As we build a movement to thwart Trump and win genuine social change, the activist life of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is instructive.
After the election, many on the Black Left are once again grappling with the “race vs. class” debate.
In theory, mathematics is neutral – two plus two equals four regardless of what anyone wishes the answer was. But in practice, mathematical algorithms can be formulated and tweaked based on powerful interests.
Democrats were wrong to think that shifting demographics alone would hand them victory. What then determines whether workers respond to economic grievances with nativism or solidarity? In a word, organization.
Why are we championing diversity and inclusivity when it comes to race and gender, but not class? Class, which we all know by now is just as much a defining factor in a person’s life as race or gender (if not moreso).
The research of Duke political scientist Ashley Jardina shows that White identity more strongly affects opinions when whites perceive themselves as under threat.
There goes the neighborhood.
In launching a cycle of plays grounded in English history, Shakespeare was able to show his audiences the blood-soaked story of their own becoming, the history of their creation as a nation. (From an American vantage, it would be as though a present-day playwright were to track our history from Jamestown to World War II, focusing most intently on the span stretching from the Revolutionary through the Civil Wars.
Clinton left a rhetorical door open for Sanders to connect Wall Street and race, but he didn’t do it.
The renewed focus, particularly on the left, on precariousness constitutes a recognition of the harsh reality of capitalism, and particularly of today’s globalized monopoly-finance capital. More than a century of Marxian political-economic critique allows us to appreciate the extent to which the conditions that Marx described, focusing on a small corner of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, are now global, and all the more perilous.
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