Portside

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaking in Geneva in honor of International Human RIghts Day cited the need to: Build a new social and economic system with human rights and justice at its core. Deliver climate justice and a better way to live together on this planet. Recognise the humanity of refugees and offer them a place of safety. Work for peace, security and understanding. The survival of our common humanity requires nothing less.

The chaos surrounding last week’s presidential elections in Honduras reflects a rightwing consolidation of power in the country, abetted by the United States.

Podemos has created a new form of struggle based in large part on the ideas of people working in the tradition of Gramsci. Iglesias argued that as the broad mass of people were not engaging in politics through the existing parties, the left had to go where the people were. This was a war of ideology and of position.

Mexico's 1917 Constitution asserted national control over all resources and launched a program of land redistribution. It established the most progressive labor legislation in the world at that time, guaranteeing a minimum wage, the right to strike and collective bargaining, an eight-hour day, an end to child labor, equal pay regardless of sex, and maternity leave. The betrayal of the constitution began early and turned into a rout in the 1980s.by neoliberals.

Against the self-serving behavior of the elite, we are seeing the rise of two currents. One of them bases its decisions on fear. They want us to direct our anger downwards, to spit on the unemployed, refugees, people who have things even tougher. It’s a trick. By spitting on those below, they are protecting the elite above. In doing so they avoid the question of power. But there is also another current. It is led not by fear but by hope.

Did we do enough in 2016? And how can we build a broader electoral movement? I don't believe the Left bears the brunt of the blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat, and I reject arguments that try to score political points through guilt-tripping. Both long-term and short-term factors worked against a Clinton victory. Trump is not Reagan; 2016 is not 1980. But both elections were lost by tone-deaf Democratic elites who dismissed the economic anxieties of the working class.

We must include migrants and refugees in the people, politically and institutionally in the sense of full social and political rights but also ideologically in the terms of how we define the “us vs. them” in our societies. We need to redefine the people –or even the “nation”– as the unity in struggle of all the subaltern classes. This is an answer to “identity politics” than chauvinism in the name of “secularism," and an answer to neo-liberal cosmopolitanism.