STEVEN PINKER'S "THE STUFF OF THOUGHT"

Thomas Riggins

This is a reflection on a review by Barbara King, a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary of Steven Pinker’s new book, “The Stuff of Thought” in the April 11, 2008 issue of TLS. Pinker is a very influential cognitive scientist who made a name for himself with his 1994 book “The Language Instinct.”

In that book he proposed that ONLY humans have language and that the claims that other animals have language abilities as well is bogus. “For Pinker, children learn language because their brains are specifically prepared by evolution to do so.” King will take issue with some of Pinker’s ideas but I am a little bit dubious as to her motivations. She implies he is not “even handed” because he has said religious beliefs are “akin to astrology or alchemy,” which, in fact, they are. However, that said, we will see that her review draws some justifiable critical conclusions about Pinker's work as she presents it.

Pinker thinks the key to understanding human nature is to learn how we put our ideas and feelings into words. King tells us that he uses "conceptual semantics" to do this. Pinker himself says, "Linguists call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them 'conceptual semantics.' Conceptual semantics -- the language of thought -- must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on when we debate what our words mean."

Pinker's book is full of examples of how we express ourselves in speech that show we have an underlying framework of reality to which language conforms . King gives one. "Why, driving home from the grocery store, do we refer to a gallon of milk in our car, but never a gallon of blood (even though blood circulates inside our body as we sit there)? Because we conceptualize our bodies as solids rather than as containers." Expressions such as this lead us to think about space and time, cause and effect, and substance, "through which in turn we may identify the deeper rules of conceptual semantics."

Pretty thin gruel! If our bodies are conceived as solids why do say we put too much food in our mouths, or have a pain in our stomach, or too much gas in that self same organ? I fear we cannot draw Pinker's conclusions based on the different idiomatic expressions of different languages and cultures.

Half way through the book, we are told, Pinker reveals the key to his speculations. One of his inspirations is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, of whom he says:

"Kant's version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. One could go so far as to say that Kant foresaw the shape of a solution to the nature-nurture debate: characterize the organization, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible."

This is a strange theory for an evolutionist to hold. The human mind has a built in abstract framework a la Kant which is there to organize our experiences into categories (domains) before we even have them. Only humans have this with regard to languages, so the first humans to have a language must have come with this ready made. This is a pre-Darwinian outlook.

According to Darwinian notions language ability would have gradually developed by natural selection and there is no reason "lower" forms in the evolutionary sequence would not exhibit different stages of this ability.

Pinker thinks that the way evolution worked was to form different domains in the human brain each with its own task to fulfill. King says, for Pinker, "The human past constrains our present human nature because it has so closely shaped our brain modules." Pinker says, for instance, that it is necessary to "pry our mental modules free of the domains they were designed for."

This is not good science. Our so called modules were not "designed" for anything. Our responses evolved as the result of environmental adaptations. There is no reason to think that this process halted sometime in the paleolithic and is no longer functioning.

King quotes Pinker as saying that "left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways." The solution, he says is, by education "to make up for the short comings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world." This outlook is basically that of Confucianism as put forth by Xunzi well over two thousand years ago and in our time by Freud. We are apt to let the Id take over if we are not educated to be social by Ivy League Super Ego types.

Marx asked who educates the educators. King is fairly critical of Pinker and thinks his views could lead to a "ranked hierarchy" of humanity antithetical to democratic values. She says he back pedals a bit from his basic theory when he grants that some of the properties he finds in the domains may not be, in his words, "necessarily direct reflections of the genetic patterning of our brains: some may emerge from brains and bodies interacting in human ecologies over the course of human history."

King thinks this much more likely than Pinker allows. Marxists would think it is the most important factor and agree, I think, with King when she concludes that our real "human nature" is much more creative and contingent than the pre-programmed computer brains (her analogy) of Pinker's pre-Darwinian Kantian humans.

Obama's Victories and Where We Go From Here by Norman Markowitz

You could see it in the faces of the media men and women as they tried
to say that the primaries were a draw yesterday. You could see it
most of all in Bill Clinton's tired sad face as he stood behind his
wife in Indiana and she claimed victory. Yesterday was a major defeat
for Hillary Clinton, one the pundits and the pollsters didn't expect.
First, she suffered a decisive defeat in North Carolina, one that was
well above what the pollsters were predicting as the polls opened.
Then she suffered a "victory" in Indiana that was well below what the
pollsters predicted.

The Reverend Wright propaganda ploy didn't work or, if it had any
effect, didn't work enough in Indiana. Even the media pundits were
saying that Clinton's argument to the Super Delegates that she had won
the popular vote in the primaries, an argument based on a significant
popular vote gain over Obama today and popular vote victories in the
few remaining primaries, was now virtually impossible to make. Obama
increased his popular vote lead over Clinton yesterday by 200,000. He
will increase his lead in delegates so that the combined Pennsylvania,
Indiana, North Carolina delegate count will show a net gain for Obama,
by my simple math calculations.

Barring some really unforeseen turn of events, Clinton is at
checkmate. She has no more serious moves to win. She has become in
effect an opportunist without opportunities.

The best way to end this for those who want to see the Republican
Right go down to a crushing defeat, I think, would be for John Edwards
to step forward and endorse Barack Obama right now. John Edwards'
state, North Carolina, gave Barack Obama a landslide victory(political
scientists called landslides when I was in school elections with
margins above 10% and media pundits early yesterday were alluding to
that when they said it was important for Clinton to got Obama's North
Carolina margin at or below 10%, which she never did)

John Edwards campaigned as a pro labor progressive, calling for a new
war against poverty,taking positions much closer to Barack Obama than
to Hillary Clinton. John Edwards is a white Southerner who by joining
with Barack Obama can do what another white Southerner, Lyndon
Johnson, who launched the old war against poverty, did, trike a
historic blow against racism in what will be a watershed election.
Whatever his other large failings, Johnson grasped his historic moment
and understood that a war against poverty for both whites and blacks
could only be fought as part of a two front war with civil rights as
the second front.

Hopefully, Clinton will not down with a new barrage of ugly attacks on
Obama, which will only hurt the presidential campaign and not help
her. Hopefully also, enough Super Delegates will now come forward to
endorse Obama to give him the nomination and to concentrate all
resources on the presidential campaign
Norman Markowitz

If You Aren't for the Right, Obama is the Best Choice; If You are for Progressive Change, Obama is the Only Choice by Norman Markowitz

The North Carolina and Indiana primaries are at hand and Hillary Clinton
has jumped on John McCain's bandwagon to call for a suspension of the
federal gas tax. Barack Obama has called that Ia gimmick, not a policy,
which of course is exactly what it is.

Senator Obama has a serious longterm energy policy, one that has been
postponed for 28 years in the U.S. After Ronald Reagan became
president he literally dumped the alternative energy programs begun in
the Carter administration, pursued policies that reversed energy
conservation programs that had been advocated even by Richard Nixon and
Gerald Ford, and encouraged the auto industry to produce new gas
guzzling vehicles. Reagan's "energy policy" was to give Big Oil more
and more subsidies to find more and more Oil and also to back Saddam's
Iraqi regime in its war against Iran to, among other things, undermine
OPEC by having these two major Oil producers produce more and also break
with OPEC monopoly pricing policies in order to finance their war
efforts(policies that in the short run did help bring down oil prices
but in the long run were economic, political, and social disasters).
Bill Clinton did nothing to reverse Reagan's policies.

Senator Obama has a energy program and the others don't. Meanwhile,
mass media continues to combine time tested Big Lie and Guilt By
Association tactics to tell people over and over again that a vote for
Barack Obama is a vote for Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Michelle Obama was
even compelled to reply to a network television interviewer who asked
her to respond to Wright's comments about Louis Farrakhan by saying
that what does this have to do with the education of her children(or
any body's children, or jobs, housing, health care, wages, the national
debt, the consumer debt, the Iraq War, and other issues of less
importance than the views of Reverend Wright) but the barrage continues.

I saw the front page of the Murdoch tabloid The New York Post(which
it always pains me to look at because it was a liberal labor paper until
Murdoch bought it in the 1970s and turned it into a camp rightwing
scandal sheet). There was a picture of Reverend Wright looking
ridiculous, and a headline that he had stolen someone's wife. This is a
precursor of the Republican campaign if Obama is the nominee, and it
shows the deep contempt that the Right has for the American peoples as
citizens.

Barack Obama is the candidate who can challenge and reverse the
disastrous course that the nation has been on for the last three
decades. He is by far the stronger candidate because he can mobilize
people to fight for a progressive program and he can respond to them,
rather than cynically use them, as Hillary Clinton has to advance her
career and interests. At this point, Clinton defeating Obama would be,
given both what he has accomplished and the kind of campaign she has
run, a major setback for progressive forces in this country. I and I am
sure most of our readers would hold our collective noses and support
her, which would be the right and necessary thing to do, but her
chances of winning a major victory and/or winning at all would be
significantly less than Senator Obama. If she did win, a great deal of
energy would have to be expended in pressure group politics against her
administration.

Let's hope(even though the pollsters say it isn't going to happen) that
Obama wins in North Carolina and Indiana and John Edwards throws his
delegates to him and the Super Delegates tell Clinton to throw in the
towel for the good of the country and the party. Let's continue to work
for an Obama victory, which will be a real victory.
Norman Markowitz

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READING LENIN 13

READING LENIN: Materialism and Empiro-criticism [ 13 ]
Thomas Riggins

Using our editor's blog to further Marxist education seems like a good idea. So here is a famous work of Lenin's that outlines what Marxist philosophy is all about. It's 100 years old this year and we might ask ourselves what is still valid in this classic. Have new philosophic developments in the last 100 years made this work outmoded? I'm going to post some reflections on the book section by section and anyone who wants to read along and comment is welcome to do so. I hope to post weekly updates and Sunday seems the best day to this as it is a free day for me.

CHAPTER THREE: THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM AND OF EMPIRIO-CRITICISM. III

SECTION Four: "The 'Principle of the Economy of Thought' and The Principle of 'The Unity of the World'"

This section opens with a discussion of Bazarov, Avenarius and Mach. The idea of 'economy of thought' in nature and in epistemology is one of the reasons that empirio-critics hold SENSATION is all that exists. Why have "sensation" and "matter" if everything can be explained by the first idea?

Lenin says thought is "economical" when it describes reality without using extra terms and entities which really don't exist. He writes, "Human thought is "economical" when it CORRECTLY reflects objective truth, and the criterion of this correctness is practice, experiment and industry."

There is no doubt that Mach and his followers reject the above formulation and subscribe to subjectivist and idealist notions. Lenin cites, in their own words, others who have also come to this conclusion: Richard Honigswald [an Austrian neo-Kantian who was born in Hungary in 1875 and died in New Haven, Connecticut in 1947] said Mach is near to the "Kantian circle of ideas ("Zur Kritik der Machschen Philosophie", 1903), Wundt, whom we have seen before, says Mach is "Kant turned inside out" ( "Systematische Philosophie, 1907), and James Ward [1843-1925 was professor of Mental Philosophy and of Logic at Cambridge] maintains Mach's criterion of simplicity (i.e., economy of thought) "is in the main subjective, not objective "("Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd ed.).

Lenin concludes, by saying that those Russians who want to be Marxists and who try to merge empirio-criticism into Marxism are "simply ludicrous."

Lenin next turns to the idea of "the unity of the world." Duhring had said the reason the world appears to be unified (we have one world after all) is due to the unity of thought-- viz., it is a deduction from the unity of thought. Engels says in "Anti-Duhring" that, "The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science."

Is this clear enough? Not for the likes of Yushkevich who says of this quote, "First of all it is not clear what it is meant here by the assertion that 'the unity of the world consists in its materiality.'"

Lenin is quite frustrated by this and wonders why Yushkevich calls himself a Marxist if the most elementary propositions of Marxism (viz., the objective and materialist basis of reality) are " 'not clear' to him."

As far as the unity of the world is concerned, Yushkevich says of the propositions from which this is deduced that, "it would not be exact to say that they have been deduced from experience, since scientific experience is possible only because they are made the basis of investigation." This is a form of KANTIANISM, and in the hands of Yushkevich "it is nothing but twaddle."

SECTION FIVE: "Space and Time"

Lenin says that Marxists reject both Kantianism ( space and time are forms in the human mind and have no existence on their own) and Humean agnosticism ( I don't know where these ideas come from). He supports Feuerbach who says, "Space and time are not mere forms of phenomena but essential conditions ... of being."

In other words, what is the answer Marxists should give if asked "are space and time real or ideal, and are our relative ideas of space and time APPROXIMATIONS to objectively real forms of being; or are they only products of the developing, organising, harmonising, etc., human mind?"

The answer to this question is the fundamental epistemological dividing line separating different philosophies. Lenin thinks all Marxists need to be on the side of Engels when he asserts that, "The basic forms of all being are space and time, and being out of time is just as gross an absurdity as being out of space."

Mach, on the other hand, according to Lenin holds that "it is not man with his sensations that exists in space and time, but space and time that exist in man, that depend upon man and are generated by man." This is what empirio-criticism leads to and, among some, to "defending medieval 'nonsense' [i.e., religion]."

The truth is, Lenin points out, that the "existence of nature IN TIME, measured in millions of years [in our day by billions of years], PRIOR TO the existence of man and human experience, shows how absurd this idealist theory is."

There now follow a few pages where Lenin defends the objectivity of time and space against Mach who thinks that Newton's views may not actually be applicable. Here Lenin seems to equate Newton's notion of ABSOLUTE time and space with the materialist view the denial of which leaves room for fideism [religion]. Newton was, however, himself a Deist and left room for God in his system. Modern physics has adopted the views of Einstein concerning time and space which are very different from those of Newton.

Since Lenin devotes a chapter (chapter five) to physics, we will postpone a detailed discussion here, as likewise his views on the "atom". Lenin's main point, however, remains, regardless of the further developments in natural science since his time, and that is that the world dealt with by science is not created by the human mind but has objective and independent existence.

Lenin does agree with Mach in rejecting a fourth spacial dimension. Mach is no "believer" and rejects a fourth spacial dimension so as not to aid "many theologians, who experience difficulty in deciding where to place hell." Lenin, of course, doesn't worry about the location of Hell. He would probably agree with Sartre that Hell is other people (especially mensheviks). His point is that Mach, thinking that Space and Time are products of the human mind, unconsciously adopts the materialist position (as it was in his time) when he asserts there are only three spacial dimensions because he assumes this to be an objective fact and is thus inconsistent.

Also, in this section, you might think when Poincare says that space and time are relative and "we impose them on nature" that he is thinking of the new Theory of Relativity (1905). Einstein, however, thought of his theory as an objective fact about the universe.

Lenin also discusses Karl Pearson again, who openly declares that his Machism is based on Hume and Kant and with whom Mach himself says he is in complete agreement. Nevertheless, the Russian Machists, posing as Marxists (they were all members of the bolshevik faction except for two mensheviks) keep claiming that Machism is an advance, is not idealism, and is a "new" philosophy. Bazarov even says "Many of Engels' particular views, as for instance, his conception of 'pure' [i.e., 'objective'] space and time, are now obsolete."

Of course many of Engels' views are obsolete, based as they were on the level of science in the nineteenth century, but the objectivity of space and time is not one of them. I will now quote a delightfully vituperative sentence about Bazarov and idealists in general.

"Like all the Machists, Bazarov erred in confusing the mutability of human conceptions of time and space, their exclusively relative character, with the immutability of the fact that man and nature exist only in time and space, and that beings outside time and space, as invented by the priests and maintained by the imagination of the ignorant and downtrodden mass of humanity, are disordered fantasies, the artifices of philosophical idealism, rotten products of a rotten social system."

In "The Future of an Illusion" Freud referred to the disordered fantasies of religion as forms of neuroses and religious people as neurotics. The US of A is by these measures, of both Lenin and Freud, populated by an immense number of disordered downtrodden neurotics who, in addition, are both ignorant and infected with false consciousness. It is my hope this Reading Lenin series will reduce their numbers but I have no expectation that it will.

Lenin ends this section with some choice remarks about Bogdanov and his notion that space and time are forms "of social co-ordination of the experiences of different people" ("Empirio-monism). He holds that space and time adapt themselves to our perceptions. Lenin says just the opposite is the case and perceptions "and our knowledge adapt themselves more and more to OBJECTIVE space and time, and REFLECT them ever more correctly and profoundly."

Next week we will begin with section 6 "Freedom and Necessity."

See Reading Lenin 12 here.

Capitalism Gone Even Madder Than Usual. Auctions for the Rich to Fund NYC Public Schools

In the 1970s in the Koch administration in NYC, I briefly went out with
a woman who was a high school teacher in the New York City school
system. As the budget cuts were beginning she had her students sell
crafts to raise money for school supplies. Today there is a sad and
crazy story in the New York Times," Bids for Botox" dealing with Public
School Auctions which are beginning to follow the patterns of private
schools. The wealthy and businesses are often contributors to the
auctions in rich areas. I
n the story among the items auctioned were a rabbit-fur jacket(the
rabbits were not asked for their assistance) tickets to a fourth of July
baseball game at Yankee Stadium, even a "botox " house call. An adviser
to the public school auction, a private school consultant made the point
that stock brokers rarely make(what sells and for what can't be so
easily evaluated). The public school was a wealthy one. I doubt such
items(and a only mentioned a few, would be in working class school
auctions).

But auctions themselves have no place in the funding of public
education, as against charity, which is never about rights. . I teach
at a university whose top administrators spend more and more time trying
to raise money from wealthy donors and corporations as they face deeper
and deeper budget cuts. I don't think they have tried these sorts of
auctions yet, although I know one who might bid on the Yankees tickets.

The public sector will stagnate, atrophy and eventual become in effect
the slum of the economy if it is not revived through large social
investments. It has been under attack for a generation, creating a
huge political-economic imbalance with has made John Kenneth Galbraith's
comment in the 1950s classic, "The Affluent Society," in which he saw
the U.S. becoming a nation of "private wealth and public squalor" a
curse. It is a crisis which can only be solved by reorganization of the
tax structure and a national industrial economic policy that will not
only end the culture of budget cuts but more importantly launch an
expansion that will undue the damage of the last thirty years. That can
only happen through new course for the federal government, a course
which, with progressive tax reform will "trickle down" to the states.
If our readers think this is utopian, let them exam the dystopia that we
are currently experiencing and which goes from bad to worse
Norman Markowitz

--

The McCain-Bush Challenge

I just took The Bush-McCain Challenge -- an online quiz to see if you can tell the difference between George W. Bush and John McCain. Check it out, and see if you can do any better than I did!

http://Bush-McCainChallenge.com/?rc=challenge-friends&r_id=12561-1918307-uHIcbT

May Day: finding its way back home

I’ve always wanted a button that reads, “Workers of the world unite, back by popular demand” — almost as long as I’ve wanted one that says, “May Day, made in the USA.”

read more | digg story

Happy May Day! Long Live the Working Class, its Past Victories, Present Struggles, and Socialist Future

by Norman Markowitz

I got a text message from a former student who is a labor organizer today wishing me happy May Day. I have never gotten a text message that wasn't a commercial and I have never sent a text message so I screwed up my answer, but I called her up and wished her a Happy May Day.

The AFL-CIO website is calling May Day International Labor Day, which would make George Meany and others turn over in their grave. This is a major step forward, but May Day can't be separated from the socialist and communist movements which have been at the center of May Day demonstrations from their beginning in 1890, from the revolutionary heritage of May Day, since it was decided to make May 1st, 1890, a day of mass protests for the eight hour day and solidarity with workers through the world at a conference in Paris in 1889 of labor and socialist representatives (with Marxists a major force in both groups) in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution.

May 1st was chosen in solidarity with the workers of the United States. The AFL-CIO website has a valuable link to the history of May Day in which it mentions the campaign launched in the U.S. on May 1, 1886 for the eight hour day. But it doesn't mention the role of anti-capitalist workers and groups in leading the May 1 demonstrations, which also were not about a holiday but about strikes to achieve the 8 hour day. In Chicago, Albert Parson's a former confederate soldier who had became a anti-racist editor fighting the KKK in Texas, then an socialist and later anarcho-socialist printer and writer well known and respected in working class circles, headed a parade of thousands of workers in Chicago on May 1, 1886. When pickets at a strike at the McCormick Harvester factory, were fired on by police a few days later, a mass protest demonstration in which Parsons was one of the leaders was organized in Haymarket Square in Chicago. After Parson's and the other organizers had left the demonstration very late in the events and a battalion of police march on the remaining demonstrators and ordered them to disperse, someone (who was never found) through a bomb and a riot ensued claiming a number of lives. Parson's and a number of his comrades in the leadership of the demonstration were tried for murder and four (even though nothing connected them to the unknown bomb thrower), including Parsons, were executed in spite of an international protest campaign from labor, socialist, and many liberal organizations and groups through Europe and the U.S. Those executed became "martyrs" for the U.S. labor movement and the resolution to make May 1st the day of protest was put forward by the U.S. delegate representing the AFL (which at the time had a large socialist contingent).

The AFL-CIO website also suggests that the holiday Americans still celebrate, Labor Day, has its origins in the the activities of Peter MaGuire, a leader of the Carpenters Union in the early 1880s (the website makes the point that there is debate over this). But our readers should remember that Peter MaGuire was a leading socialist in the U.S. labor movement whose defeat years later by a conservative business unionist was seen by some (myself included) as an important symbolic event in the shift of skilled workers away from an inclusionary class conscious trade unionism toward to an exclusionary "job" conscious" unionism.

The article then goes on to make the the important point that Labor Day was declared a National Holiday by Congress in 1894 fearful of a worker backlash in response to the Cleveland administration's brutal suppression of the Pullman Strike, led by American Railway Union president Eugene Debs. The backlash did occur as the Republican party won a major victory against the conservative Democratic Cleveland administration. Debs, as the article doesn't mention, went on to become the leader of the Socialist Party of America after it was established at the beginning of the twentieth century and was its presidential candidate in four elections.

I am trying to provide this article, which contains valuable information and an overall progressive orientation in its treatment of May Day and Labor Day, with constructive criticisim. The article also quotes really prominent labor historians David Montgomery and Nelson Lichtenstein whose statements capture the essence of class struggle that May Day was and is about.Montgomery's comment that "First state governments and then the federal government adopted the day (labor day) in response to workers demands The government did not create the holiday," is especially important in understanding what May Day was about, just as the "government" responded to workers demands in 1938 in the U.S. when it created the eight hour day standard, which the original U.S. May 1 demonstrations and the later international demonstrations were initiated to establish. But its omissions undermine it signnificantly as a tool to educate working people.

You cannot omit the Marxist and socialist history of both May Day globally and Labor Day in the U.S. (in terms of MaGuire's role), not to mention the role of May Day in the global Communist and Socialist movements right up to today and understand its significance for the past, and its meaning for the present and the future. Those who separate labor from socialism, which laws like Taft-Hartley in the U.S. along with purges and blacklists sought to do after WWII, in effect strike blows against both.

I did learn something really important from the AFL-CIO article that I did not know and I can teach the AFL-CIO article's writers something about this also. In 2003, the Bush administration declared May 1st Loyalty Day, using September 11 and the "war against terrorism" as their pretext. I either didn't know this or had forgotten it since, like millions of Americans, you can only take so much of what what the Bush administration is doing without beginning to blot it out from your consciousness.

But the article omits the that this wasn't the first federal "loyalty day." In 1947, the year of Taft-Hartley and the Truman Doctrine in effect declaring the Cold War, the Veterans of Foreign Wars established and Congress later made official May 1st as "Loyalty Day." In the 1950s especially when May Day demonstrations were suppressed, "Loyalty Day" demonstrations were held as parades in which various right-wing groups, both secular and religious, proclaimed their "loyalty" to the America represented by Joe McCarthy. I assume Bush's advisors knew all of that when they pushed through "Loyalty Day in 2003. It fits the old classic definition of a reactionary---those who learn nothing from history and forget nothing from history and thus try to do the same thing over and over again.

I would also tell both our readers and the authors of the AFL-CIO website article that when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, his government officially declared May 1st "national day" to take it away from the Social Democratic and Communist trade unionists whom he was throwing into the new concentration camps. The Nazi government even banned the use of the word "proletarian" But they couldn't kill May Day, just as the McCarthyites in the U.S. couldn't kill it with their "loyalty day. The Bush administration won't kill it either with the "loyalty day" they recycled from p;d McCarthyites in 2003.

The AFL-CIO website mad the central point that workers on this May Day are standing up for workers rights and against the Iraq War and that the AFL-CIO is with them front and center. And that is the best news for this May Day, as the trade union movement prepares to play a leading role in the defeat of the Bush administration and its would be successor, John McCain. Happy May Day.

War and Workers’ Rights Highlight May Day Celebrations

Workers around the globe today are celebrating International Labor Day, better known as May Day, to make it clear they want to live in a world where people live in peace and prosperity.

Read the full post at the AFL-CIO's blog here...

Call for Equal Protections for LGBT Immigrants

From Pride at Work, AFL-CIO:

Same-sex binational couples are not protected by U.S. immigration policy; since they are not recognized as a family, they are often forced to leave the country in order to stay together. There is a way to change this - with your help!

The Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) is a bill pending in the U.S. Congress that will grant equal rights to American citizens who are in same-sex relationships with non-citizens.

On May 6, 7, and 8, Immigration Equality is leading an action week during which LGBT families will travel to Washington D.C. to lobby Congress to pass UAFA. Even if you cannot participate in D.C., you can support their efforts by taking action locally: call or writing your members of Congress, visit their local offices, write to your local papers, or sign a petition.

Please take a few minutes to demand equal immigration rights for LGBT people. For same-sex couples affected by the immigration system, this legislation cannot come soon enough.

Click here to take action...