Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. He blogs at the Substack Labor Politics and is the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.
In New York City, leaders of unions and nonprofit groups like the Working Families Party again picked the losing, old-guard side in last night’s elections. How long before these leaders get on board with the future of working-class politics?
As the union reform organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union turns 50, we spoke to its cochairs about their work building rank-and-file power inside one of the most important unions in the United States.
Nobody wants to join a boring movement. Socialists can’t change the world if we aren’t providing people with a good time.
Socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has accomplished much in just a few months. But one major thing is missing from his tenure thus far: activating mass participation of working-class New Yorkers in the fight for his ambitious agenda.
A campaign to ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement from polling places would provide a concrete, winnable demand that unions, student organizations, and immigrant and democracy defense groups could organize around today, months before the election.
Amid the horrors of war, it’s always tempting for some on the Left to stake out more and more radical sloganeering. This was a dead end during the Vietnam War — mass action was not.
We don’t have an effective, mass antiwar movement to push back against Donald Trump’s war on Iran. We need one immediately.
It’s not enough just to oppose this war on Iran. We should demand major cuts to the US military budget, starting with cutting it in half.
Boycotts against corporations can be powerful tools. But they have to be waged as part of larger collective struggles with real plans to win — not simply as acts for frustrated individuals to take on their own.
The 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” mobilized millions and killed a draconian anti-immigrant bill. With ICE waging war on immigrant communities, the playbook for a mass strike already exists — we just have to study it.
General strikes are the most powerful tool in the working class’s arsenal. Recent mass actions in Minnesota against ICE terror were strong steps toward such a strike, but much more organizing is needed. Here’s how we can do it.
We spoke to a Minneapolis organizer about the community-organizing infrastructure there in response to ICE, why targeting corporations that profit from ICE is working, and how other cities could do the same in their fight against ICE terror.
Accounts of the life of Martin Luther King Jr often present him as a singularly great individual. Yet MLK was profoundly shaped by a vibrant ecosystem of socialists and labor radicals, from Myles Horton and Rosa Parks to Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison.
In Wisconsin, state assembly member and democratic socialist Francesca Hong has announced she is running for governor. We spoke to her about the campaign.
Critics of the American sewer socialists often point to racist statements made by their leading light, Wisconsin’s Victor Berger. A close examination of his writings shows that those views changed dramatically over time.
How the socialist left and the anti-Trump Resistance are slowly but surely learning to work together.
The hard part is over. The harder part is about to start.
The way to help Zohran Mamdani overcome establishment and billionaire opposition to his agenda has to involve organizing bigger and deeper, rather than simply criticizing him harder.
The government shutdown was a test showing where progressive forces are strong and where they’re weak. The results are in after last night’s Democratic capitulation to the GOP: most top union leaders are failing to meet the moment.
A democratic socialist wasn’t supposed to be able to win a major office like New York City mayor over the objections of billionaires. Yet Zohran Mamdani and the movement behind him built a campaign far stronger than the oligarchs and their unlimited money.