Dilip Simeon's blog

In 1908, Theresa Malkiel, a young Jewish refugee who fled antisemitic violence in Russia, was working in a New York factory making shirtwaists, an early twentieth century must-have for “fashionable ladies”. The conditions that the workers – almost entirely female immigrants – endured then are replicated today in the factories of the global south, and also in many workplaces in the global north. To ensure that profit levels are maintained, conditions in factories both in 1908 and 2019 are hugely unsafe, there are often industrial accidents, days are long and neither wages nor breaks are adequate. Malkiel, a fantastic organiser and orator, brought together the workers around her and together they went on strike. As part of her activism, Malkiel organised the first International Women’s Day, where in February of 1909, 2000 women and men gathered on 34th Street in New York to listen to socialist feminist speakers discuss the importance of universal suffrage. Malkiel’s Diary of a Shirt...

When strikes broke out across Poland the autumn of 1980, it was difficult to find a name for the new phenomenon. The story is simple enough. In August 1980, a strike broke out at the shipyard in Gdansk. The workers, who were among the fairly well paid, wanted a raise. In the People’s Republic of Poland, such a matter was not difficult to resolve. Either one agreed to the demands of the workers, or one called in the police, the military; this had been done before and claimed victims. The workers demanded a meeting with high-ranking politicians in order to solve the conflict, and the politicians agreed to it.  But they were in for a surprise. The negotiations took place in public: apart from the strike committee, other workers also participated (through the internal radio at the shipyard). And the workers moved between the room where the negotiations took place and other places in the shipyard. Every decision made by the strikers’ committee was a joint decision. Among othe...

NB: All those who had forgotten about working class movements and workers rights, may please consider this: what just happened in the US was a lock-out called by the highest executive official in the country - all to blackmail his own political system. Millions of people - workers and their families were made to pay the cost of this rascal's egotistical blackmailing tactics - and they will continue to pay, since the interest on debts will not be reimbursed by the employer. DS An interview with Sara Nelson, the US flight attendant union head who called this week for a general strike.   Flight attendants work for airlines, and so they have, of course, been getting paid for the past five weeks, setting them apart from airport colleagues like TSA screeners, air traffic controllers, and customs agents. But it was Sara Nelson, the head of the flight attendants’ union, who made the most forceful call for worker solidarity in the face of the shutdown. At an award dinner on Sunday, ...

Fisher and Tribal People Come Together in Massive Protest Rally  DM's Office Blocked for Hours in West Midnapore On 27th December 2018 in   a   first ever joint movement Dakshinbanga Matsyajibi Forum and Adibasi Bikash Parishad alongwith many other organisations of the tribal people came together and staged a massive protest rally in Midnapore town against government's insensitivity and bureaucratic inaction regarding their long standing demands. For hours the DM's office was under siege with about 8,000 fishing community and tribal people blocking its entrance. In West Midnapore, as in many other areas, the fishers and fish farmers either belong to tribal communities or live and work together. Thus common cause builds up among them to move for both fishing communities' and tribal people's rights and entitlements.  The Judge Court ground of Medinipur Town was overflown with thousands of people hailing from places like Narayangar...

... a humanitarian crisis unprecedented in modern Latin American history...  The United Nations estimates  3 million have fled  the country since 2015  to escape chronic food and medicine shortages, crumbling healthcare and transport systems and an economy in freefall. The latrines at Simón Bolívar international airport in Caracas overflow with urine; the taps are bone dry. In the departures hall, weeping passengers prepare for exile, unsure when they will return. At customs, a sticker on one x-ray machine warns: “Here you don’t speak badly about Chávez!” But even before stepping outside the terminal it is obvious his Bolivarian revolution, like the airport’s immobile escalators, has ground to a halt. On 6 December 1998,  Hugo Chávez  proclaimed a new dawn of social justice and people power. “Venezuela’s resurrection is under way and nothing and nobody can stop it,”  the leftwing populist told a sea of euphoric supporters  after  ...

Every day before work, Kevin Lau stopped for breakfast at a restaurant in Sai Wan Ho, a residential area in eastern Hong Kong. It was a routine as ingrained in him as brushing his teeth, and it nearly cost him his life. On a morning in February 2014, Lau -- a senior editor at the popular, upmarket daily Ming Pao -- had parked his car on a street near the restaurant when two men, wearing motorcycle helmets and gloves, rushed up to him. One slashed at Lau with a meat cleaver, knocking him to the floor, where he lay bleeding with deep wounds in his back and legs as his assailants ran off. With what a court later described as "superhuman calm," Lau phoned for an ambulance, and was rushed to hospital. He survived, and two men with triad links -- Yip Kim-wah and Wong Chi-wah -- were arrested and charged with grievous bodily harm. While Yip and Wong were later jailed, they did not reveal who had commissioned and paid for the attack, one of several against journalists in Hong Kong ...

Demonstrators take to the streets on 1 May 2018 to celebrate workers and push for improved labour rights. By Matt Fidler ttps://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/may/01/may-day-rallies-around-world-2018-in-pictures May 1, 1923: Communist leader Malayapuram Singaravelu Chettiar raised the first red flag in India, in Chennai.

Deep cracks had appeared in the eight-storey building outside Dhaka the day before. That morning, workers who had been producing clothes sourced by major international brands had begged not to be sent inside. Managers would not relent. More than 2,000 people filed in. Some time before 9am, floors began to vanish and workers started falling. Rana Plaza took less than 90 seconds to collapse,  killing 1,134 people . Unions called it a “mass industrial homicide”. Standing in the rubble, Khatun promised to quit her job in a nearby garment factory. “Even if I don’t have any other work, I won’t do it.” Revulsion over Rana Plaza forced brands and retailers to act. The full list of companies who were sourcing clothes from the building remains unclear, but had previously included  Primark ,  Matalan  and others.  About 250 companies signed two initiatives, the  Accord on Fire and Building Safety  in Bangladesh, and the less constraining Alliance for Ban...

The Soviet retreat from the ideas of 1917: muffled tones of a nation of whisperers and diarists The second decade of Soviet history, the 1930s, was volatile and consequential in ways that none of the other six were. The revolution that occurred then, explicitly designated as a revolution, and the third since February 1917, recast economy and society in ways that justify the use of adjectives like tectonic and paradigmatic. Unlike the first two revolutions, the apical character of agricultural, industrial and social change – directed by the Politburo `from above’ – rendered this revolution a semantic mystery: where was popular participation in support of the regime, as against its strength in opposition? It was certainly dialectical. If the thesis was erecting socialism, declared done in 1936, its antithesis lay in the offensive against capitalism that formed the thrust of Stalin’s speech on the twelfth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. It was an economically premature...

N B : This essay has appeared in EPW's special number commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which falls on November 7. (A Word file is downloadable here ) . The revolution began on February 23, 1917, (March 8 according to the new calendar adopted in 1918); but for complex reasons, tended to be identified with the Bolshevik seizure of power on October 25 (November 7). However the two should not be conflated, as I argue below. My essay deals with Lenin's ideology and the period between 1917 and 1922.  I taught Russian history for many years at Ramjas College in the 1980's, as some of my students will remember. This enabled me to study the complex history of Russian social-democracy and its Bolshevist wing. For decades the socialist movement unfolded in the shadow of Bolshevism; and its Indian counterpart was no exception. Unfortunately, idealism was often overtaken by dogma and ideological factionalism, resulting in a closure of debate and the reduction ...

As the Left celebrates the centenary of the Russian Revolution this month, it is important to learn lessons from its tragic fate. The Russian Revolution is a startling paradox. It was a revolution largely based on the working class, the first workers’ revolution in history, creating a state that was  not  a workers’ state. This searing paradox would clinch the fate of the radical left for the rest of the twentieth century, since the chief outcome of the revolution (the regime known as ‘Stalinism’) would exert a preponderant influence on radical sectors of the left in countries like India no less than in Europe, and crucially affect the course of major political events internationally, most notably, Hitler’s unimpeded rise to power at the end of the twenties and the tragic fate of the Spanish Revolution a few years later. As Don Filtzer showed in his seminal book  Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization , by the 1930s the working class in the Soviet Union cea...

The Bleak Left - On Endnotes TIM BARKER Marxists have waited long enough that Marx is right again: we have a surplus population… Not only communists believe this time may be different. As the Economist, put it in 2014: “Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not less. But things can change." A round the world, more than a billion people can only dream of selling their labor power . From the point of view of employers, they are unneeded for production, even at the lowest wages.  Even in China, the new workshop of the world, there were no net industrial jobs created between 1993 and 2006. The size of China’s industrial workforce  -  around 110 million people -  is vast in absolute terms. But relative to the population of China, the number suggests the limited demand for industrial labor, not just in Detroit but around the world…  Endnotes  takes the view that these billions are “pure surplus” whom the system wi...

The standoff between cooks, cleaners, drivers and childminders of the rich, who last week stormed across the well-manicured lawns at Mahaguna Moderne in Noida, a Delhi suburb, has turned from violent to political. Dozens of people whom residents believe took part in the angry uprising have been sacked, and in response trade unions are calling for a boycott of all domestic help. There is fury at what has been seen as the high-handed approach of a government minister who arrived to talk to  residents before making racial slurs against the rioters and refusing to meet slum dwellers. The 100-strong group of protesters consisted of workers who enter the high-rise complex daily yet are forced to take different lifts and corridors to their employers, and even have to use different glasses and taps to drink water. When Zohra Bibi, a part-time maid, went missing, her husband went to the complex to demonstrate together with his relatives and friends. It is claimed that Mithul and Ha...

Where the state has collapsed, the market has come up short and the boss class has literally fled, these 26 workers are attempting to fill the gaps. These are people who have been failed by capitalism; now they reject capitalism itself as a failure. You could call the men and women at  Viome  factory workers, but that wouldn’t be the half of it. Try instead: some of the bravest people I’ve ever met. Or: organisers of one of the most startling social experiments in contemporary Europe. And: a daily lesson from Greece to Brexit Britain, both in how we work and how we do politics. At the height of the Greek crash in 2011, staff at Viome clocked in to confront an existential quandary. The owners of their parent company had gone bust and abandoned the site, in the second city of Thessaloniki. From here, the script practically wrote itself: their plant, which manufactured chemicals for the construction industry, would be shut. There would be immediate layoffs, and dozens of...

Tamil Nadu has an estimated 4.5 lakh employees in the IT space, many are reluctant to join the union because they worry their employers will disapprove or see them as trouble-makers. Tamil Nadu has an estimated 4.5 lakh employees in the IT space.  A week after employees complained against  IT major Cognizant  for pink-slipping them, techies in Tamil Nadu are forming a union. More than 100 software professionals have signed up as members. The union, to be called "Forum for IT Employees, Tamil Nadu " will lobby for women's safety and protect members' rights by holding  IT firms  to labour laws, said P Parimala, a techie turned activist heading the mission. Sources say that though Tamil Nadu has an estimated 4.5 lakh employees in the IT space, many are reluctant to join the union because they worry their employers will disapprove or see them as trouble-makers. Mohandas Pai , among the co-founders of Infosys, told NDTV, "Nobody will be interested to join these u...

Paris Commune of 1871 (March 18-May 28) A brief history of the world's first socialist working class uprising. The workers of Paris, joined by mutinous National Guardsmen, seized the city and set about re-organising society in their own interests based on workers' councils. They could not hold out, however, when more troops retook the city and massacred 30,000 workers in bloody revenge. Photographs and posters from the  Paris Commune The Paris Commune is often said to be the first example of working people taking power. For this reason it is a highly significant event, even though it is ignored in the French history curriculum. On March 18 1871, after France was defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war, the French government sent troops into Paris to try and take back the Parisian National Guard’s cannon before the people got hold of it. Much to the dismay of the French government, the citizens of Paris had got hold of them, and wouldn't give them up. Th...