After Labour's setbacks in May's local elections, moderates claim the party needs to tack to the center to win. But their economic ideas offer 1990s-style neoliberalism — not the jobs and investments working-class voters want.
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.
Class dynamics continue to dictate who has access to an unstigmatized gay identity — and to exclude many working-class people from participating in mainstream gay life.
Karl Marx didn't believe the working class would automatically end capitalism. He believed that actively engaging in class struggle can change workers' consciousness — and change the world.
Since Trump’s victory, authors like Michael Lind have portrayed the “white working class” as victims of metropolitan elites. But seeing the class war as a culture war overlooks working people’s greatest strength: our power to fight for our common interests, above cultural divides.
To sustain capitalism, otherwise competitive businesses have to do something unnatural: cooperate with each other. The state plays a crucial role in fostering this class discipline. We, on the other hand, have to build our own power.
For socialists, unions are paradoxical organizations. On the one hand, unions are essential for creating a workers' organization that can oppose capital and challenge it for power. But they are also an insufficient vehicle for mobilizing those workers to transform the world.
The global left has moved away from social class as an organizing identity, allowing the Right to peddle a working-class identity politics untethered from the socialist vision.
For decades, the parties of labor have been slowly replaced by the parties of the educated. A Left that doesn’t acknowledge this as a problem has already been defeated.
Lula rose from humble origins to become a leftist icon, exuding working-class authenticity and successfully bringing working people into the country’s political life. And his story isn’t over: he could soon return to power.
Matt Karp on how a political movement beating the drum for working-class populism can restore fraying ties between blue-collar workers and the Left.
A strategic focus on uniting the working class doesn’t mean marginalizing the struggle against racism and sexism.
If we’re going to change the United States, socialists will have to win the working class. And we urgently need a strategy and an organization to do just that.
Though his pessimism about the working class ebbed and flowed throughout his life, George Orwell ultimately saw workers as the only force that could build an egalitarian, socialist society.
One hundred seven years ago today, the labor troubadour Joe Hill was executed by a Utah firing squad for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit. His real crime: singing and agitating on behalf of the working class.
Britain’s Conservative Party used Brexit to cut a swathe through Labour’s electoral heartlands. But don’t be fooled by their last-minute populist makeover: the Tories are the same as ever — they’re not the party of the working class.
On the one-hundredth anniversary of American women’s right to vote, let’s remember the working-class socialist suffragists who struggled for the franchise. And let’s devote the next hundred years to realizing their vision.
While public-health guidance tells citizens to work from home, for millions of low-wage workers, this has never been a realistic option. As Europe’s governments ease the lockdown, it’s working-class people who are on the firing line of a second wave of infections.
Frankfurt School cofounder Max Horkheimer is today credited as an insightful analyst of authoritarian culture. But Horkheimer’s ever-pessimistic outlook reflected the political defeats of his time — and an oft one-sided view of the loss of working-class agency.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain explains his union’s position on tariffs and argues that we need a political movement that puts working-class people first to address the current political crisis in the US.