United States of America (USA)

By staff - La Via Campesina, May 31, 2024

The genocide war committed by the Israeli occupation against Gaza has now reached 230 consecutive days. The Palestinian people continue to endure a brutal genocide that has escalated into one of the most severe humanitarian crises in recent history. The unyielding assault has resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of lives, with countless more injured or displaced, their homes and communities reduced to rubble amidst relentless bombings.

In a groundbreaking development, we commend the initiative of Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who has formally requested the court’s judges to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Minister of War, Yoav Gallant. This marks a historic step toward achieving accountability for the high-ranking officials responsible for orchestrating widespread atrocities against the Palestinian people. This move by the ICC represents a critical advancement in the long pursuit of justice for Palestine, signaling to world leaders that impunity for war crimes will not be tolerated.

Among the backdrop of this relentless genocide war, La Via Campesina stands firmly in solidarity with the Palestinian people, whose resilience in the face of such adversity is nothing short of heroic. The Palestinian spirit of resistance, manifested in their steadfast refusal to surrender their rights and dignity, is an inspiration to all who stand against oppression and strive for justice worldwide.

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, May 30, 2024

Two thousand student workers at the University of California Santa Cruz stopped work May 20 in the first of a series of compounding strikes protesting the university’s response to pro-Palestinian protests. The university in turn has filed charges with the California Public Employment Relations Board accusing the union of violating the no-strike clause of its contract and is asking for an injunction to block the strike.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), represents 48,000 graduate student teaching assistants, researchers and other academic workers at University of California’s 10 campuses. 79% of voting members across the state authorized the union leadership to call for rolling “stand up” strikes – tactic used successfully in the UAW’s strike against the big three auto companies last year.

The strikes are based on charges the union has brought for unfair labor practices. The union complaint focuses on the arrests of pro-Palestinian graduate student protesters at UCLA and suspensions and other discipline at UC San Diego and UC Irvine. It accuses the universities of retaliating against student workers and unlawfully changing workplace policies to suppress pro-Palestinian speech.

Graduate workers at UCLA, the University of Southern California, the University of California at San Diego, Brown University and Harvard University have filed similar unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board over how their university administrations unilaterally changed policies and responded to Gaza protests.

For a video featuring UAW members explaining the strike: https://x.com/uaw_4811/status/1791512207563583777

By Jerome Roos - The Rift, May 23, 2024

It’s been quite a sight. Over the past month, students have been rising up against Western support for the Gaza war and in solidarity with the Palestinian people from California to Kyoto. They’ve had enough: no longer will they allow their governments and universities to be complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The first protest camp was set up at Columbia University in mid-April, in the historic cradle of the 1968 student protests against the Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Since then, the demonstrations have spread across the United States. For weeks now, the same chant has been echoing through the “hallowed halls” of academia all over the country: “Disclose, divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!”

In the first week of May, the solidarity encampments crossed the Atlantic and began to spread like a wildfire through Europe as well. I was in London when the first tents went up at UCL and SOAS earlier this month. When I arrived in Cambridge for a conference a few days later, students there had just started another solidarity encampment in coordination with their peers at Oxford. Once I got back home to Amsterdam, I found students there still seething with anger over a violent police crackdown on a series of attempted encampments. Last week, students at my own university, the London School of Economics, launched an occupation as well.

The protest camps and solidarity actions have now spread to at least 247 universities worldwide. There have been demonstrations on campuses in Canada and Australia, in Mexico and Argentina, in Egypt and South Africa, in Lebanon and India, in New Zealand and Japan. What unifies them is a simple set of demands: that universities end their involvement in human rights violations by cutting ties with Israel’s system of apartheid and divesting from the military-industrial complex more generally.

For this, the students have been widely vilified. In the US, President Joe Biden sternly lectured the younger generation that “dissent must never lead to disorder”—as if a few broken windows at Columbia hurt his sensibilities more than the destruction of twelve universities, 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools in Gaza. Hillary Clinton went even further in her condescension of the students, saying that young people “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including our own country.”

The situation in Europe has not been much better. In France, the regional council of Paris briefly suspended its funding to Sciences Po after accusing students there of US-style “wokisme.” In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders interrupted the formation of his new coalition government to denounce the protesters as “antisemitic scum.” And in Britain, where university leaders have generally taken a more de-escalatory approach, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is needlessly inflaming the tensions with his repeated calls on vice-chancellors to quell the peaceful demonstrations.

Despite this widespread demonization, most students have actually been remarkably reasonable in their demands.

By staff - La Via Campesina, April 10, 2024

Fully intertwined with current geopolitical dynamics, the anti-(neo)colonial struggle in Haiti is central. Confronting existential challenges, the Haitian people engage in a protracted struggle for emancipation and self-determination. This endeavor necessitates a robust and mobilized internationalist solidarity movement. Dominant imperialist forces persist in asserting control over the small Caribbean island to gain strategic advantages, thwarting Haiti’s path to true independence and national sovereignty.

The current situation in the country is marked by unprecedented violence and systematic human rights violations, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations, particularly those from lower classes and rural communities. With half of the nation now under the sway of criminal gangs, manipulated by the national oligarchy aligned with imperialist interests, dissent is confined and social unrest quelled. In response, Haiti’s social movement, comprising peasant organizations, progressive political entities, unions, and feminist groups, collectively organizes to carve out autonomous spaces for self-centered development. These alternative models to the prevailing racist and neo-colonial paradigm are perceived as disruptive, prompting the targeting of the social movement by imperialist and neo-colonial forces, hence the exploitation of criminal gangs.

In Haiti’s context, the United Nations has historically played a deleterious role. Under its auspices, interventions spanning three decades have exacerbated rather than alleviated the nation’s plight. These so-called “peacekeeping missions,” ostensibly aimed at restoring political stability and combating corruption, have only further destabilized the situation. The UN Security Council’s recent proposal for a foreign military intervention to tackle the country’s gang problem underscores this point.

By Jeff Schuhrke - Jacobin, February 13, 2024

Four months into Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza that has killed over twenty-eight thousand Palestinians, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) — the US labor federation whose member unions represent 12.5 million workers — issued a statement on February 8 urging a negotiated cease-fire to end the violence.

The move came after over two hundred US unions and labor bodies — including national unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), American Postal Workers Union (APWU), United Auto Workers (UAW), International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), National Nurses United (NNU), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), National Education Association (NEA), Communications Workers of America (CWA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — had already made cease-fire calls of their own. Many unions, especially at the local level, have also expressed solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement.

With the backing of the AFL-CIO and the nation’s two largest unions (NEA and SEIU), support for a cease-fire is now the mainstream position of the American labor movement. Given US labor officialdom’s history of providing substantial political and material aid to the state of Israel — along with its frequent partnering with US empire (which I examine in my forthcoming book, Blue Collar Empire) — this is a remarkable development highlighting the power of rank-and-file organizing to push union leaders on critical issues, and signaling the possibility of building a more internationalist labor movement.

Now, the task for rank-and-file members who successfully organized to get their unions to issue cease-fire statements increasingly is to translate that commitment into concrete action to stop what the International Court of Justice considers Israel’s plausible acts of genocide. Across the US labor movement, networks of pro-Palestine workers are continuing to organize to get their unions to cut economic ties with Israel, put pressure on political candidates and elected officials, and interrupt the flow of union-made weapons and research to the Israeli military.

By David Griscom, Union Jake, and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, February 11, 2024

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, January 9, 2024

By staff - La Via Campesina, December 4, 2023

On the afternoon of Sunday, December 3^rd, La Via Campesina representatives from every continent and Palestine offered critical analyses of their regional contexts, drawing connections between the climate crisis, migration, and political instability. This is a critical component of building and advancing a global movement for food sovereignty to foster critical consciousness of disparate geographic realities, struggles and victories.

César Villanova, a LVC representative from El Salvador, shared that Latin America is one of the final critical battlegrounds in the struggle against neoimperialism. A war is being fought over the blood—that is the resources—of Latin America, and that war is not simply symbolic but very real, and felt in territories from Mexico and El Salvador, through Colombia, and to the south in Chile.

Building upon Villanova’s discussion of territorial conflict, Albert Bahana Manzambi (COPACO, Democratic Republic of Congo), next offered insights into the African experience, emphasizing that a number of multinational corporations are pushing to destabilize Africa. “We see the lack of security increasing,” Bahana Manzambi suggested, “taking the form of increasing coup d’états and contestation governments.” Importantly, this lack of security is deeply rooted in questions of food sovereignty, and its interconnections with the political context. Bahana Manzambi drove home the point that “there is no security, and no one is protecting peasants”. The question of political instability is driving an increasingly grave migration crisis. “People are fleeing to Europe, and are trying desperately to get there in whatever way possible, and are dying on the way, and when they die, whole families are lost, children, partners; everyone is losing.”

By Cody Lonning, Anthony Flaccavento, Alan Minsky, and Marilyn Wrenn - Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, October 5, 2023