Jacobin Magazine: The Dynamics of Retreat

Following the labor upsurge and radicalization that came in the wake of World War I, workers’ militancy tailed off, and the 1920s saw the American capitalist class at the peak of its power, confidence, and productiveness, in total command of industry and politics. Manufacturing productivity rose more rapidly during this decade than ever before or since, the open shop (which banned union contracts) prevailed everywhere, the Republican Party of big business reigned supreme, and the stock market broke all records. [...]

What transformed the political landscape beyond recognition was the outbreak of what Rosa Luxemburg would have called a “mass strike upsurge,” a phenomenon she had witnessed and analyzed at the time of the 1905 revolution in Russia and the accompanying wave of mass strikes. Out of the blue, starting in Detroit auto plants in spring 1933, you got a series of ever larger and more encompassing strikes, mobilizing ever broader groups of workers on the shop floor and the streets — organized and unorganized, employed and unemployed, in an ascending wave. Programmatic demands and ideas that seemed pie in the sky were now, with the increase in workers power, plausible and actionable. [...]

Equally important, the smashing victories in the 1934 strikes endowed the nascent radical-led labor movement with the confidence and capacity to organize the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the CIO over the next three years. Roosevelt was transformed from a standard politician into a reformer, the carrot and stick of the new labor movement inducing the administration to advocate a series of historic sociopolitical reforms that included the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act (which set maximum hours and minimum wages for most workers), and the Wagner Act (which extended union recognition and set up routinized collective bargaining). [...]

To put the point in a more general way, an electoral strategy of voting for a third party could never be sustained, as the right-wing party would typically win greater electoral majorities as the third party increased its vote share. Only if the third party could achieve a majority all at once, perhaps on the back of a titanic mass movement that brought about a sudden lurch to the left among a large section of the citizenry, would it have a chance of succeeding. Otherwise, dull electoral calculation ensures the hegemony of the two-party monopoly.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: The sensory landscape of the city

The sensory landscape of the city. Laurie Taylor explores the scenes, sounds, smells and tastes of urban life. He's joined by Daniel Silver, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Alex Rhys-Taylor, Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and Monica Degen, Reader in Sociology at Brunel University London.

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CityLab: Britain's Next Megaproject: A Coast-to-Coast Forest

The goal of a thick green ribbon is still a long way off, of course. So far, the government has pledged just an initial £5.7 million of the £500 million needed to fully realize the project. But what’s significant about the plan is that it amps up a transformation that is in fact already underway—it is actually the second major attempt in recent years to re-green the English landscape. [...]

This sounds wonderful—but first, a reality check. If Britain is planning new forests, it’s because the island badly needs them. Overall, the U.K.’s landscape contains one of Europe’s lowest proportions of woodland: just 13 percent. No one expects a populous, heavily developed country like the U.K. to reach the levels of, say Finland, which, at over 73 percent woodland, is Europe’s leafiest country by far. The U.K. trails far behind its more comparable neighbors Belgium (22.6 percent woodland) and France (31 percent), making it look decidedly bare and patchy by comparison. [...]

So far, over 80 percent of this forest area is accessible to the public, making it easy to enjoy for nearby city-dwellers. Indeed, it’s the intimate link with major cities that connects the National and Northern Forests, as both plans create new havens of peace in some of England’s more densely inhabited, city-filled areas.

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Al Jazeera: Forced at 15

Many parents here justify their decisions to marry off their children at a young age in such a manner. Premarital relationships are taboo in their community and becoming pregnant before marriage brings disgrace on the whole family.

Extreme poverty is another major factor in the prevalence of child marriage in Niger. Half of the country’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. Niger is second from the bottom on the current UN Human Development Index.

There is also a rapidly growing and extremly yound population. Sixty nice percent of Nigeriens are under 24 yeas old. On average, each women bears seven or eight children. [...]

An increasing number of girls are fighting back. The local aid organisation SOS is one of the first places they go to seek help when they flee child marriage. Thriteen-year-old Chafa-Atou arrived here from here village Filingue four days ago. She tells SOS emplpyee Hannatou her story. [...]

Aid organisations are critical of the government for doing too little to protect girls. Niger has no laws determining a minimum age for marriage. The consequence is that it is tradition rather than the law that decides when girls are old enough to marry - this means their fates lie in the hands of fathers, male relatives, village elders and religious leaders.

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The Atlantic: Trump Is A 19th-Century President Facing 21st-Century Problems

Nineteenth-century presidents are the ones that, with a few exceptions like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, most people can’t remember or recognize. In terms of political outlook and accomplishments, they are a somewhat diverse lot, but several factors tie these men, and the way they approached the presidency, together. The presidency changed dramatically in the 20th century; the modern presidency is big, designed to deal with the challenges of an expansive federal government and an interconnected world. But in the 19th century, the presidency was a smaller office, with less of a policy role. Presidents’ staffs were nothing like the thousands of employees who now make up what some call the “presidential branch.” The U.S. played a smaller role in global politics than it does now, and the president played a smaller role in American political life. [...]

Policy-making was much more Congress-centered in the 19th century. The clearest examples of this are probably from the 1850s, when presidents Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce left the difficult task of dealing with the growing crisis of slavery to Congress. (Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas urged Pierce to support the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which he eventually did – rather than the other way around.) After the Civil War, presidents grew less passive, but members of Congress still asserted their own agendas on issues like tariffs and currency — the big economic questions of the time. Presidents were more likely to be led by their parties than to lead them. [...]

This is one of the big differences between modern presidents and those from earlier eras. While 18th- and 19th-century presidents commented on the major issues of their day, sometimes drawing on moral and religious appeals, this usually took place in speeches that had already been scheduled for other purposes — like an inaugural or farewell address. Presidents, and their particular values, weren’t omnipresent in Americans’ lives in the way they are now. Even Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which described the moral purpose of the Civil War, was simply an invitation to “say a few words” at a cemetery dedication ceremony. In contrast, televised national addresses and in-person remarks have become a standard way for modern presidents to respond to a tragedy or crisis.

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Politico: Scotland’s (latest) Brexit strategy

And while the paper doesn’t actually mention the Labour Party, it’s another clear target. Interviewed by the BBC at the weekend, the first minister challenged U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to “decide where he stands,” suggesting that many of his supporters would balk at him appearing “to be only slightly less in favor of a hard Brexit than the Tories are,” a clear attempt to position the SNP as the unequivocal party of a “soft” Brexit.

Sturgeon also came close to accusing Corbyn of lying over his questionable claim that the single market “is dependent on membership of the EU” and therefore not an option for the U.K. as negotiations continue this year. “Saying this once could be a simple mistake,” tweeted the first minister. “Continuing to say it when you know it is inaccurate can only be an attempt to mislead people.”  [...]

The SNP’s (justifiably) gloomy analysis of Brexit, however, invites an obvious rejoinder: Why are Nationalists being rather more vigorous in assessing the impact of leaving the EU than they were — or rather are — about Scotland leaving the U.K.? Today’s paper could end up being a double-edged sword.

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Quartz: Electricity from all forms of renewables will be consistently cheaper than fossil fuels by 2020

Today, fossil-fuel power typically costs between $0.05 to $0.17 per kWh. By comparison, consider the global-weighted average cost of electricity generated by various forms of renewables in 2017, as calculated by Irena: hydropower ($0.05 per kWh), onshore wind ($0.06 per kWh), bioenergy and geothermal ($0.07 per kWh), and solar photovoltaics ($0.10 per kWh).

Offshore wind and solar thermal power aren’t yet competitive with fossil fuels, but that should change by 2020, Irena predicts, with the cost of solar thermal falling to $0.06 per kWh and offshore wind to $0.10 per kWh. The drivers will be technology development, competitive bidding systems, and large base of experienced project developers across the world. [...]

Varun Sivaram, an expert in solar power at the Council on Foreign Relations, has shown that intermittent power sources suffer from value deflation as they become more important in the energy mix. In a simulation of California’s power market, he found that “when a grid relies on solar power for 15% of its total energy needs, the value of solar falls by more than half,” Sivaram writes in his upcoming book Taming the Sun. “At 30% solar power, solar’s value declines by more than two-thirds.”

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Deutsche Welle: Is Germany’s political left coming apart at the seams?

Arguably, the splintering of the German left began with the rise of the Green party in the early 1980s, but it became undeniable with the establishment of the Left Party in the mid-00s. The crux came in 2005 when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder engineered an early national election as a referendum on his Agenda 2010 reforms, which significantly cut Germany's social welfare system in the interest of growth and economic competitiveness. [...]

The weakening of the left in the Merkel era hasn't brought with it lasting gains on the political right. On the contrary, that era began in 2005 with more than 50 percent of voters casting ballots for one of the left- wing parties – SPD, PDS or Greens. The conservatives' success has been built on their relative cohesion. By contrast, because of the connection with communist East Germany, no SPD leader since 2005 has dared risk cooperating with the PDS/Left Party. [...]

Long gone are the days when the left was neatly aligned with the industrial working classes. The big-tent leftist movement so vaguely formulated by Lafontaine and Wagenknecht would have to bring together the interests of, for instance, blue-collar workers, the long-term unemployed, affluent environmentalists, human- and civil-rights activists, single parents and Germans from vastly different cultural backgrounds in the east and west.

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