The Left Is Still Losing the Working Class
It’s good that college-educated workers are unionizing. But it doesn’t tell us much about the working class as a whole.
Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia.
It’s good that college-educated workers are unionizing. But it doesn’t tell us much about the working class as a whole.
It’s not what you spend, it’s how you use it.
Progressives and moderates accuse each other of being unable to appeal to working-class voters — and maybe they’re both right.
Some “anti-elitists” on the Right say they want the GOP to be the party of the working class. But what they’re really offering is a PR campaign that won’t fundamentally change the lives of workers.
A reply to Angela Nagle and Michael Tracey.
Socialists say they either want to “realign” the Democratic Party or break with it entirely. But those aren’t political strategies — they are outcomes of political struggle. We need a way to develop working-class politics without condemning ourselves to third-party marginality.
Bernie Sanders can’t continue campaigning as usual, and he certainly can’t drop out of the race. We desperately need Bernie to retool his entire operation to demand a robust government response to the coronavirus — a response the Democratic Party will never spearhead themselves.
Containment isn’t enough. We need a wartime mobilization to expand coverage, capacity, and production in order to test, trace, and treat coronavirus. And Bernie Sanders must play a major role in advocating for more aggressive measures.
The bad news is that the Democratic Party isn’t going anywhere. The good news is that today’s commonsense political demands are, almost unthinkably, democratic socialist ones. Our work continues today.
Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s The Populist’s Guide to 2020 offers a powerful rebuke to liberal elitism and ruling class neglect. But only one of its authors has the solutions it will take to remake our unequal society.
Bernie Sanders’s decisive victory in Nevada today shows that he has a working-class base committed to fundamentally transforming our radically unequal political and economic system. He’s on his way to not just the nomination, but the White House.
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.
On the politics of professional-class anxiety.
Some CEOs are endorsing Medicare for All. For socialists, that could be a trap.
You can’t do mass politics without mass demonstrations.
Both parties aren’t addressing our health care needs — now is the time for socialists to lead a national Medicare for All campaign.
Millennials are better educated than ever. They also overwhelmingly identify as working class.
Will backing Bernie Sanders help build an independent left? A debate.