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The article presents a speech given by author and activist Naomi Klein as the commencement address at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, on June 6, 2015. Topics included income inequality and the concentration of wealth, the urgency of addressing climate change, and building effective social change movements based on collective action more than on individual consumer decisions.

The article discusses the two sides of the Food Movement in the U.S. The article notes that while the number of hungry people worldwide has increased and only 10 U.S. corporations hold more than half U.S. food and beverage sales, the grassroots global food movement has become increasingly active. The article discusses improvements in farmworkers' circumstances, land ownership reform in Brazil, and anti-GMO (genetically modified organisms) seeds activism. Narratives from food researchers, authors, and activists Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva, and Michael Pollan are presented.

Offers a look at why liberals in the United States believe that President George W. Bush can bring democracy to Iraq and questions why some liberals refused to march against the U.S.-led Iraq War. Report that leftists have moved towards faith in U.S. power and skepticism of popular movements; Belief of some liberals that mass movements are blind to evil or apologize for it; Suggestion that liberals are inspired by that which minimizes fear; Role of liberalism in inspiring various social movements, including the war against slavery, women's rights and civil rights; Failings and compromises of liberalism; Statement that U.S. liberals in the past have looked at the rest of the world as a rebuke to illiberalism at home or a goad to domestic reform.

Bolivia, the poorest country in South America in 2004, is the center of a three-year-old indigenous insurrection that has twice routed multinational corporations and nearly achieved the rarest of political successes, election of an openly Indian president in the Americas. What began with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994 has surfaced in Ecuador, Guatemala and especially Bolivia, where, almost one-fifth of the population, or 1.5 million Indians, live in autonomous communities where official government structures have virtually faded away. They are not attempting to turn back the historical clock but are becoming "postmodern" and "postnational" bearers of an alternative narrative of the country. El Alto is the largest, most Indian city in Latin America. In 2003, El Alto residents rose against a government plan that allowed foreign investors to exploit Bolivia's natural gas for Mexican and Southern California energy markets. Bolivia has suffered from resource plunder since colonial times, starting with silver and tin. Frightening for U.S. officials and the Bolivian upper class in 2002 was the presidential campaign of Senator Evo Morales, a socialist leader of the Union de Cocoleros, the major target of the U.S. drug-eradication program. The U.S. policies of economic globalization and militarization are both failing and deepening in Bolivia.

For many kids at that time, punk music was one of the few vehicles for expressing anger toward what they perceived as the political and cultural bankruptcy around them. But Beefeater's songs and the antiapartheid activism they helped to inspire were destined for obscurity. The music was far too loud and abrasive for most people over the age of 30 and, more significant, inaccessible to the majority of young Americans, whose tastes in music have long been dictated by trends set in the offices of music conglomerates.

This article presents information regarding the book "The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism. 1865-1925," by David Montgomery. This large book is both a summary and the culmination of Montgomery's research over the past two decades. It concerns the golden age of industrial capitalism, when the brains and bodies of millions of migrants from Europe, Asia, Mexico and rural America changed the United States from an agricultural nation into the leading manufacturing power in the world.

The number of Italians, compagni, as they called themselves, who remained committed in the late 1970s to movements for radical social change made the new left experience in other countries seem thin and distant. New left electoral parties had deputies in Parliament. Here in a modern industrial state was a non-Stalinist communist party, by far the largest in the West, that commanded the loyalty of nearly one-third of the electorate and talked realistically of becoming the governing party. Today new left organizations are as dead in Italy as they are everywhere else.

This article presents information on several social and political events, in the U.S. The grand classical rotunda where a Columbia University president named Dwight Eisenhower once welcomed Princess Elizabeth rang with cheers on the night of October 3 as nearly 2,000 people participated in a giant rally for social change. The event, modeled on the anti-Vietnam War teach-ins of the 1960s, was intended to educate and encourage a new generation of students and to heal the division between intellectuals and unions created by that war. Urgent business kept John Deutch; Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), from delivering the keynote address at the Venona Conference, held October 3-4 at the National War College in Washington, D.C. On the surface, the purpose of the conference, which was said by its sponsors to signify a "new openness" on the part of the intelligence community, was to give the participants, first crack at providing an understanding and a context for the 2,900 previously secret messages the Soviets allegedly sent to their U.S. spies in the 1940s.

This article presents information about the social movement organized by anti-abortion groups in Russia. Christian right groups such as the International Right to Life Federation are by far the best organized and most successful. Their ideas about morality and family values, especially as these coincide with a resurgent nationalism that relies on traditional notions of women and the glorification of motherhood-are highly appealing to Russians in flux between discarding an old identity and creating a new one. In this context, abortion rights have become a natural target. Antiabortion forces are also exploiting fears over the dramatically falling birthrate. Last year, for the first time since World War II, deaths in Russia exceeded births. Many women say that grinding poverty, social instability and hopelessness lead them to postpone, or forgo, childbearing.

Focuses on the ideology of radical democrats in the U.S. Ideals of radical democrats; Character of the society that radical democrats sought to build; Need to present them in such a way as to challenge the average citizen with a vision of how an alternative America might look; Social changes which bring about by calling for a transformation of the metropolis; Need for radical democrats to assume responsibility for coercing private institutions to join in the struggle for justice.

This article, which is based upon the view that a revolution occurs when new classes and their parties, either assume power or indelibly set their stamp upon social effort, will attempt to estimate the effects of the war so far on the social structure of Great Britain. It will thus be a brief study of the momentum of the British Labor movement, for the deepening of democracy and the removal of conservative and imperialist hindrances to the successful prosecution of the war will only be accomplished.

The article presents information on international political developments. Prime minister William Gladstone's speech is little less than a portent. He is a statesman of great experience. He must be accustomed to measure his words. He asserts, that Ireland is passing through a "social revolution." At the very moment, however, when it is of supreme importance that the English people generally and especially all English statesmen, should practice to the very utmost the nearly allied virtues of patience and of justice. In Germany this nefarious transaction originated with the Conservatives, who were afraid of being swept from the political surface by the coming elections unless they formed an alliance with their former alleged foes. It is a noble compact between a set of worthy brethren, the Protestant orthodox and the orthodox Papists.

The author claims that progressive social movements in the U.S. must also have strong electoral support in order to create social change. The Occupy Wall Street protest movement, grassroots organizations, and elections in the U.S. since 2010 are discussed, as well as the author's run for Congress in California's North Coast district. The author's political support from labor unions, campaign funds, and liberal policies are described, and politicians such as Jared Huffman, David Gill, and Dennis Kucinich are mentioned. The conciliatory policies of Democratic politicians and the relationship between business and politics are also described.

The article looks at the importance of hope in society for bringing about social and political change. Any clear-eyed view of the world recognizes that grave threats exist: war, environmental destruction, the runaway power of corporate greed. To make matters worse, those in power often take advantage of real threats, like terrorism, by exploiting fear and feelings of vulnerability for their own gain. The antidote to such fear and silence is hope: defiant, resilient, persistent hope. Hope is a way of looking at the world--more than that, it is a way of life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the stories of those who persist under the most dangerous conditions. Even in a seemingly losing cause, one person may unknowingly inspire another, and that person yet a third, who could go on to change the world, or at least a small corner of it. Even if the struggle outlives us, conviction matters. Actions of conscience confirm the link between our fate and that of everyone and everything else on the planet, respecting and reinforcing the fundamental connections without which life itself is impossible.

In November 1999 the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish made his first appearance in Beirut, Lebanon since fleeing Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion. The great poet's visit to the city he once called home was nearly as charged with symbolism as Yasir Arafat's return to Palestine, and it seemed to herald a new chapter in Lebanese-Palestinian relations. Some of the demonstrations have provoked confrontations with the police, notably the rally on April 2, when protesters surrounded the American Embassy. These clashes were dutifully noted by a US media obsessed by the mythical "Arab street." But what has captured the Lebanese imagination is the spontaneous explosion of grassroots youth activism on a scale not seen here in three decades.

Symbolism is the adrenaline of activism, but it is the hard work of maintaining programs and coalitions that generally yields real social change. Today Colin Powell is toying with the idea of running for President. The reverend Al Sharpton led more than 400 protesters outside Clarence Thomas's home, and Louis Farrakhan has struck a responsive chord with his call for a Million Man March that took place in Washington D.C.. The class and regional conflicts could also be described as North versus South, labor leaders versus ministers or management versus staff, but at the highest level it was Gibson's people, the black bourgeoisie, versus the civil rights royalty-men and women who became nationally known in the movement and later became successful in white institutions.

Since the early nineteenth century, progress has been perceived as the movement of Western society "leftward" along an imaginary line that began in the feudal past, ran through early, middle and late capitalism, and ended or at least pointed toward-the dimly perceived social formation called socialism, and far beyond that, communism. By "leftward" the author means a direction of social change whose prime mover was the emerging economic dynamic within social life. In the opinion of almost every historian, this slow, often interrupted but persistent movement was intimately connected with the idea of progress. It is that view that now stands at bay.

The article presents the views of the author on civil rights movements. As a black woman who became politically active in the civil rights movement during high school and then in black student organizing and the anti-Vietnam War movement as the sixties continued, it seemed only natural that being oppressed as a lesbian would elicit the same militant collective response to the status quo that my other oppressions did. Boston's lesbian and gay movement came of age in the context of student activism, a visible counterculture, a relatively organized left and a vibrant women's movement. The city had always had its own particularly violent brand of racism and had become even more polarized because of the crisis over school busing.

This article presents information regarding a peace demonstration in Washington. Several peace activists on the North Shore of Long Island gave a party to honor those who did the major work on arrangements for the demonstration. And of course they were there to congratulate themselves for being part of a gigantic witnessing action. Those who are participants believe that what has been done in these five Congressional districts, with a combined population of more than 2 million, can be done around the country. Each of Nassau and Suffolk County districts is different from the others, yet many of problems are the same.

Every accentuation of a great social movement such as came to a crisis in the granting of votes to women will have its characterizing trait. In this case, the notation of the advanced-woman movement has been sex antagonism. Without visible ancestry, the cry of votes for women, toward the last quarter of the last century, became tinged with acrimony, a feeling of resistance to and rasped resentment against the prevailing attitude of men toward women. No such color can be discovered in the recorded words of the great women leaders.

In all the churches of the Western World, what used to be called the Christian Social Movement, has now come to a dead end, and its leaders, themselves announcing and lamenting this fact, are casting round to find the way out of it. They would not do this if they did not believe that there was such a way, or, conversely, if they thought that their work was finished and done. Significantly, this is not true of their daughter churches in the underdeveloped parts of the world, for there, particularly in India and all over the Far East and in much of Africa, the Christian Social Movement is still in its pioneering stage.

The article focuses on the political and social conditions in the world during 1939. Poland's stout-hearted resistance to Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler's demand for Danzig seaport has started twitters in the French and British undercover appeasement groups. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, by introducing a conscription bill, has broken many pledges that he would never take this step in peace time. The adoption of conscription obviously has no immediate military value. The first draft of two to three hundred thousand young men will need six months for a modicum of training.

The article offers the author's opinion on the Occupy protest movement, focusing on the movement's need to embrace many different types of social activists. The author states that the initial core principle of the Occupy movement in 2011 was to fight against income inequality and the wealthy one percent of the population. He argues that the movement must remain nonviolent to be viable and he cites offers of free training classes in civil disobedience from several Occupy supporters.

Does "Dean for America" have a second act? That's the question a lot of people have been asking after the collapse of Howard Dean's presidential campaign. "We all felt the muscle flex of this new progressive movement and were stunned by it," Nicco Mele, Dean's webmaster, told me recently at the Politics Online conference at George Washington University. "Everybody wants to carry that forward." But no one knows exactly how. Maverick populist candidacies always generate important ripple effects--like the many black mayors elected in the wake of Jesse Jackson's 1988 run. But it's awfully hard to bottle political lightning. But this time, there's a new ingredient: the Internet and all the capacities for bottom-up and lateral networking it offers. "The people have it in their brains that they can organize themselves." Not only that; both by design and by accident, Dean's core staff really did share a lot of power with their base. Thus, to glimpse where all this goes next, you have to look beyond the efforts of a few leaders and wade through a sea of Dean-inspired activist networks that are basically hubs of independent Democratic activism. If anything, the biggest problem for these post-Dean ripples is coordinating their efforts without a strong center guiding them. There's evidence that Dean has inspired a wave of new aspirants to public office. This suggests that worrying about the lack of a strong center may not matter, as emergent self-activating and self-organizing people may find equally valid ways to knit themselves together.

Presents several letters to the editor. Information about social changes in California; Health care facilities in the U.S.; Information about public sector unions.

The present is the most interesting period of the Bolshevik Revolution since 1922, perhaps since 1917. A tremendous upheaval has occurred during the past six months. One returns to the country to find not only new achievements, radically new policies, and a new social atmosphere, but a powerful, all-enveloping, newly released wave or wall of energy and enthusiasm. The greatest innovation is the sharp course directed to the eradication of private capitalism in the village. The student of social movements is interested to observe that the moment socialism comes into the foreground communism appears in the offing. The kolkhozi may here and there develop into communes, but especially in the cities one already notes the beginnings of groups which propose to place their varied earnings in a common fund and live on a communistic basis of equal consumption.

The article presents information on various political movements around the world during the early 1860's. From Labrador to Patagonia, the American continent is active beyond precedent in social and political changes. Some concern the form, others the essence of government. Some relate to boundaries and the freedom of great rivers. There are questions of labor, of foreign and domestic policy, of independence and confederation, of religion and of races. In the general broil enter emperors, dictators, insurrectionist; priests and peoples. Beginning at the south, one has witnessed a war between Brazil, the Bande Orientale, and the Argentine Republic, on tile one hand and Paraguay on the other. The only novelty in this quarrel is the combination of parties.

The article focuses on the book "A Theology for the Social Gospel," by Walter Rauschenbusch. The purpose of this volume is adaptation rather than innovation. Its field is limited to the development of the social content of certain of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Its purpose and result are thoroughly constructive. The most significant contribution that the social movement has to make to theological thought is its demand that religious thinking become scientific, not simply speculative. The modern theologian who keeps abreast of the investigations, of social science does not have to write allegories concerning the fall of man.

This article focuses on the book "The Great Offensive," by Maurice Hindus. Hindus' new volume is an up-to-date account of the economic and social changes wrought upon Soviet Russia by the Five-Year Plan. The movement to collectivize Russian land was perhaps the outstanding factor in the Soviet program. It began in 1930, referred to by the Soviet leaders as the "year of the great break." The primary aim of this movement was to industrialize agriculture, to get control of the food supply of the entire nation and increase it by scientific methods. The real issue, however, was much deeper than that.

The article focuses on the book "The Revolt of Asia," by Robert Payne. Payne, poet and novelist, in "The Revolt of Asia," has turned to political reporting and his book offers a fresh and challenging approach to the understanding of social change in Asia. His method is to take his readers into the mental climate of Asia's leaders, which he reconstructs by a brilliant and intuitive use of details of their careers and especially their own writings. As a biographer of lives rather than a journalist of events, Payne seeks in these revolutionary leaders springs of their action. The result is tremendously illuminating, though it can also be misleading unless one keeps constantly in mind that one is looking at these men on their own terms, as they see themselves.

This article presents the authors views on the issue social movement in England. According to the author the discredit into which the dogma of laissez-faire, and with it a whole body of economical doctrine, has for the moment fallen, is due to the combined influence of three different causes. First is that the formulas of political economy are, of all the principles which concern the conduct of life, the hardest for educated men, and still more for uneducated men, to grasp with a firm hold. The so-called "laws" of economical science are in reality descriptions of certain permanent tendencies.

It has long been a commonplace of self-congratulation in England that the poorer classes are contented with their lot, and not, like those of some Continental countries, disposed to lend an ear to the preachers of wild or subversive doctrine. The various socialistic or communistic schemes, movements, organizations that during this century have alarmed the respectable classes of France, Germany, Spain, Russia, have not raised their heads here. But in the last year or two a change has been observable in England. Socialistic or communistic views have begun to find advocates here, and to be considered as influences, which may have to be reckoned with as forces likely before long to come into the sphere of practical politics.

The article discusses the book History of the Free-Trade Movement in England, by Augustus Mongredien. This little volume, presents one of the most interesting phases of nineteenth-century progress, nominally treats of free trade. But that is, in fact, by no means the most important lesson which it has to teach, and it is because its true import differs from its apparent that it and kindred publications have so little effect in the United States. It is the combination of strength of administration with responsibility to public opinion which has enabled the English nation to win so many pitched battles with private and class greed and while one commends Mongredien's book to the readers one thinks they will derive more profit from it if they try to read between the lines.

The article presents the author's opinion on the state of the Occupy protest movement in the U.S. in 2012. The author states that the original Occupy movement of 2011 is dead, but many of its subgroups such as Occupy Our Homes, Occupy the SEC, and Occupy Colleges are still viable protest groups in 2012. She believes that the Occupy movement is making an evolutionary social change in the U.S. The 99 percent Spring project which trains protesters in nonviolent civil disobedience is also discussed.

Presents tributes to author George Plimpton, who died on September 25, 2003, and to lawyer Arthur Kinoy, a contributor to "The Nation" who died on September 19, 2003. George Plimpton wore lightly his New York upper-class WASP heritage, but it was the real thing. Scorning entitlements of birth, he followed the young writers' trail to Paris in the 1950s and co-founded "The Paris Review". Thanks to Plimpton's dedication and perseverance, it survived and continues to set the gold standard for literary magazines. Meanwhile, Plimpton was becoming a celebrity by acting out sports fantasies and writing up his experiences in bestselling books. Though basically nonpolitical, he was a friend of "The Nation"; volunteering to emcee fundraising events. Arthur Kinoy never really believed that lawyers bring about social change. The lesson he took from years in Southern courtrooms fighting segregation and defending civil fights activists was that "legal battles to enforce freedom and equality had potential only when they were intertwined with the daily struggles of black people and their supporters to transform these constitutional promises into reality." It was in the defense of civil rights groups and local desegregation campaigns--SCLC, Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party -- that Kinoy helped shape a revolution. In 1966 he helped found the Center for Constitutional Rights, which carries on his fight.

The American Friends Service Committee, while dispatching volunteers to help victims of the World Trade Center attack, launched a "No More Victims" campaign urging U.S. President George W. Bush to "look for diplomatic means to bring to justice the people who are responsible for this crime against humanity." Peace Action, while continuing its activism against Bush's National Missile Defense plan, made the case for treating the attackers as criminals rather than embarking on military actions. Arab-Americans facing threats of violence and discrimination after the attacks found defenders among Japanese-Americans who recalled the abuses they suffered during World War II.

This article presents information on several political events, to be held around the world. "Rethinking Marxism," announces its fourth international Gala conference, aimed at celebrating the richness of contemporary Marxism in all its varieties. 2000 URPE Summer Conference, to be held from August 19-22, in Bantam, Connecticut. It is a unique conference camp by a lake, and enjoy the combination of interesting people, classroom facilities, good food, beautiful scenery and clear water for swimming--activism should embrace fun, and heated debate is necessary.

People have no idea how much love he got for this, says David Jamil Muhammad, referring to his role as a student organizer of "Hip-Hop Generation-Hip-Hop As a Movement." The conference was held from April 14-16 at the University of Wisconsin and brought together activists, scholars and entertainers to examine hip-hop as a force for social change. Muhammad's interest in music has drawn him into the campus antisweatshop movement that when he found out that some hip-hop gear was being made in prisons, he was furious. Muhammad later teamed up with a broad range of students, including some of the key organizers of the successful antisweatshop campaign at the university, to put together the event, which featured hip-hop trailblazers Afrika Bambaataa and Chuck D of Public Enemy.

This article presents information about several conferences on various topics to be held in the U.S., as of August 25, 1997. The Union for Radical Political Economics Inc., has its 1997 summer conference entitled "What is the Right Fight? Economics Questions for the New Labor Movement," at Camp Chinqueka, Bantam on August 23 to 26, 1997. The third annual conference of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, to be held in November 1997 at George Washington University. One-page abstracts are welcome on any aspect of aggressivity and violence or on the more general topic of psychoanalysis and social change.

The article presents cartoons related to politics all round the world.

The article discusses the student left movement in new perspective and analyses the causes of its debacle. Reports of the student left's death have been greatly exaggerated. In the past few years students have grappled with racial violence, sexism and homophobia in their communities. While coalitions have formed and dissolved and some students have involved themselves in larger initiatives like the Rainbow Coalition, most organizing has remained local and fragmented. Economic hardship and the shrinking labor market have made young people less willing to take risks. There has been no major mobilization like the civil rights movement to unite the left.

This article presents information on various issues related to same-sex marriage in the U.S. According to the author fair judgment given by U.S. Supreme court and others have encouraged the controversial issue of same-sex marriage. That sense of fairness also draws on the liberal idea that a pluralist democracy's institutions should be capacious, that civic marriage should be one-size-fits-all. But same-sex marriage does more than just fit; it announces that marriage has changed shape. As with any social change, there will be more consequences, which look pretty progressive. There are practical benefits like the ability to share insurance and pension benefits, care for our ill partners, inherit automatically, protect children from desperate custody battles.