We live in dangerous times. While the traditional, mainstream parties that the working classes across the globe may still be able to pull off an election victory, they have continued to decline in the face of confident far right masquerading as “working class” parties.
As always, the Democrats hope that the fear of Trump and Project 2025 will be enough to hold their supporters in line. But the fact that Trump continues to lead among people who say that the economy is their main concern, and that concerns about inflation—which hits lower income people the hardest—is still top of mind, both work against the incumbent vice president.
There is something in the air. You can feel it in something as simple as the amount of honking as people drive by picket lines. This was certainly the mood last summer. But this momentum needs new fresh events and struggles to sustain itself.
With the Teamsters and O’Brien coming under heavy criticism, a siege mentality has gripped the union with pressure on well-known Teamster activists to demonstrate loyalty to O’Brien.
It matters whether a particular union leadership is encouraging or blocking a particular struggle. Socialists are therefore not indifferent to different trends in the union leadership and pay careful attention to them in order to chart their possible impact on our fundamental task, the battle with the employers.
A commitment to arming Israel and to providing it impunity to violate international law is a bipartisan pillar of U.S. foreign policy. On that score, Harris is and will be no different from her predecessors. But many ordinary Democrats and activists—including many on the marches outside the convention center—will be encouraged to believe otherwise.
It’s common for people to think about the price of eggs or gasoline when they think about inflation. But aside from prices for commodities like these, which do fluctuate with “supply and demand,” there are the long-term price increases of commodities and services that are essential to everyday life.
The reality is that there is no evidence, no serious reason, to believe that Kamala Harris will have a better or different approach to Palestine than Joe Biden. Fortunately, large sections of the movement understand this very clearly.
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 Republicans are the right-wing party akin to the Liberals or the Nationals, and the Democrats are the “center-left” party like the Labor Party. While this is a quick way of sorting out the two main parties in the US bipartisan system, it doesn’t adequately account for what is unique about the Democrats in the taxonomy of political parties across the democratic world.
Harris’ rhetoric has tended to be more progressive than Biden’s, but Biden’s policies are very likely to be Harris’ policies in a future presidency because Harris has never strayed far from them—whatever language she has used.
The country was built on the violence of chattel slavery, the extermination of the native population, and wars of conquest. It fought a bloody civil war that killed the equivalent of seven million people, in today’s population.
It may not be apparent now, but it’s hard to see how Trump’s status as a serial predator, fraudster and, now convicted felon, is a benefit to him. And if the November election proves to be as close as all analysts are expecting right now, even a small defection from or deflation of Trump’s support base could doom him.
Biden’s order “would shut down asylum requests to the U.S.-Mexico border once the number of daily encounters hits 2,500 between ports of entry, with the border reopening once that number declines to 1,500,” according to The Associated Press—and various other media outlets that also cited unnamed officials who cautioned that the final figures could still change.
If we look at the migrant crisis from outside the realm of grubby electoral politics, we see that the current crisis is the product of decades of U.S. imperialism and domestic political dysfunction. Decades of neoliberal economic “reform” have helped to destroy whole sectors of the Central American economies. U.S.-backed “drug wars” in Central America and Colombia have also contributed to flows of migrants fleeing paramilitaries. The U.S. and other imperialist powers have meddled in Haitian affairs for centuries. And U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela have made life unsustainable for millions in those countries.
