

Mark Ruffalo in Zuccotti Park with Occupy Wall Street protesters (Photo: ©2011 Julie Dermansky)Mark Ruffalo in Zuccotti Park with Occupy Wall Street protesters. (Photo: ©2011 Julie Dermansky)

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS