Portside

The Sanders campaign is resurrecting socialist electoral politics and paving the way for a more radical public discourse. Only the revival of a decimated labor movement and the rebirth of socialist political parties that can bring them all together could result in the major redistribution of wealth and power that would allow real movement on these individual issues.

Portside's moderators every day contribute our best at finding and sharing the most interesting and useful material we can for the modest task of remaking the world into a fairer and more peaceful place. We expect no pay -- seeing the material on Portside read and forwarded and acted on is reward enough. Once a year, we appeal to readers to contribute some cash to sustain the Portside infrastructure that makes our work possible. Here's why...

Reader Comments: Trump is a Fascist; Poem written by Pastor Martin Neimoller; They Are Coming Again; Chicago Police Crimes and Mayor Rahm; Venezuela Elections; Portside Fund Appeal; Non-Profits and the 99%; Bernie Sanders' Socialism and the Left Critics; Edward Snowden Meets John Cusack and Arundhati Roy; World's Richest 10 Percent Responsible for Half of CO2; Remembering Danny Rubin

Reader Comments: Chicago Police Killings of African Americans; Hillary and Labor; Readers debate Democratic Socialism; U.S. history and refugees, then and now - doors closed to Jews, while Japanese Americans are interned; Young Workers; NUHW Wins Battle with Kaiser; Quebec Rolling Strikes; Close Guantanamo; Who Benefits From A Post-Paris "Clash of Civilizations"?; Suffragette - Portside readers weigh in; Announcements: Book Sales; Worker Coops; Puerto Rico Fightback

Evoking Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr., the Vermont senator bridged the aspirations of New Deal liberalism with the democratic socialist tradition.

Today in America we not only have massive wealth and income inequality, but a power structure which protects that inequality. A handful of super-wealthy campaign contributors have enormous influence over the political process. In his 1944 State of the Union speech, President Roosevelt outlined what he called a second Bill of Rights. This is one of the most important speeches ever made by a president but, unfortunately, it has not gotten the attention that it deserves.

Albert Einstein's take on this question was surely influenced by the general crisis of 1914 to 1945, which profoundly shook the faith in inexorable progress and the belief in universal schemes of history. The lessons of that crisis still mark our present moment: historical determinism, outside of the academic cloisters of analytic Marxism, has very few adherents today. The question of why socialism remains as pressing for us as it was at the time of Einstein's writing.