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Analysis Politics United States

The end of Trump?

2024 will become, as every national election since 2016 has, a referendum on Trump and MAGA. In that circumstance, Joe Biden—despite holding the support of only about 40 percent of the public—will have to be favored by the Democratic Party for reelection, assuming a health crisis doesn’t derail the octogenarian president.

Art & Literature

Review: Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried

The film, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, available to view for free at your local PBS station until May 1, 2024, shows not only how U.S. corporations have historically used murderous violence to prevent workers from organizing into unions, but also why most workers are not aware of this history: The corporate media has systematically suppressed it from being reported to the public.

Marxist Education

Why workers need their own party (part 2)

The previous installment of this two-part series covered the emergence of independent working-class politics in the era of Marx and Engels. This article takes the history up to contemporary times to show how different conceptions of a working-class party reflect different conceptions of its ultimate aim.

Analysis Latin America World

Chile: In free fall. Reformist defeat reloaded.

On May 7, the Chilean right scored a major victory in elections to choose delegates to draft a new constitution for the country. The conservatives, who mostly want to maintain the current constitution drawn up under the Pinochet dictatorship, have more than the 60 percent support in the constitutional council they need to write the new constitution without having to offer any concessions to the left.

Analysis Global Economy World

G7: Where is that recession?

Marxist economic theory suggests that slumps will happen when the profitability of capital starts falling; eventually leading to a fall in total profits in an economy.  Those profits can further be squeezed by increases in the cost of capital i.e. interest costs on borrowing. 

Marxist Education

Why workers need their own party (part 1)

When we say that the Democratic Party is a bourgeois party, it’s because no matter who votes for it—and the majority of Democratic voters are workers—the party apparatus itself is set up to reflect, and to some extent, organize, the political interests of the capitalist class.

Analysis World

Desperate journeys. Sick system!

There are by now an estimated 100 million people globally who have fled their homelands or become internally displaced by war, political repression or ethnic violence; by environmental destruction or economic collapse; or in many cases, by lethal combinations of these modern plagues.

Debates

What has become of the left?

A large part of the left often seems ashamed of having at one time defended egalitarian politics. The extent to which many left-wing leaders go to pretend that they have never defended these politics, or that they are not to much of an irritant the economic powers-that-be, has led them to adopt ways of intervening in politics with people and parties that was characteristic of those on their right.

Analysis Social Issues United States Women

The ghost of Anthony Comstock

So far in 2023, state lawmakers have introduced a record-breaking least 483 anti-trans bills. Put differently, only four states have not done so. These include banning parents from allowing their teens to attend drag shows, barring insurance companies from covering gender-affirming medical care (already in use for several decades), and even making it illegal for parents and medical providers to dispense gender affirming care to minors.