In an interview, longtime socialist-feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham reflects on her decades on the Left, grappling with the reality of being a socialist from the middle class, and E. P. and Dorothy Thompson and the classic book The Making of the English Working Class.
The working class in capitalism is not a coherent class but a fragmented one — an amalgam of individuals trying to survive. It’ll take politics to change that.
Millennials are better educated than ever. They also overwhelmingly identify as working class.
One of the great labor scholars of the 20th century, David Montgomery was determined to place workers at the center of US history. For Montgomery, rigorous historical analysis couldn’t be divorced from engagement with the working class.
This month marks 100 years since the birth of Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. His work offers vital insights into the growth of class consciousness — but also helps us see how parts of the 20th-century left lost their structural focus on class.
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.
Working-class voters may be having second thoughts about MAGA, but they’re still abandoning the Democratic Party. Democrats’ reliance on college-educated suburbanites is arithmetically insufficient and politically unsustainable.
Chile’s socialist experiment was made possible by a confrontational working-class political party and a militant labor movement. The experience shows the promise, and the dangers, of a movement based in both government initiatives and grassroots militancy.
Since Labour’s election defeat, pundits have accused the party of being out of step with working people’s social conservatism. But the “Blue Labour” obsession with Christian morality and national pride offers a caricature of the working class — and ignores the ability of socialist politics to unite people across cultural divides.
Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in New York City drove home the political promise of economic populism. A bold progressive economic agenda can win working-class voters in the Midwest too.
Far-right intellectuals like Steve Bannon claim to speak for a working class put upon by out-of-touch liberal elites. But their anti-modernist, hierarchical vision of the world doesn’t offer workers what they really need: more money in their pockets, and more power at the workplace.
The New York gubernatorial race has much to tell us about the future of working-class politics in the US.
We talk with historian Matt Karp about how ending our great age of inequality will take a renewed working-class politics.
As inspiring as the Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s were, they failed to democratize the Middle East. The primary cause had little to do with the region’s cultural or religious characteristics and everything to do with the profound weakening of the Middle East’s working-class power under neoliberalism.
Alberta’s UCP government, led by premier Jason Kenney, is kowtowing to the province’s bosses in every conceivable way. The passage of Bill 32 demonstrates their devotion to Alberta’s business class and their contempt for working people.
With the new Child Tax Credit, two-thirds of people in the US now receive monthly benefit checks. That’s a very good thing — it means delivering poor, working-class, and middle-class people clear material gains while also destigmatizing the welfare state.
The labor movement is the critical institution for the Left. Socialists should root themselves in it — not as supporters from afar or paid staff, but as rank-and-file workers.
A new study clearly shows that Democratic candidates aren’t embracing progressive economic demands. Is it any wonder why more and more working-class people are tuning these politicians out?
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.
Two writers, Thomas Frank and Joan Williams, provided sharp insight into the Democrats’ hemorrhaging of working-class voters eight years ago. The Democratic Party ignored their perspectives. We asked them to explain how we ended up here — again.