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Beating Trump: Absolutely Essential, Also Not Enough

Max Elbaum Organizing Upgrade
student demonstrators
Ousting Trump from the White House is not sufficient to address the deep-going crises that today threaten the rights and well-being of people in the U.S., the very lives of millions across the globe, and the natural environment...

Beyond the Rank-and-File Strategy

Max Elbaum Jacobin
car production line
The rank-and-file strategy isn't enough. We should examine the broad range of working-class organizing strategies and experiences that are today's socialists' collective heritage.

Revolution in the Air: Lessons from the 1960s

Max Elbaum Comparative and Historical Sociology
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: Assessing the 2018 Mid-Terms

Max Elbaum Portside
newly elected Muslim Congresswomen
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.

Revolution in the Air Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che

Max Elbaum Verso
“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.

Left Strategy After Charlottesville

Max Elbaum Organizing Upgrade
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.

Trump vs. the Resistance: Taking Stock 75 Days In

Max Elbaum Organizing Upgrade
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.