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One of the most compelling aspects of Venezuela’s ongoing Bolivarian Revolution, founded with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999, is the central role that communes play in the process. These communes bring together communal councils, elected representatives of 200-400 families in urban areas (and 20-50 families in rural areas), to manage social services and production in a self-sufficient manner. Currently, there are almost 50,000 registered communes in Venezuela, concentrated in the countryside and the sprawling urban barrios.

Discusses the need for labor activists to go beyond "lowest common denominator" union organizing.

When the coup was looking inevitable, Morales had gone underground.  Days after Morales and Linera arrived in El Trópico, Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent a plane to rescue them, flying them out of Chimoré airport again.  Obrador later said that the Bolivian armed forces targeted the aircraft with an RPG rocket moments after it took off. It appears the U.K.-backed coup regime wanted the deposed president – who had served for 13 years – dead.  Morales then brings up the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “I feel that it is time now, seeing the problems between Russia and Ukraine … to do an international campaign, globally, first to explain that NATO is — ultimately — the United States.”  He adds: “Better still a campaign orientated around how to eliminate NATO. NATO is not a guarantee for humanity or for life. I do not accept — in fact, I condemn — how they can exclude Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council. When the U.S.

In the 1930s, a new type of union, an ​“industrial” union that welcomed all workers in a single workplace emerged as the cutting edge of working-class struggle. Previously, unions and employers both had a long history of racism and support for white supremacy. Certain jobs were reserved for whites, and Black workers were kept out of factories and union halls. This had catastrophic consequences. For example, in the 1919 Steel Strike, employers brought in 30,000 Black and immigrant workers to break the strike staged by white workers and their racially exclusive unions. With that, employers got production moving again, defeated the strike, and prevented worker organizing for the next 15 years.