MAY 15, 2026

The Past Is Present: History Is Organizing With Us Now
The Lucas Plan turns 50. The British General Strike of 1926 turns 100. “History isn’t a comfort blanket. It’s a human-made map, imperfect, incomplete, sometimes misleading. The terrain changes, but the questions the Lucas workers asked, and the General Strike raised aren’t historical curiosities. They’re questions now. […] Capital’s memory is long. The playbook used to crush the 1926 General Strike — divide workers by sector, by race, and gender, and nation, to de-legitimize solidarity; to use media to frame strikers as threats to the public — is recognizable. It has only ever been updated, not retired. Union-busting consultants charge hundreds of dollars an hour to deploy strategies with century-old roots. The names change. The logic doesn’t. So workers with long memories aren’t being nostalgic. They’re being strategic.” Laura Flanders Substack via Portside

Mazzocchi welcomed young radicals into unionism and shifted labor’s stance
When student radicals started migrating from campus and community organizing to unionized workplaces, labor officials did not welcome them. But a World War II veteran from Brooklyn named Tony Mazzocchi did. Mazzocchi had risen through the ranks of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), a CIO union which had a strong tradition of rank-and-file activism and internal democracy. He welcomed Sixties’ radicals into the ranks of labor and went on to personally mentor them. Many of Mazzocchi’s mentees will join others in a tribute to his achievements at the Rutgers University Labor Center, June 4 – 5. Labor Notes

We need a Socialism After Capitalism
“As Ellen [Meiksins Wood] pointed out, markets existed before capitalism. What capitalism introduced was market dependence — a system in which basic survival is contingent on success in the market. Socialism, if it means anything, must abolish that condition. No one’s ability to eat, access care, educate their children, or secure housing should hinge on their position within the market. That is the heart of the socialist promise, and we should never let go of it. But incentives for participating in markets — for participating in the economy’s complex network of production — could help generate the surplus that makes the elimination of market dependence possible in the first place. Our goal as egalitarians is not to abolish production or exchange across a complex division of labor, but to abolish the system of market dependence and exploitation that currently governs them.” Jacobin

A practical book to help sort out our own rank and file
“A User’s Guide to DSA: 5 Debates That Define the Democratic Socialists serves a dual function. Most obviously, it connects readers with the largest organization on the U.S. Left today — Democratic Socialists of America, whose membership has sky-rocketed from a few thousand mostly aging and inactive old-timers to 100,000 newly-minted socialist adherents. These adherents and activists are mostly young. They have been energized not only by the intensifying social, economic, political and environmental crises of the past couple of decades, but also the phenomenal impact of open, self-identified socialists in the electoral arena – from Bernie Sanders to the Congressional left-of-center “squad” headed by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, and the remarkable 2025 mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. The other function of this valuable collection is to draw readers into a series of discussions and debates among committed DSA members, through which Marxist theory is being connected to politically serious, outward-reaching activism in the United States.” Against the Current/Communis

More on AI: labor-based followups on last week’s all-AI roundup in ESSENTIAL PERSPECTIVES
Overriding question: all jobs are different, but is it time for a “One Big Union” cross-labor demand for an AI framework that will actually enable worker agency and control in a (potentially) post-scarcity society? We see different needs from West Coast longshore workers fighting the use of taxpayer money to automate port activities (The Stand); tech workers at Google UK unionizing to push back against military uses of AI for autonomous weapons (Tribune-UK); and NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss’s letter rallying support against the deep threat of AI to journalism. (ProPublica Guild)