Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
Donald Trump’s Labor Department just issued a rule freezing farmworkers’ wages, even as his administration predicts a big increase in agribusiness profits. It’s a parting reminder that, for all its populist bluster, the Trump administration has been an enemy of working people.
Queensland is often viewed as a hopelessly conservative state. But the story of Jack Henry, the Australian communist who organized the Far North, suggests that this stereotype is far from the truth.
We’re all exhausted, but the rich aren’t. In the 24 hours since the election was called, corporate interests and their allies in the Democratic Party have already started their war on the Left.
The mass celebrations of Trump’s defeat yesterday were a beautiful outpouring of collective political joy. We can harness that energy to build a mass working-class politics against Joe Biden’s neoliberalism.
Donald Trump is the grotesque embodiment of market principles. In climbing back from his disastrous four years, one of our aims must be to wrest back democracy from the market.
Donald Trump’s presidency was a catastrophe, and its imminent demise is well worth celebrating. Our task now is to build a politics that ensures Trumpism is dead and buried.
Both hip-hop and punk bloomed out of the social collapse created by the economic crisis of the 1970s. But where is the music of our twenty-first-century disaster?
With the Trump presidency thankfully in its death throes, Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership are in thrall to a dangerous illusion that they can take the country back to the political world of 2015 as if nothing happened. They’re about to learn that they’ve won a Pyrrhic victory.
Joe Biden’s empty campaign may well have won over some suburban Republican voters. But the fragile majority he has likely eked out this time should have been many times larger, and without a more serious reorientation, it won’t hold for long.
It’s good that Donald Trump lost. But the Left now needs to pivot immediately to opposition to the Joe Biden administration.
The corruption of British politics by corporate “dark money” is part of a global phenomenon. But we can’t make sense of that trend without recognizing that capitalist oligarchies have always sought to undermine genuine democracy.
Sweden’s longtime refusal to impose a general lockdown has seen it portrayed as an alternative “model” for coping with the pandemic. Yet death rates in its care homes have been appalling — and as a scandal that broke last month highlighted, much of the blame lies with the breakup and privatization of the country’s once-mighty public services.
A ballot measure to tax the rich failed on election night in Illinois. The person behind the “no” campaign: right-wing billionaire Ken Griffin, who funneled $50 million of his own money to kill the referendum.
Don’t let the gloom of Tuesday’s national elections obscure the remarkable results in lower-level races across the country. Dozens of socialists were elected to legislatures, while minimum-wage hikes, rent controls, and taxes on the rich to fund schools all won voter backing, even in very red places.
It appears Joe Biden will defeat Donald Trump, which is a very good thing. Now, get ready to fight — because oligarchs will concede nothing in their class war.
It looks like Biden won a narrow victory. But when Democratic candidates lose elections, is there any accountability for the Democratic Party operatives responsible? They don’t lose their jobs; they don’t even seem to take a pay cut.
Our work lives are so fissured, our ability to survive requiring such constant and Herculean efforts, that even fantastical narratives portraying the hunt for a steady job as swirling, maddening, operatically dramatic, degrading, bizarre, and never-ending feel just as real as life itself.
If Joe Biden managed to pull off a victory despite his lackluster campaign, it’s in part because the electorate felt the urgent need for a president who would focus on the coronavirus crisis instead of railing against a series of cultural bogeymen. No wonder: most people care more about their material conditions than the partisan culture wars.
The Lincoln Project said it would win over Republican voters from Donald Trump. Instead, Trump consolidated his base as the group burned $67 million that could’ve been spent better on real political organizing.
Democrats based much of their 2020 campaign on support for the Affordable Care Act. But the law has become less popular as the pandemic has exposed its flaws while continuing to enrich insurance companies.