Editorial Notes

In this edition of SPE, we introduce a new, regular section called “Alternatives.” Alternatives, which replaces the “Comment” section, is intended to open up spaces for discussion of concrete alternatives to the status quo. In the debut article, Steve Williams, from People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER, an organization of poor, working-class people in San Francisco), discusses POWER’s strategies for improving the lives of the poor in that city and for developing socialist-Left organizations with an alternative vision for the future. We hope to publish a wide range of commentaries on topics such as contemporary events’ popular mobilizations, the state of political economy as a discipline, and the development of alternative political economies. In “The Palestine Test: Countering the Silencing Campaign,” Mary-Jo Nadeau and Alan Sears examine the campaign to silence Palestinian solidarity work in Canada, especially on university campuses. This article examines the strategic logic of the silencing campaign, which attempts to foreclose debate on the basis of an equity argument that equates criticism of Israel, outside of narrow bounds, with anti-Semitism. This issue features two articles examining social movement organization in Brazil. Charmain Levy considers the conditions under which social movements form and mobilize, using the example of the inner-city slum movement in Sao Paulo. Her article, “Brazilian Urban Popular Movements: The 1997 Mobilization of the Inner-City Slum Movement in Sao Paulo,” deals in detail with this urban movement, and also constructs a theoretical model that includes both the analysis of socioeconomic structures and changes to these structures, as well as dynamics and synergies at the micro level. While Levy considers urban mobilization, Marie-Josée Massicotte focuses on the rural, and “the centrality of food in people’s everyday lives and culture...and the failure of the neoliberal order to ensure sustainable agriculture, access to nutritious food, and adequate living and working conditions