{"id":14581,"date":"2010-08-06T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2010-08-06T15:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=14581"},"modified":"2010-08-06T09:00:34","modified_gmt":"2010-08-06T15:00:34","slug":"a-new-type-of-political-organization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=14581","title":{"rendered":"A New Type of Political Organization?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.socialistproject.ca\/bullet\/\"><strong>The\u00a0B u l l e t<\/a><br \/>\nSocialist Project \u2022 E-Bulletin No. 400<br \/>\n6 August 2010<\/p>\n<p>The Greater Toronto Workers&#8217; Assembly<br \/>\nHerman Rosenfeld and Carlo Fanelli<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left  around the world is undergoing reformation. As the Great Recession has  vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism  have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades  following World War II. From wage and benefit concessions to reductions  in social services, in an openly anti-union political climate, it is now  being demanded that the working class pay for a crisis which it did not  create. With the impasse of the anti-globalization and other new social  movements that burst onto the scene in the early 2000s, coupled with  the inability of many historically progressive unions, trapped in  erstwhile social democratic parties, to mobilize their membership base,  the Left is in a period of experimentation.<\/p>\n<p>There have been important developments: the emergence of explicitly anti-capitalist parties such as <a href=\"http:\/\/die-linke.de\/politik\/international\/english_pages\/\" target=\"_blank\">Die Linke<\/a> (The Left) in Germany, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloco.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Left Bloc<\/a> in Portugal, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npa2009.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">New Anti-capitalist Party<\/a> in France; the re-emergence of working class discontent in the streets  of Greece, Spain, and Italy; and a left tide throughout Latin America.  What about North American developments, however? A June 2010 article by  Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster discusses the weak state of  progressive forces in the United States and their inability to translate  significant support for their political positions into commensurate  political influence. This article updates reports on attempts in Toronto  to build an anti-capitalist political movement bringing together trade  unions and working class communities, first published in the pages of <em>Relay: A Socialist Project Review<\/em> and <em>Monthly Review<\/em>.<a href=\"http:\/\/www.socialistproject.ca\/bullet\/400.php\">[1]<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>[<a href=\"http:\/\/www.socialistproject.ca\/bullet\/400.php\">Read more<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The\u00a0B u l l e t Socialist Project \u2022 E-Bulletin No. 400 6 August 2010 The Greater Toronto Workers&#8217; Assembly Herman Rosenfeld and Carlo Fanelli At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=14581\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-3Nb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14581"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14585,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581\/revisions\/14585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}