
Taking Back Left Parties From the Brahmins
Across Western countries, the decline in class-based voting isn’t inevitable: it results from political choices.

Across Western countries, the decline in class-based voting isn’t inevitable: it results from political choices.

Jeremy Corbyn is attempting to transform a Labour Party that represents labor in name only.

Right now, democratic socialism is on the rise in American society. Revolutionary socialists who have kept the torch of socialism burning during the lean years will now have to merge with democratic-socialist demands of the current moment.

Last year’s prestige cinema focused on working-class characters too consumed to reflect on their own conditions.

How the housing crash got us believing in ghosts again.
Thoughts on politics, social movements, and the 2012 elections.

Here’s something to celebrate this May Day: History may well look back at our era as the moment the working class finally got back on its feet.

The music critic Ian Penman made his name during the heady days of anti-Thatcher counterculture. In Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, he finds his match in the frenzied life and work of postwar Germany’s most iconoclastic director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

A strategic focus on uniting the working class doesn’t mean marginalizing the struggle against racism and sexism.

In the 1990s, Democrats adopted a neoliberal program to suit the needs of capital, driving many workers out. The party then adopted a political strategy meant to replace working-class voters with professionals — with disastrous consequences.

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain has called on unions to come together for a national strike in 2028. This is a radical idea — and elevating Medicare for All as a central demand would give workers across sectors a reason to join in.

The response to Bernie showed that a socialist party in the United States is possible. But there is no shortcut to building power.

How has the rise of finance changed class relationships?

The Democratic Party has been collapsing for years, but no one noticed before Trump came along.

Last week’s passage of a bill in the California state legislature ending the rampant misclassification of workers as independent contractors was a huge win. The bill was animated by the spirit of unions fighting for the entire working class — the exact principle that should animate all unions.

The demand to cancel student debt is vital, but it would be politically dangerous to let it get detached from a broader left vision for higher education. We should unite it with another key working class demand: tuition-free public college and trade school.

Reinvigorating class-based politics in the US depends on more than inspiring candidates like Bernie Sanders: it requires durable working-class political organization. Here’s what one group learned about organizing working people around bread-and-butter issues.

Cold War hysteria meant that Communist writer Mike Gold has been universally denounced in life and death. But Gold’s pioneering work created a working-class literature written for, by, and about working-class people — and it should be celebrated today.
Class politics and reparations aren't at odds — they're part of the same struggle.