Jackson – U.S. Solidarity Economy Network

14JunJune 14, 2018

A Socialist Southern Strategy in Jackson

By Max Ajl via Viewpoint Magazine We know that the literal meaning of the word Utopia is no-place. It doubles as a word meaning a perfect world. Appropriately, the Latin American literary giant, Eduardo Galeano, who came from the continent which has gifted the world so many of this and last century’s attempts to reach the unreachable, gave us the very best spin on the word. Utopia lay always “at the horizon.” “What then, is the purpose of utopia?” Galeano asked....

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20JunJune 20, 2017

The Reconstruction of Democracy in America

via Medium Lessons from Jackson, Mississippi by John Duda This piece was written before the November 2016 US election, and originally appeared as “La démocratie en construction aux États-Unis” in La Pensée n°388. My intent in writing the piece was to highlight, for a non-US audience, some of the underlying dynamics and promising developments obscured by the sound and fury of the then in-progress presidential campaigns. I’m posting the English version here; I think the recent election of Chokwe Antar Lumumba to the...

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07JunJune 7, 2017

Black Power Takes Root in the Heart of Dixie

via The Indypendent by Marisa Anne Day Jackson is the largest city in Mississippi. Surrounded by prosperous white suburbs, it is more than 80 percent Black and overwhelmingly working-class. “If you are making $10 an hour here you are doing damn good,” says Kali Akuno, who for 20 years has been a driving force in Cooperation Jackson, a community organizing hub intent on radically changing business as usual in Mississippi’s capital city and creating a model for local movements in the United...

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08MayMay 8, 2017

A Fresh Model for Economic and Social-Justice Politics is Emerging in the South

via The Nation Jackson, Mississippi, Just Nominated Radical Activist Chokwe Antar Lumumba to Be the Next Mayor by John Nichols When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, NAACP president Cornell Williams Brooks, and actor Danny Glover joined thousands of Mississippians in marching for labor rights two months ago, economic and social justice activist Chokwe Antar Lumumba was in the thick of it. “I stand for workers’ rights,” Lumumba said, as the marchers converged on a Nissan plant where workers have been organizing for union protections....

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03MayMay 3, 2017

Jackson, Mississippi’s Radical Mayoral Candidate

via In These Times If the Left can make it here, they can make it anywhere. by Kate Aronoff The city of Jackson, in the heart of staunchly Republican Mississippi, might seem an unlikely place for a municipal revolution. Yet Jackson’s radicalism has been forged in the crucible of massive disinvestment, both by private industry and by a conservative state legislature. Led by the Black nationalist organization Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, organizers in Jackson have backed experiments in everything from worker-owned businesses to...

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