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The Supreme Court’s Glacier pro-employer ruling this week opens the door to further erosion of workers’ rights to strike. But the right to walk off the job is far from extinguished in the US, and workers shouldn’t let the court scare them away from doing so.

The US Supreme Court’s decision in Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters Local 174 is outrageous — valuing property over workers’ rights. But it could have been much worse.

Unions still have the right to strike. Employers still can’t generally sue unions in state court for losses caused by strikes. But the decision does open the door to whittling away those rights more in the future.

The practical impact of the court’s decision is that employers will be suing unions more often for alleged property damage caused by strikes — and that therefore unions (and their attorneys) are likely to be more cautious.

But the court did not do what many had feared it would do in this case: overrule longstanding precedent that employers generally cannot sue unions in state court over activities — like strikes — covered by the National Labor Relations Act.

Instead, it found that this case fell under an already-existing exception for intentional damage to employer property or failure to take reasonable precautions to prevent such damage.

Workers and unions are right to be furious at this ruling. But we should be careful not to sensationalize or overstate it — which could do more damage to the right to strike than the ruling itself does, by making workers scared to exercise it.

“American workers must remember that their right to strike has not been taken away,” said Teamsters President Sean O’Brien in response to the ruling. “All workers, union and nonunion alike, will forever have the right to withhold their labor.” His statement went on:

The Teamsters will strike any employer, when necessary, no matter their size or the depth of their pockets. Unions will never be broken by this Court or any other.

Today’s shameful ruling is simply one more reminder that the American people cannot rely on their government or their courts to protect them. They cannot rely on their employers.

We must rely on each other. We must engage in organized, collective action. We can only rely on the protections inherent in the power of our unions.

The question the Supreme Court considered in the Glacier case was whether the employer could sue Teamsters Local 174 in state court over the allegedly intentional destruction of the company’s concrete when striking drivers who had set out with deliveries of ready-mix concrete returned their loaded trucks, requiring the company to dispose of it before it set.

Prior court cases say that an employer can’t sue a union in state court over activity arguably covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Instead, the employer has to go to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

There is an exception, though, if striking employees intentionally damage employer property or don’t take reasonable precautions to protect employer property. For example, in one case, employees walked out of a foundry when molten iron was ready to be poured — which the court found could have caused substantial property damage.

This exception is narrow: property damage that is intentional or caused by a lack of reasonable precautions. It doesn’t include things like economic losses due to temporary closure of a store or factory, strawberries rotting in the field because farmworkers are on strike, or milk going sour in the fridge because baristas have walked out.

The trial court in Washington state dismissed Glacier’s claim because it found that the Teamsters’ strike action was arguably protected under the National Labor Relations Act. The Washington State Supreme Court affirmed.

The United States Supreme Court has now overruled that decision and sent the case back to the trial court, because it says that — assuming the facts alleged in the employer’s complaint are true — the union did not take reasonable precautions to prevent concrete from hardening.

The Supreme Court did not order the trial court to decide against the union, just that the case be allowed to proceed. And it left open the possibility for the state courts to dismiss the case again, depending on what the NLRB does about a pending unfair labor practices complaint against Glacier related to the same strike.

The NLRB issued its complaint against Glacier after the Washington State Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of the state court case. The US Supreme Court explicitly did not rule on whether the lawsuit would have been preempted if the NLRB had issued the complaint earlier.

Depending on how future cases play out in state and federal court, Glacier could end up being a relatively small change to labor law or another in an escalating series of court decisions chipping away at the right to strike.

Already the laws are stacked against powerful strikes. Employers routinely obtain injunctions limiting where and how many strikers can picket, economic strikers can be permanently replaced, secondary targets often can’t be picketed, and so on.

Comparisons to other areas of law, like abortion rights, are useful. Roe v. Wade was not overturned in one night. It took nearly fifty years of legal battles in which courts questioned and undermined Roe v. Wade, until a conservative majority finally overruled it.

Similarly, right-wing attorneys and judges will try to build on Glacier to expand employers’ ability to sue unions. But for the moment, the labor movement may have dodged a bullet.

The original goal of the United States blockade against Cuba was to worsen conditions and inspire Cubans to overthrow their government. Regime change hasn’t been forthcoming. Now the US maintains the devastating sanctions as a threat to other nations.

Drivers queue to get fuel near a gas station in Havana on April 24, 2023. (Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty Images)

Last month, I traveled to Cuba as part of a seven-day youth delegation, organized by the International Peoples’ Assembly, to meet Cuban activists and learn about conditions under US sanctions. A common refrain I heard from the young Cubans I met was “No hay un futuro en Cuba.” There’s no future in Cuba.  

Many young Cubans who shared this sentiment with me told me that they hoped to come to the United States as soon as they could figure out how. “Y sin el bloqueo?” I asked. And without the embargo? “Eso es diferente,” they replied. It’s true: without US sanctions, life in Cuba would be very different, and the future much brighter.

The economic effects of the more-than-sixty-years-long embargo on Cuba alone are devastating. By one count, they have cost Cuba more than $130 billion. Not only does Cuba’s neighbor to the north, the largest economy in the world, refuse to do business with Cuba, but the United States also freezes Cuba out of systems of global commerce and trade via its influence in and control over international banking and financial networks.

In 1960, a US official spelled out in a memorandum that the purpose of US policy regarding Cuba was “to weaken the economic life of Cuba . . . [to deny] money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Government overthrow has not been forthcoming, but everything else has been a stunning success. Cuba now serves as an example to the globe of what happens when you refuse to follow Washington’s orders.

If the sanctions weren’t bad enough, add in COVID-19, a disaster at the island’s largest fuel depot in Matanzas, and the redesignation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism (SSoT)) by Donald Trump’s administration on the way out the door — along with the introduction of twenty-two additional restrictive measures, all upheld and continued under Joe Biden — and you’re left with a full-blown crisis on the island. The hurdles Cuba faces in procuring even the simplest humanitarian supplies — such as needles and syringes to vaccinate their population with any of Cuba’s five self-created COVID vaccines — often prove insurmountable in the immediate term. Although Cuba did eventually manage to vaccinate its entire population, many died as a result of the delay, which was caused by the embargo. People also died when Cuba faced issues in procuring more ventilators, eventually having to build their own. By designating Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism amid the COVID pandemic, the US government has further cut off Cuba from the rest of the world, exacerbating the island’s material deprivation.

But the difficulties imposed on Cuba by the US go far beyond medical supplies. People can’t repair their homes because supplies are incredibly difficult to acquire. Tourists can’t use their debit or credit cards on the island, severely limiting the spending of visitors to Cuba. Food can’t be bought by the Cuban government using credit, and thus food is more expensive, more limited in quantity, and far more difficult to procure overall. The blockade makes shoes hard to import, and average Cubans are forced to cough up significant portions of their paychecks to buy a new pair. (Even so, I saw only one person without shoes in Cuba. By contrast, vast numbers of homeless people walk the streets of my hometown of Washington, DC, without footwear.)

The list of hardships caused by the US blockade of Cuba goes on and on. It’s abundantly clear that the goal of the policy is to create as much economic desperation as possible, in order to bend Cuba to America’s will. In the last year, we’ve seen a large wave of Cuban migrants to the United States. Do not be fooled: they are not political refugees. They are economic refugees fleeing circumstances created by American policy.

The goal of the US government has been to asphyxiate the Cuban economy as a means of undermining the Cuban Revolution and bullying Cubans into relinquishing their sovereignty and right to self-determination. In the process of attempting to pull off this strategy, the United States has garnered the resentment and disapproval of the entire world. Thirty times now, the United Nations has voted overwhelmingly in favor of resolutions to condemn the illegal and unilaterally imposed embargo on Cuba — most recently in 2022 with a 185-2 vote, the only two dissenting nations being Israel and the United States.

Despite the inhumanity of the embargo and SSoT designation, Cuba has still managed to accomplish feats considered impossible in much of the capitalist world. Health care, housing, and education are universal rights in Cuba. The country has enacted “some of the most farsighted environmental measures in the world.” Meanwhile, Cuba has developed both a vaccine for lung cancer and a cure for diabetic ulcers — a condition that claims the limbs of hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, limbs that could be saved if the embargo were to end. Each of these has been achieved in spite of the blockade.

Presently, it takes no more than the stroke of a pen from Biden to remove Cuba from the SSoT list (it is similarly as easy to end the embargo). That, however, could soon change. First introduced by Senator Marco Rubio in 2021, and then again by Representative Maria Salazar in 2023 — both right-wing Cuban Americans — the so-called Fighting Oppression until the Reign of Castro Ends (FORCE) Act seeks to formally codify Cuba’s place on the SSoT list, ending the ability of the executive branch to remove Cuba at will.

You may be wondering what Cuba has done to warrant placement on the list in the first place. To hammer home the insanity of the US’s assault on Cuba, the justification is that Cuba provided safe haven to terrorists when it hosted peace talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government. Cuba remains on the list not because it poses a terrorist threat, but because its inclusion furthers the United States’ goal of worsening Cuban economic conditions. For the US to accuse Cuba of terrorism is ironic: it is Cuba that has suffered bombings, hijackings, sabotage, an attempted invasion, more than 634 documented attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, jaw-dropping violations of sovereignty, and other attacks that have been funded, orchestrated, and many times directly carried out by the CIA.

The US assault on Cuba began as an attempt to bring the nation to heel, essentially reestablishing Cuba as an unofficial colony of the United States. Unsuccessful in its original aim, the US has continued to punish Cubans for insisting on their sovereignty. While the rest of the world disapproves of the United States’ actions, the message remains clear: Cuba serves as a reminder of the hardship and suffering that await any nation that resists Washington’s dictates.

It is time to insist upon the removal of Cuba from the SSoT list, an end to the embargo, and the normalization of US relations with Cuba. The United States must allow Cubans to live in peace and to determine their own future. The US government has made clear that it will sacrifice the well-being of millions to prove its point and get its way. It will not stop until we rise up and demand an alternative.

Egypt’s initial claim, that the terrorist had entered Israeli territory in pursuit of drug smugglers, is unconvincing.

By Yaakov Lappin, JNS

There are several critical questions that the joint Israeli-Egyptian investigation into the deadly terrorist attack on the two countries’ shared border on Saturday must address.

During the incident, which lasted several hours, three Israel Defense Forces soldiers were killed by an Egyptian police officer. The first two were killed at around 6:00 a.m., according to the IDF, and the third some two hours later, during a shootout that broke out after back-up forces arrived to search for the gunman.

Israeli forces led by the regional brigade commander killed the gunman soon afterwards.

The first key question is whether the terrorist, who was armed with an AK-47, acted on his own, or as a member of a larger terrorist group that has infiltrated Egypt’s security forces.

Egypt’s initial claim, that the terrorist had entered Israeli territory in pursuit of drug smugglers, is unconvincing, and reflects pressure within Egypt to smooth over the incident with a convenient narrative rather than attempt to ascertain the facts.

It is fair to assume that Israel has made it clear, behind closed doors, that this explanation is illogical and unacceptable in light of the assailant’s conduct; he remained in Israeli territory for two hours after the initial shooting, before he again fired on Israeli forces.

The second question must address the role that a significant drug smuggling run, which occurred at 2:30 a.m. that same night, and in the same area, may have played in the attack.

Both incidents occurred in the desolate Mount Harif border region, and the attempt to smuggle some 1.5 million shekels’ worth ($400,000) of narcotics into Israel, at the same time as the attack is unlikely to have been a coincidence.

Was the smuggling run, which the IDF thwarted, an attempt to distract the military?

A third question that needs to be given consideration is whether the attack was the result of a jihadist-Islamist group seeking to undermine the ongoing security cooperation at the border between the Israeli and Egyptian militaries.

The post The Egypt border attack: Key questions appeared first on World Israel News.

Law enforcement is on the hunt for a 24-year-old Missouri woman wanted in connection to a shooting that injured two people at a Blue Springs hotel. Samantha J. Thrasher is facing first-degree felony assault and armed criminal action charges stemming from a May 20 incident at the SureStay Plus Hotel, where a 36-year-old man and a 7-year-old girl received gunshot wounds.

According to authorities, the incident began when Thrasher almost ran over the victims with her tan Chevrolet Tahoe, after which the woman entered the hotel lobby and demanded a refund for her room. When the employee informed Thrasher that a manager had to provide a refund, the two became engaged in a heated argument, and Thrasher allegedly grabbed her by the hair. Soon, the male victim tried to intervene, taking Thrasher to the hotel’s front door, at this point, Thrasher reportedly hit him with a fist.

Surveillance footage then showed Thrasher opening the passenger side door of her vehicle and rummaging through something before producing a gun. She then reentered the hotel lobby and fired several shots from the pistol; the man and the girl were both hit by shrapnel.

After the shooting, the male victim was rushed to a hospital and underwent surgery in the intensive care unit, and the girl was taken to a specialized children’s hospital. Evidence collection for the case is ongoing, with authorities recovering four spent .40 caliber casings in the hotel lobby and a live .40 caliber cartridge in the parking lot.

Police have issued an arrest warrant for Thrasher and requested a $200,000, 10% bond. People who have seen Thrasher are urged to call the police rather than try to apprehend the suspect.

“The deadly incident on the Egyptian border on Shabbat is severe and extraordinary and will be fully investigated,” the prime minister said.

By JNS

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday promised answers following the “extraordinary” killing by an Egyptian policeman of three IDF soldiers.

“The deadly incident on the Egyptian border on Shabbat is severe and extraordinary and will be fully investigated. I want to commend our forces who sought contact and eliminated the terrorist,” said Netanyahu.

“Together with the entire people of Israel, I share in the sorrow of the families of [those killed]… and wish a swift recovery to the wounded. Our hearts are with the families in their profound grief,” he added.

Sgt. Lia Ben-Nun and Staff Sgt. Uri Iluz were shot dead overnight Friday while manning an observation post. During the subsequent manhunt, Staff Sgt. Ohad Dahan was killed in Israeli territory in an exchange of fire with the terrorist, who was also fatally shot.

A fourth Israeli soldier was lightly wounded.

The three fatalities served in the Bardelas (Cheetah) Battalion, a mixed-gender unit.

The funeral for Ben-Nun, 19, took place in Rishon Lezion at 4:30 p.m. Iluz, who was 20, was buried in Safed at 5 p.m. Dahan, 20, was laid to rest in Ofakim at 5 p.m., the IDF said.

A preliminary investigation found that the terrorist crossed the border through an emergency gate used by IDF soldiers in coordination with Cairo.

Egypt claimed the police officer crossed the border to chase after drug smugglers, in the aftermath of an earlier bust.

However, Army Radio reported on Sunday that the Egyptian policeman had in his possession six ammunition magazines for his rifle, a Koran, and a knife. The IDF estimates that the presence of the Koran suggests that the policeman was motivated by Islamic religious extremism, the report said.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Egyptian Defense Minister Maj. Gen Muhammad Ahmed Zaki spoke on Saturday evening and agreed to cooperate in investigating the attack.

“Egypt has played an important role in the Middle East by proactively brokering calm between Israel and Iran-backed terrorist groups. A level of trust has been established between Israel and the first Arab state to make peace with the Jewish state,” said Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“The coming days will be delicate, but the two sides have the personnel and processes in place to handle this without escalating tensions,” he added.

The post Netanyahu vows to fully probe ‘severe’ Egypt attack appeared first on World Israel News.

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Cairo would take a broader role in the economy and Israel would get “quiet.”

By JNS

Egypt is working on a “long-term truce” between terrorist factions in the Gaza Strip and Israel, the London-based The New Arab news site reported on Sunday.

The report comes several weeks after Cairo brokered an end to the brief war (“Operation Shield and Arrow”) between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group in Gaza and as the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi continues to play an active role in the affairs of the Strip, with which it shares a border.

According to Egyptian sources familiar with the mediation efforts, Cairo has conveyed the message that the senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials should attend the new round of talks in Cairo in person because “the leaders will be looking at highly sensitive files.”

One of the Egyptian sources told the pan-Arab news site that the meeting comes amid new international and regional understandings involving the United States, Qatar and Egypt that will “include broader roles for Cairo in terms of its presence in the Gaza Strip” and necessitate the direct involvement of the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

“There have been consultations during the last period between Egyptian and Iranian security officials regarding the situation in the Gaza Strip and the occupied territories, due to Tehran’s role in supporting Hamas and the Islamic Jihad,” the source said.

Another Egyptian source said the plan includes an expansion of trade with Gaza through the establishment in the Strip of a subsidiary port of Sinai’s el-Arish Port to be administered by Egypt.

It also includes a highway to be constructed linking Gaza with the city of el-Arish, the largest in the Sinai Peninsula. The highway would be used to transport goods from Gaza to the Egyptian port for export abroad and import into the Strip.

Also under discussion as part of the plan: Egypt supplying Gaza with electricity that would involve a large project starting at 100 megawatts and increasing from there in stages, possibly to 300 MW.

The final part of the plan involves exploiting the natural gas reserves off the Gaza coast.

According to the report, Egypt is hesitant to get involved in managing a port inside Gaza because Cairo would be held responsible by Israel and the international community if the port is used to bring weapons into the Strip. The Egyptians would therefore want a broad security role in the Strip that the Palestinian terrorist factions would not accept.

The post Report: Egypt working on ‘long-term’ plan for Gaza Strip appeared first on World Israel News.

The documentary Rabble Rousers tells the story of the New York activists who overcame enormous odds to build the Cooper Square community land trust — and points to the limits of movements that don’t contend for broader control over the state and capital.

The documentary Rabble Rousers covers the activists behind the Cooper Square community land trust. (New Day Films)

If you’ve been around housing movements in New York City, or the United States, or maybe anywhere, you have probably heard about a place called Cooper Square, where the people did the impossible: beat back the real estate speculators and aligned power brokers to take control of a piece of their neighborhood, creating permanently affordable social housing while supporting a flourishing arts infrastructure and a slew of small businesses.

A good number of people know that this happened; far fewer know how it happened. The new documentary film Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square, which opens March 24 at the Firehouse Theater in Manhattan’s Chinatown, aims to change that.

Rabble Rousers tells the story of Cooper Square, a twelve-block section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and its legendary lead organizer, Frances Goldin. The film takes viewers from Goldin’s youth in the 1920s to the day in 2012 when the Cooper Square Community Land Trust (CLT) and Mutual Housing Association formally took over the area’s land and buildings. It’s a long and complicated story to tell, and producing this film has been a labor of love from directors Kelly Anderson, Ryan Joseph, and Kathryn Barnier for over a decade.

Full disclosure: I’m biased. The directors are friends of mine. Some of the people interviewed have been my teachers and mentors, and many of the activists who speak in the film are colleagues who I’ve collaborated with on campaigns and educational projects. The first time I organized a protest I asked Frances Goldin to speak. So maybe it’s no surprise that I think this is a fantastic film that everyone with an interest in housing movements and grassroots planning should see. But my bias also means I’d be pretty pissed off if I felt the directors missed the mark – if the story they were telling didn’t line up with the history, or betrayed the true character of the people it presents. From my perspective, they nailed it.

Rabble Rousers does several things that will be notable to an audience of progressive planners. First, it tells the history of the struggle for Cooper Square from being slated for Urban Renewal demolition in the late 1950s to the formation of the community land trust, with plenty of attention paid to all the unpredictable forks in the road. The filmmakers tell the story through interviews with CLT organizers and members (including Goldin, Tito Delgado, Val Orseli, Gisela Jasmine Gomez, Amir Bey, Maria Torres-Bird) and connected scholar-activists (Frances Fox Piven, Tom Angotti, Ron Shiffman), archival footage, documents brought to life with animation, a helpful timeline, and plenty of character development. We see the community come together not just to oppose their own displacement, but to work with Walter Thabit — one of the cofounders of the Planner’s Network’s precursor organization, Planners for Equal Opportunity — to create their own alternate plan, premised on the idea that the people themselves could determine which structures should be saved, built, or demolished. The plan called for the city to use a “checkerboarding” strategy to house the neighborhood’s poor and working-class residents without displacement. They wanted the city to build public housing on a large vacant lot, move tenants from nearby decrepit housing into that development, tear down the bad old housing, rebuild it, move tenants from other nearby decrepit housing into that development, and repeat until everyone in the neighborhood had decent housing. They fought Robert Moses, Richard Nixon, and every mayor from Robert Wagner to Ed Koch until they reformulated their plan and won control of their buildings through a community land trust.

In the course of this telling, the film also demonstrates and explains key concepts that can often be confusing or overly abstract. This film is as good as anything at showing what CLTs and mutual housing associations are, how they work, why they keep an area affordable, and what it takes to win them. Rabble Rousers also helps demonstrate the relationship between complex socio-spatial processes like disinvestment, “planned shrinkage,” gentrification, and community control through a concrete, historically and geographically specific example.

The documentary also examines an important piece of political history that is not often a part of our discourse around community planning: the early relationship between the fight for public housing and the fight for CLTs. Cooper Square Community Land Trust is known best as a functioning example of this model of community land and housing stewardship. The CLT movement is sometimes thought of as distinct from the movement for public housing. In fact, it can be seen as a turn away from large-scale state ownership of land and housing and toward a smaller-scale vision of community control. But Rabble Rousers shows us that for the people who built the CLT, public housing was always Plan A. It was only after the Nixon administration put a moratorium on federal public housing construction and the city government entered into a fiscal crisis that the activists devised the CLT alternative. In other words, the activists didn’t give up on public housing, the state did. This subtle but crucial corrective is reason alone to watch this film.

Without control over the state and capital, it can only ever be local and partial.

The filmmakers don’t sugarcoat the way the CLT got the land and the funds to renovate their decaying buildings. According to Cooper Square veteran Val Orseli, realizing that they had built up “the power to block” but they didn’t “have the money to build,” they allowed the city to sell two large, vacant lots at the southern edge of the neighborhood — which were the cornerstones of the public housing “checkerboarding” strategy — to private developers to build luxury housing. In exchange, they got 25 percent affordability in those two new buildings, and more important, secured tens of millions of dollars from the city to bring their buildings up to code. Once the buildings were renovated, they were transferred over to the community in the form of a community land trust and a mutual housing association, with apartments selling for $250 each and never appreciating in exchange value. There is still more to this story — we aren’t told where people moved to while the city was fixing their apartments, and I’m pretty sure federal vouchers are also a part of Cooper Square’s financing strategy — but the filmmakers don’t shy away from the fact that while they won something incredible, there were real costs and trade-offs involved.

Finally, Rabble Rousers closes by pointing its audience to the future. As the credits roll, we see a new generation of activists organizing to establish East Harlem/El Barrio CLT, about five miles north of Cooper Square. We see tenant activist Raquel Namuche Pacheco organizing a building (sounding a lot like a young Frances Goldin), and Picture the Homeless member and activist Marcus Moore talking about Cooper Square’s inspiration (sounding a lot like a young Tito Delgado). By closing with its gaze on a new CLT struggle, the film reminds us why Cooper Square matters — not just for itself, but as an inspiration for popular movements near and far.

But the film also closes on a sober note: Cooper Square may be forever affordable, but what about all that surrounds it? Frances Fox Piven notes that “the harms done by Robert Moses shrink if you compare them to the harms done by Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” and urges us to view the Cooper Square story as two truths at once: a remarkable achievement, and also a drop in the bucket. This may not be the triumphant conclusion many viewers expect, given that Cooper Square is often treated — accurately! — as a historic victory over enormous odds.

If Rabble Rousers is the story of a victory in community planning and the CLT movement, it’s also a demonstration of those movement’s limits. Community-based planning is just that: community-based. Without control over the state and capital, it can only ever be local and partial. This is not anything the protagonists of this story don’t know already — Frances Goldin got into this movement via Communism, and while she left the party (or the party left her) she remained a radical and an internationalist to the end. Shortly before she died in 2020, when much of her memory had left her, I saw of video of her singing every word of “Der Internatsyonal” (“The Internationale” in Yiddish). She may have dedicated much of her time to a hyperlocal struggle, but she never took her gaze off of the wider world.

For those working in Goldin’s political lineage, the question this forces us to grapple with is: How do we engage in local struggle without losing sight of what lies beyond? What’s our theory of how local struggles relate to the rest of the world, and to the global capitalist system that structures our local politics? One can reasonably argue any of the following: that the demand to “scale up” local struggles is in fact a masculinist imposition on anything that works on a smaller scale; that a network of local projects can join together and take on the world; that we can do it all at once, and organize both local projects and global uprisings; or that the global is simply beyond the reach of our movements right now, and so we do what we can where we are.

Any of these are plausible responses, but we need some kind of theory to explain the duality Piven poses at the end of this film: the presence of Cooper Square, and the disappearance of much that once surrounded it. Watching Rabble Rousers should get us all thinking about what that answer might be.

In the closing moments of the film, Goldin says, “I think that fighting back is a very life-giving force.” She explains that organizing and protesting forced her to have hope and to keep going for over ninety years.

I’m forty. Some days my stockpile of hope is in short supply. I’m sure sometimes Frances Goldin felt the same way. But she didn’t quit, right up to her dying days. This film is a reminder that it may take fifty years, but victories do come. And the day after they come, there’s still a world to win.

This year marks the centennial of Mrinal Sen, one of India’s most brilliant Marxist filmmakers. His work combined a formal inventiveness that rivaled that of the French New Wave with an unflinching commitment to attacking the hypocrisies of India’s elite.

Indian filmmaker Mrinal Sen at the Munich Filmfest in Munich, Germany, in 1990. (kpa / United Archives via Getty Images)

A hundred years have passed since the birth of Mrinal Sen, one of India’s most brilliant and prolific postwar filmmakers. He was born in Faridpur, a city in what is now Bangladesh but was, at the time of Sen’s birth in 1923, part of the British-ruled Bengal Presidency, a subdivision of the empire in India. In the forty-seven years (1955–2002) in which he was active, Sen produced twenty-eight kaleidoscopic feature films. Each ran roughshod over barriers of time and geographical space. Poverty, hunger, class struggle, anger, revolution, and middle-class complacency haunted his films.

With these subjects, Sen developed and unleashed a kinetic, hypermodern aesthetic. This cinematographic language combined filmed fiction with documentary and newspaper headlines, creating new ways of storytelling that went beyond classical Hollywood-style narrative. Sen’s innovativeness explains why he became popular in Europe, where the experimental films of Jean-Luc Godard and the fairy-tale-like parables of Éric Rohmer were all the rage, but not in the United States. The great Hollywood films of the postwar era focused on stories of individual triumph and embraced an act-based structure that Sen eschewed. While his contemporary Satyajit Ray, author of classics such as The Apu Trilogy (1955–59), Jalsaghar (1958), and Mahanagar (1963), worked masterfully within the confines of traditional cinema, earning him praise from establishment figures such as Martin Scorsese, and, eventually, an honorary Oscar, Sen continued to work on the margins.

As evidence, look no further than a scene from Sen’s anthology film, Calcutta 71 (1972). In one scene, the director takes us to a party full of uptown liberals waxing eloquent about India’s burning political issues in the 1970s: poverty, corruption, unemployment, and so on. Leading the pack is a political figure who laments about the 1943 Bengal famine, widely attributed to Winston Churchill’s policies, which claimed millions of lives. But, we learn, it was the famine that helped this person grow his business as a black marketeer. Later, this same profiteer drunkenly argues for revolution. Meanwhile, striking workers have forced his factories to sit idle. What, the scene forces us to ask, does politics mean to a middle class that can throw around the word revolution so casually while exploiting workers?

Leftist ideas and a concern for the oppressed masses made it hard for him to translate his cinema into something that a primarily middle-class theatergoing Bengali audience were comfortable with.

All the while a rock band performs live. The music is intercut with images of the famine and on-screen text: “unemployment, degeneration, hunger, betrayal of our ancestors.” Finally, the charade is interrupted by an explosion. From the darkness emerges the disembodied head of a communist activist who was shot dead by the police. He announces that he is dead before adding:

Can you guess why I am here? I have come to tell you that I know who murdered me. But I won’t tell you their names. I want you to find out who they are. You might experience discomfort in the process, but you will not stay so comfortable, so indifferent.

The roots of such storytelling lie in Sen’s past. Unlike Ray, Scorsese, and most great filmmakers, Sen came to filmmaking later in life. He was first an activist, then an intellectual, followed by a short stint as a film critic, after which he eventually managed to find a gig as a director.

Sen’s father Dineshchandra was a lawyer closely associated with Indian freedom fighters. His son had his coming of age as a student in the teeming metropolis of Calcutta, now Kolkata. There he witnessed firsthand the savagery of the Bengal famine. While riots and World War II raged on, Sen associated with the Communist Party’s cultural wing and locked himself up in the library. During the war years he discovered Rudolf Arnheim’s influential Film as Art and turned his attention to aesthetics and film theory. In 1945, Sen published the article “The Cinema and the People” in a magazine rolled out by the Indo-Soviet Friendship Society. By the early 1950s, his first book on cinema, about Charlie Chaplin, was out.

It would take Sen almost a decade and a half to really find his groove as a director. Leftist ideas and a concern for the oppressed masses made it hard for him to translate his cinema into something that a primarily middle-class theatergoing Bengali audience were comfortable with. It was only after the political ferment of the 1970s hit India, creating by a massive distrust in the state, rampant corruption, and the rise of militant communism, that Sen’s career took off. The tumult of the world brought out the best in him.

Sen’s most notable films in his early period include Baishey Shravana (1960), Akash Kusum (1965), and Bhuvan Shome (1969). Baishey Shravana literally means the twenty-second day of the Shravana month in the Bengali calendar, August 7, 1941, according to the Gregorian calendar — the day Rabindranath Tagore died. Sen upends the meaning of this day in Bengali cultural life by making it the wedding date of a doomed rural couple. Plagued by famine and extreme poverty, the man and woman drift apart until the latter decides to take her own life on the anniversary of their wedding.

In Akash Kusum, Sen turns to the story of an urban couple. A young man wants to get rich quick and conveniently falls in love with a rich woman. But this romance comes at a cost: the man feels compelled to present himself as a successful entrepreneur and fabricate a whole life story. The lies compound and eventually their weight becomes too much for him to bear. The film is typical of Sen’s oeuvre insofar as it depicts individuals caught in dilemmas that are the product of their contradictory ambitions. In one scene, a friend tells the protagonist, “Don’t you see how big business is dominating? You cannot make it as a small businessman. Those days are gone.” The hero disagrees: “Don’t talk like a communist.”

Among the film’s highlights is Sen’s use of freeze frames and still photographs. These experiments get intense in Bhuvan Shome, which ended up being a commercial success. Made in Hindi, a decision that guaranteed a wider market in India, the film is a quirky drama about a hoity-toity bureaucrat who rethinks his life after meeting a young rural woman. Although a gentle film by Sen’s standards, his most well-known techniques were born here: use of documentary footage, documentary-like narration and commentary, and animation, all interspersed with freeze frames.

The film’s success gave Sen leeway to make cinema as he pleased, just when Naxalism, a Mao-inspired militant guerilla movement, had taken off in Bengal before spreading to the rest of India in the 1970s. Sen figured he could use the skill set he had developed so far to become a chronicler of the movement. This led to his second period that resulted in the critically acclaimed Calcutta trilogy, which includes Interview (1971), Calcutta 71 (1972) and Padatik (1973).

In these films, Sen is at his most aesthetically footloose and politically blunt. Interview follows a young Bengali man’s daylong ordeal to find the right suit to wear for a job interview with a British company. When his traditional Bengali kurta and dhoti doesn’t impress his prospective employers, a kernel of revolutionary animosity develops in the hero. He hurls stones at a clothes shop and strips a mannequin of its suit.

Like Brecht, Sen insists on the theatricality of the whole performance and never lets the audience forget that they are watching something staged. When lead actor Ranjit Mallick, called Ranjit in the film, is confronted with a film magazine carrying a photo of himself, he turns to the camera and explains that he is in Mrinal Sen’s new film and points to the cinematographer K. K. Mahajan, who has his camera pointed back at Ranjit. Near the end of the film, an agitated Ranjit has to debate an unseen audience in the darkness about his attitude about the whole day. The effect is to prevent the viewer from falling into a passive consumerist relation to cinema and instead maintain a critical attention on what is happening before them.

Calcutta 71 is perhaps Sen’s most ambitious film. In it, he connects three stories about poverty and its dehumanizing effects on oppressed and oppressor alike. The first is set in an unspecified time, possibly in preindependence India, the second during the Bengal famine, and the third shows the postindependence generation’s simmering anger. All three stories collide in the fantastic aforementioned party sequence.

Sen was as much a brilliant humorist as his was a social critic. A wonderful sequence in Calcutta 71 involves a group of business owners revolting against the Communists, carrying banners reading “Rulers of the World Unite,” and play-acting armed violence while the audio track plays the sound of gunfire and bombing.

It is in the third film in the series, Padatik, that Sen starts to question the methods and achievements, if any, of the Naxalites. A young revolutionary finds shelter in the house of an affluent woman who secretly sympathizes with his politics. During his stay, he questions the dogmatic nature of the Naxalite leadership and wonders if there is any point to his revolution.

By the late ’70s, something in Sen had shifted. A melancholy mood, born out of the pyrrhic victories of radical politics, characterizes his films of this period. After the left government won the 1977 state elections in West Bengal, he turned his gaze inward to investigate the responsibility and complacency of the middle class, of which Sen had become a part. The Left ruled West Bengal for the next thirty-four years. During this time, Sen’s work became sparse and quiet, aesthetically stripped down but thematically intense.

Kharij (1982) involves a middle-class family reconsidering their values after their domestic help, a little boy, dies accidentally from carbon-monoxide poisoning. Sen’s 1991 film, Mahaprithibi, is his reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany: a family in Calcutta is broken when an elderly woman kills herself. Why? She wonders what was the purpose of her Naxalite son’s death. What did her other son achieve by escaping to Germany? What was the point of it all?

For almost a decade, Sen stayed away from cinema, emerging finally in 2002 to produce his final film, Aamar Bhuvan. Its mood, gentle and optimistic, breaks with that of many of his previous works. Had two decades of global neoliberalism, terrorism, the rise of the Hindu right-wing in India, and old age softened Sen? Aamar Bhuvan, which translates to “my world,” deals entirely with an all-Muslim community in a village. Despite the world burning and breaking, as on-screen text announces in the beginning, people continue to live with love, compassion, and empathy. The film is remarkably kind and full of good-natured people despite all darkness. Rather than a withdrawal from reality, the film is an attack on the prejudice meted out against India’s Muslim minority, made more radical by the Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party .

One hundred years on, Sen still stands as one of the most inventive filmmakers of his generation. His work provides a model of how politics and formal inventiveness can be fused in art without kowtowing to didactic simplifications.

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