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Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics.
The Teamsters’ refusal to endorse Kamala Harris underlines the need for the labor movement to develop a coherent political appeal to win its members over, on terms that are relevant to the vast majority of the working class.
Yes, Republicans are “weird,” but the in-vogue Democratic talking point gets us further away from an economic argument about why Donald Trump is bad for working-class families.
Hegel claimed that wisdom about a historical period often comes only after it has ended. As wokeness loses sway, we can better see its effects on socialist politics.
Teamster president Sean O’Brien’s speech at the Republican National Convention may represent a return to nonpartisan realpolitik for unions. But does that reflect labor’s strength or its decline?
What a failed racial equity program tells us about the pitfalls of race targeting.
For some, searching for a surer moral footing upon which to launch a socialist political program has again raised the specter of Christian ethics.
A dive into mid-century American history uncovers how a strong labor movement was pivotal in building social unity, equality, and advancing civil rights. While nostalgia might seem like a dead end, the past holds valuable lessons for shaping a better future.
Netflix’s new feel-good Bayard Rustin biopic, Rustin, claims the civil rights hero has been forgotten because of his sexuality. But it was his fiery and provocative class politics that makes him both controversial and prophetic today.
It’s good that college-educated workers are unionizing. But it doesn’t tell us much about the working class as a whole.
It’s not what you spend, it’s how you use it.
Progressives and moderates accuse each other of being unable to appeal to working-class voters — and maybe they’re both right.
Some “anti-elitists” on the Right say they want the GOP to be the party of the working class. But what they’re really offering is a PR campaign that won’t fundamentally change the lives of workers.
A reply to Angela Nagle and Michael Tracey.
Socialists say they either want to “realign” the Democratic Party or break with it entirely. But those aren’t political strategies — they are outcomes of political struggle. We need a way to develop working-class politics without condemning ourselves to third-party marginality.
Bernie Sanders can’t continue campaigning as usual, and he certainly can’t drop out of the race. We desperately need Bernie to retool his entire operation to demand a robust government response to the coronavirus — a response the Democratic Party will never spearhead themselves.
Containment isn’t enough. We need a wartime mobilization to expand coverage, capacity, and production in order to test, trace, and treat coronavirus. And Bernie Sanders must play a major role in advocating for more aggressive measures.
The bad news is that the Democratic Party isn’t going anywhere. The good news is that today’s commonsense political demands are, almost unthinkably, democratic socialist ones. Our work continues today.
Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s The Populist’s Guide to 2020 offers a powerful rebuke to liberal elitism and ruling class neglect. But only one of its authors has the solutions it will take to remake our unequal society.
Bernie Sanders’s decisive victory in Nevada today shows that he has a working-class base committed to fundamentally transforming our radically unequal political and economic system. He’s on his way to not just the nomination, but the White House.
If we’re going to change the United States, socialists will have to win the working class. And we urgently need a strategy and an organization to do just that.