Portside

As the Hyde Amendment turns 40 in September, activists and legislators are seeking to permanently end the prohibition on federal funds from covering abortion care. According to sexual and reproductive health rights nonprofit group the Guttmacher Institute, between 18 percent and 35 percent of people insured by the federal Medicaid program who have experienced an unwanted pregnancy have been forced against their will to carry that pregnancy to term under Hyde.

When Bernie Sanders talks about a political revolution larger than himself, it is important to understand that it must also be larger than electoral movements. Although the working class has changed from the halcyon days of yesteryear, it is still the class at the heart of the contradictions of capital, and it is time to take back its true meaning.

Some cast the labor movement as dying or even dead, but even amid attacks on collective bargaining workers are finding innovative ways to organize.

At the center of the liberal democratic system, workers have fiercely resisted exploitation through the development of worker-based organizations rooted in the ideal of paving the road to a classless and democratic society. All those seeking greater labor militancy must recognize that traditional unions are unable to escape the trap set in the 1930s through fidelity to the collective bargaining agreement. [An earlier version was published by CounterPunch.]

Two weeks ago Portside published an essay by Michael Brie, The Tragedy of Party Communism. Here Kurt Stand, David Cohen and Jack Radey reflect on their participation in the socialist movement, what lessons there may be to draw on, as well as which to forget. For today's and tomorrow's socialists, they see socialism as a system that could be reformed, capitalism a system that needs to be abolished.

A hundred years after publication, the central message of this British classic still rings true . . . These fictional but very representative working people are under the thumb of papers such as the Daily Obscurer and the Weekly Chloroform; attend the Church of the Whited Sepulchre; work for bosses named Sweater, Makehaste, and Slogg; elect a town council comprising "The Forty Thieves"; and have daughters who work as maids for the likes of Mrs. Starvum and Lady Slumrent.

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