Throughout US history, the only way democratic rights have been expanded is through mass struggle—from the Civil War to the labor upsurge of the 1930s; from the Civil Rights movement to the fight for marriage equality—and it’s the only way they can be won today.
The class bias of the system begins with who the police target: police are far less likely to arrest higher-income people for committing the same crimes as poor people, and far more likely to charge a poor person than a well-off person for the same offense. Swat teams aren’t barging into wealthy neighborhoods and arresting teenagers holding drug-addled parties while their parents are on vacation at the second home in Cabo.
It is true that O’Brien’s two meetings with Trump and the Teamsters’ contribution to the GOP don’t constitute a formal endorsement. The question is: what kind of message does it send?
In a period of 8 years, Eric Blanc moved from being a keen critique of labor’s “suicidal subordination to the parties of the bosses” (2014) to the idea that the labor movement should engage in “some form of electoral alliance” with liberal Democrats (2022).
Paul D’Amato, author of The Meaning of Marxism, explains how the Russian revolutionary Lenin approached the question of imperialism and national liberation.
The real “strategic impasse” is that of those socialists who, finding themselves adrift and without serious organization, joined DSA in a vain hope that it could be influenced to become something it was never been set up to be.
In honor of Indigenous People’s Day this week, we reprint here an article originally published in Socialist Workerin 2010, telling the story of the Native American leader Tecumseh and his vision of uniting Indian tribes into a single confederation.
Israelis may hope that their incessant collective punishment against Palestinians will force the latter to relinquish their national aspirations. To Israel’s chagrin, these efforts have only strengthened the Palestinians’ resolve.
No matter the outcome, the Commune had shown how a revolution raises up workers estimation of themselves and brings out the best in humanity.
Lenin was fundamentally anti-elitist—not in the sense of anarchists who simply deny the necessity of leadership in struggle, but in the sense of grasping that leadership is a product of the uneven development of consciousness and activity in the working class…
