Looking beyond Joe Biden’s unexpectedly modest victory, the 2020 election was a historic failure for the Democratic Party. On the other hand, despite some painful hitches coming out of this campaign season, the Left has reason to be hopeful.
For weeks, voters have been forced to wait in interminable lines just to cast their ballot. That’s an indictment of American democracy — and it points to deeper flaws in a political system that represents the oligarchic minority over the working-class majority.
Effective states can enforce discipline on elites. The United States is not one of them.
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.
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.
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.
If we’re going to reverse the ravages of neoliberalism, we’ll need to rebuild a global labor movement that knows how to strike and win. A recent international “Strike School,” led by labor organizer Jane McAlevey, brought 3,000 trade unionists and activists from seventy countries to try to do just that.
After four years of having a xenophobic reality TV host in the White House, the desire to just “go back to normal” is understandable. But a return to normalcy would be disastrous, shoring up the plutocratic status quo that gave us Trump in the first place.
Marxist historian Vijay Prashad talks about his new book Washington Bullets and the history of US-backed coups, from the post–World War II period to the recent successful right-wing coup in Bolivia.
Nancy Pelosi is a barrier to transformative change. Socialists and progressives should oppose her reelection as House speaker.
Triumphalist celebrations of Joe Biden’s hollow win over Donald Trump are a master class in ideological hubris. Canada’s New Democratic Party absolutely should not take the wrong lessons from his feeble victory.
Joe Biden says he’ll be a pro-labor president. But his funding from anti-union corporate executives, his Obama administration record, and his flirtation with Silicon Valley all point to a gap between rhetoric and reality.
Since the election, Democratic centrists have harshly criticized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Left for their own poor electoral showing. But AOC has bravely hit back — standing up for left-wing politics and refusing to be cowed by the centrist attacks.
The establishment of the first Amazon union in the US is a historic breakthrough for organized labor. The successful union drive shows how the Left can best build real grassroots power: by organizing in the workplace.
If you were hoping for a change of heart from Joe Biden after a decades-long career as a hawk, we've got bad news: his incoming team helped shape some of the most militaristic policies of the Obama administration.
CEOs at companies like Walmart and McDonald's continue to pull down multimillion-dollar salaries while their workers' wages stagnate. And the whole system is underwritten by what amounts to a massive public subsidy.
Democrats performed poorly on Election Day, but many working-class ballot measures won across the country — like in Portland, Maine, where a coalition of the Democratic Socialists of America, racial justice activists, labor, and others won victories on a $15 minimum wage, local Green New Deal measures, banning police use of facial recognition software, and rent control.
Joe Biden’s likely nominee to head the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, called for cuts to Social Security, saying, “we need to put both entitlements on the table as well as taxes.”
Smart union organizing tactics can produce incremental growth for unions at some points, or at least slow decline. But those tactics don't lead to substantial increases in overall union density — those increases happen quickly, in moments of upsurge. Labor and the Left need to be ready for those moments.
An astounding 68 percent of Americans say they want lawmakers to reject corporate executives and lobbyists if they are nominated for Joe Biden's cabinet posts, according to a new survey.