On September 6th, top officers of the striking public sector unions announced their decision to "suspend" the mass strike. In an interview, South African socialist Brian Ashley calls the strike "a major missed opportunity." You can find a collection of articles about the strike on the website of the South African magazine Amandla here.

If you're interested in an overview of workers' struggles and politics in South Korea from the end of the Second World War to the present, check out the radio interview with Loren Goldner on Against the Grain. Goldner discusses many interesting facets of South Korea, including the extraordinary struggles of the 1980s, how the collapse of the USSR affected socialists and the devastating impact of the 1997-98 "Asian Crisis" on workers.

With corporate media attention playing up the right-wing Tea Party and likely losses for the Democrats in November's mid-term elections, it's easy for people in Canada to think that people in the US are moving decisively to the right. But reality is more complicated, as pointed out in three articles from the US worth reading:

The editorial of the latest issue of Against the Current argues that "the pending Democratic electoral debacle does not flow from a fundamental “shift to the right” by the population. Nor, for that matter, did we consider the historic election of president Obama some major “shift to the left.” In 2008 the corporate elites and tens of millions of people, and not only African-American voters, were sick and disgusted with the monstrous abuses, lies and incompetence of the George W. Bush regime. Today, many people, especially white voters whose lives remain dominated by fear and insecurity don‘t see any results for themselves from the corporate and bank bailouts, or from an incredibly complex health care “reform” whose merits, whatever they might be, won’t kick in for years." Read the rest of the editorial here.

Lance Selfa goes back to the 1960s to explain how the current situation in the US came to be the way it is and suggests that popular consciousness is more contradictory than many polls and media reports suggest. Read his piece in socialistworker.org here.

Writing in Black Agenda Report, Bruce A Dixon looks at African-American community leadership today and points out that "Not so very long ago, before 1965 passage of Medicare, the cost of health care for senior citizens was so high that hundreds of thousands of elders in the U.S. were eating cat food. Black seniors, as always, were the worst affected. Given its stated objective, of rolling back Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, it's easy to see why President Obama's debt commission has earned its label as the President's Cat Food Commission. It's much harder to see why black America's political leadership chooses to ignore the Cat Food Commission created by Democrats in power, and instead picks meaningless fights with Republicans out of power."