For the author of the work under review--much heralded by the reviewer--Czech novelist Franz Kafka was no chronic pessimist or dour, fatalistic misbeliever in human emancipation, but a consistent partisan artist siding with the humiliated.
In spite of the economic boon for the wealthy, working people in the U.S. have yet to receive a significant improvement in their standard of living for over 30 years. At the same time, democratic forces are once again confronted with anti-immigrant campaigns. As socialists, we stand with and among the U.S. working class in opposition to the rule of the transnational corporations and their exploitation of the economy and despoliation of our lives, society and environment
Sunkara and Leonard say that people aren’t scared of socialism taking their money, they’re scared of Wall Street taking their money.
Our radical democratic socialist perspective is critical because it helps us connect the dots between what might seem to be separate issues in the organizing we do. For example, how does anti–charter-school activism relate to the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15?
After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America. Bernie Sanders helped give renewed meaning and salience to democratic socialism as a political identity. His emergence as the moral conscience of the American left was nearly impossible to anticipate. Perhaps the most important aspect of Sanders's run in the Democratic primary was cultural rather than electoral.
Martin Luther King's last book was downplayed when it was first published in 1967; even radicals thought it passe. On the 50th anniversary of its first publication--it is still in print-- the reviewers find much of value here for contemporary readers.
The historical time is in our favour. What helps us in this fight is that the kind of society we propose is in the interests of the immense majority. The great question is: why does this not translate into an equivalent social and electoral support? Part of the reason is media disinformation. But we are also at fault. We have not been able to explain our project in understandable terms. And worst of all, we preach democracy but act in an authoritarian way.
Reading Lebowitz has also given me a greater fluency in talking to people about what is wrong with capitalism and how socialism could really work, how the flaws in its past could be avoided, and what is necessary for its success.
It's an old idea, but the people who will make it happen are young - and tired of the unequal world they've inherited. I will come of age in the era of Trump. It's a bleak generational landmark, but ideological capitulation and despair are not the answer. In the 1930s and 1940s, many of the most dedicated antifascists were communists. The antidote to radical exploitation and exclusion is radical egalitarianism and inclusion.
We need a socialist politics that challenges the Democratic Party's leadership, not just the Right.
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