Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, like much of MLK’s legacy, is selectively remembered. It attacked the material roots of American racism, just as his anti–Vietnam War speech five years later excoriated American militarism.
For the first century of its existence, the organized left mobilized around the “labor question”: who determines the what and how of production. For years, though, the Left has abandoned this question for a concern with inequality — at its own peril.
The Democratic Party has become, improbably, the preferred party of American capital. But in doing so, it’s lost more and more of its working-class base.
The Democratic Party has become, improbably, the preferred party of the elites.
The story of the Congressional Black Caucus reflects the class contradictions of black politics in the post–civil rights era.
Socialists have demonstrated the tactical utility of running on the Democratic Party ballot line. But making our peace with the party would be a mistake — to accomplish our goals, independent political organization and identity is indispensable.
The great black freedom struggles of the past have been joined by many white people — not just out of a sense of moral obligation or sympathy for the oppressed, but out of a sense of shared interest and a desire for collective liberation. That spirit of solidarity should be central to anti-racist struggle today.
The rich tradition of Black Marxist thought — one that includes W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon, among many others — emphasizes the centrality of capitalism to racial oppression and the destructiveness of that oppression for all workers.
Corporate America and the rich have used anti-racism to distract from broader inequality. Ensuring that every racial group has identical access to society’s limited resources does nothing to change an economy that exploits the many to enrich the few.
Half a century ago, New York City paraprofessional educators waged a campaign to win their first contract as part of the teachers union. It’s a history the union can draw on to win needed advances for paras today.
Coretta Scott King condemned the brutality of the Vietnam War and criticized how it drained money from housing, health care, and jobs.
The theologian and historian Gary Dorrien has made it his mission to chronicle and revive the tradition of Christian democratic socialism. His work reminds the American left of our project’s spiritual dimensions.
Political strategist Waleed Shahid explains why the Uncommitted movement’s organizing at the Democratic National Convention should be seen as successfully moving the needle within the Democratic Party toward justice for Palestine.
How liberals brought an anticommunist slur from America’s past back to life.
Of all the internal controversies Occupy generated, the one over whether the movement should adopt specific demands may have been the most significant.
On the politics of professional-class anxiety.
Rosa Parks may be lionized for her defiance on the bus, but that episode doesn’t do justice to her career as an organizer.
Can literature be a force in the fight for economic justice?
This century's LGBTQ liberation movement must be part of a broader project to redefine human freedom.
The reparations demand survives as a parlor debate — it cannot address the real needs and interests of black workers.