Portside

In this piece, I want to discuss the political climate and experience of revolutionaries of the 1960s to better understand today’s political landscape and what I think could be some useful directions forward for the battles we are engaged in now.

Politics is about Power. One of positive things this moment is that the question of power has moved central to discussion on the left. ..., we need to build our own organizations and strengthen alignment and cooperation between them.

“Max Elbaum has given us an incisive and critical history of the Other New Left – the radicals who brought class struggle and Third World liberation to the forefront, looked to the world for allies, and tried their best to work through the dynamics of race and class.

A key challenge facing progressives is translating general strategy into concrete action priorities in 2018.

In shorthand: this essay is an argument for the left to interact with the post-Charlottesville surge of resistance by pursuing a strategy that is anti-right, anti-racist, gender-inclusive, grounded in the interests of the working class and oriented toward working both inside and outside of the Democratic Party.

Scaffolding for an assessment of the correlation of forces after the battles from Trump's inauguration through the GOP's failure to repeal Obamacare, and what the next year may hold in store. Note added April 7: This piece was finalized just before Trump's air strike in Syria. For updates on that extremely dangerous escalation, see the links added to the paragraph terming this "an aggressively militarist, war presidency" below.

The perilous consequences of a Trump presidency should be a wake-up call for the left.