Mexican Truckers Declare Strike Mexico, Feb 5 (Prensa Latina)

Mexican transport workers confirmed on Thursday they will hold a national strike on February 16, urging the government to freeze fuel prices. The president of the Alliance of Autonomous Transport Workers, Jaime Soberanes, said five million workers from the sector will stop their activities that day to press the federal government cope with their demands. If no positive answer is made, the strike could drag out indefinitely, they warned. Soberanes stressed that the 75 percent reduction in the monthly adjustment in oil prices, announced last week by President Felipe Calderon, fails to solve the situation of transport workers, who have to face ever increasing prices. http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID=%7BD59E9644-8DF1-4348-85CD-89C57BD80616%7D)&language=EN

The postman who wants to deliver the end of capitalism

“to all Australians who work with their hands, in gratitude for their very real contributions to my education.” from Humphrey McQueen's home page http://home.alphalink.com.au/~loge27/aus_hist/aus_hist_weird_mob.htm

A Weird Mob They’re a Weird Mob leapt out of Australian bookstores from November 1957. By Christmas, the first edition of 6,000 had sold out. Five reprints followed before the end of February. Before 1981, A Weird Mob had sold half-a-million, making it Australia’s best-selling novel. Its author was “Nino Cullota”, which proved to be the pen-name for Australian-born John O’Grady (1907-81).

“Nino Cullota” could be translated as “Little Fatarse”. Publisher Sam Ure Smith “exposed” the author’s identity as part of the marketing. With little formal schooling, O’Grady began publishing stories in the late 1930s. As an erstwhile builder’s labourer, he dedicated A Weird Mob “to all Australians who work with their hands, in gratitude for their very real contributions to my education.”

http://wdpress.blog.co.uk/

Video http://au.youtube.com/Giles53

on the 20th of January, Giles Ji Ungpakorn was charged with Lese Majeste - ie. offending the dignity of the monarchy - for a book he published in 2007. Giles was charged with Lese Majeste because of 8 paragraphs in Chapter 1 of the book 'A Coup for the Rich'.

Associate Professor Giles Ji Ungpakorn is a lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Giles is a political commentator and has been involved in social movements in Thailand for many years on the side of labour and the poor of Thailand. In the political unrests of 2008, Giles' social commentary was again very clear in exposing the role of the military and the elites in organising the protests. T

he Lese Majeste law is quite clearly aimed at suppressing dissent in Thailand. It is now used by the present government to target its critics. The Lese Majeste law mainly targets people and organisations that criticise the social order, and organise, in favour of workers and the poor. It is important to defend activists like Giles Ji Ungpakorn.

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 394-396:

6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the wage- earner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually completely to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both quantitatively (a shorter working week, free weekends, paid holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education) and qualitatively (the actual 

Social Reproduction for Beginners: Bringing the Real World Back In

Loren Goldner

“The animal is immediately one with its life activity, nor distinct from it. The animal is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself into an object of will and consciousness. It is not a determination with which he immediately identifies. (The animal)… produces in a one-sided way while man produces universally...The animal only produces itself while man reproduces the whole of nature.”
K. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts

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About the Course

"Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity
as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.