The Virginia Worker

Keith Jay, community organizer and worker in southwestern Virginia, makes their case on the importance of organizing in Appalachia Appalachia appears, at first sight, an extremely obvious, trivial thing. Of course, Marx was referring to commodity fetishism when he conceived of those critical words in the first volume of his groundbreaking work, Capital. Nevertheless, after…

RICHMOND, VA – Spirits were high on Sunday, April 24th at the National in Downtown Richmond as supporters of Starbucks Workers United gathered to celebrate the union’s historic victories in five stores in the Richmond area. While Unity Fest’s musical acts and speakers like Bernie Sanders undoubtedly captivated the audience, Starbucks workers themselves drew the…

TN Long reports on the ongoing struggle by Columbia Gardens tenants against mass evictions triggered by a wave of gentrification stemming from Amazon’s new HQ2 site La ColectiVA, an immigrant rights group in Arlington, VA, serving the local Latin American community, hosted a vigil outside the Columbia Gardens apartments for the remaining two families at…

The Failure of ‘Don’t Look Up‘ Christopher Sloce, socialist writer and co-host of the It Can Be Done podcast brings us The Poverty of Popcorn Politics: The Failure of Don’t Look Up. This is the first installment of The Culture Column, a new bi-monthly series criticizing the culture we have so we can create the…

An Interview with Steven Salaita on his Recent Keynote Speech Former Virginia Tech professor Steven Salaita recently gave the Keynote Speech for the Virginia Tech Graduate and Professional Student Senate Symposium in the face of protest from zionists on campus and from afar.  Salaita first drew ire across Virginia Tech and the country when he…

Recently members of the organization Socialist Resurgence of Virginia have fused with other socialist groups to form a new organization – Workers Voice. The following is their official statement on this merger STATEMENT ON THE FORMATION OF WORKERS’ VOICE We live in a period characterized by escalating capitalist crises, imperialist conflict and war (i.e., the…

Recently, the National Political Committee – the executive body – of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) dissolved their Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions Working Group by fiat, triggering a backlash from the rank and file membership for their undemocratic maneuver. As a result, a mass resignation is taking place. Here is a resignation letter from…

The Communist League of Richmond argues for revolutionary defeatism vs campism and other distortions of revolutionary marxism in regards to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of rite plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people.…

This reportback was written by an anonymous member of the TAP Head Start Workers Committee A year ago, in January 2021, preschool workers at TAP Head Start in Roanoke, VA initiated our first workplace struggle. We were organizing for some basic, decent working conditions (the first two of which were a long time coming, and…

Rick Amherst, member of The Virginia Worker Editorial Board, offers the following review of Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann’s ‘Climate Leviathan’ As the authors of Climate Leviathan concede, climate change is not a debate– it is a reality that will inevitably wreak at least some degree of havoc on the world, especially for the most…