Portside

Democrats should be running on their own wedge issues and saying look, the Republicans want to take Medicaid away from your family, from your neighbors, from your friends. If you’re here in Appalachia and say you don’t know someone covered by Medicaid, that’s not true. Democrats should be using that issue like a damn cudgel and beating Republicans with it in 2018.

Reader Comments: GOP's Secret Health Bill - not popular in Red states; Across the Country, Verdicts Protect Cops Who Kill; Naomi Klein; Mueller's Trump Investigation - Follow the Money; Readers respond to various Portside posts - Progressive Electoral Politics, People's Summit, Socialists and Electoral Politics; On the United Front; Gig Work; and more...

Reader Comments: Trump Failure Answer is Single Payer; Gorsuch-"Originalist" Disaster; Israel Segregationist and Apartheid; Left Growth Today - Religious Left, Socialists, Feminists; Censorship and Art - Emmett Till painting; PBS; Maine Fishermen; Job Growth and Worker Injury; Resources: Teachers’ Union Guide for Immigrant and Refugee Children; Announcements: Black Women in the Media; Chicago-April 4; 81st Annual Celebration of the Lincoln Brigade; and more...

What happened Nov. 8th, and why? Here two socialist organizations present their analysis of both why, and what next. Statements from the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). -- The fight against the far right assault must be fashioned around specific programs and demands that unite the broadest sectors of the working class, regardless of political stance.

Reader Comments: The Life and Death of Daniel Berrigan; Gary Tyler Free After More Than 40 Years; Does an Inside-Outside Strategy Have a Chance? - The People's Summit; Sanders' Impact on Millennials; Digital history project - When Socialists Won Elections; Get Cops Out of Schools; What's the Israeli Army Afraid Of? - Tair Kaminer Fights On; Italian Court Rules Food Theft 'Not a Crime' If Hungry; Rolling Stones to Trump: Stop Using Their Songs at Campaign Events

It would be very healthy for a democratic socialist to press the flesh, meet ordinary folks, let them see what a socialist looks like, what socialism stands for. Now we have a socialist doing that. Bernie Sanders is off and running, to huge and enthusiastic crowds. The campaign is sharpening the differences, functioning as a pole of attraction to bring together a mass popular alliance that is a key aspect of a strategy for taking power away from the corporate rulers...

Barriers to social change posed by our constitutional structure should not overwhelm us with pessimism. The history of the United States is punctuated by radical reform periods: Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the civil rights era. Militant social movements can make major gains when ruling elites prove incapable of solving major social crises. During these periods a moderate reform party temporarily controls all three branches of government,

American history is littered with examples of pointless wars fought for bad reasons, and with people who risked their careers and their freedom to oppose them. some wars aren't worth fighting. Some causes aren't worth sacrificing American lives for. Those who've fought to remind the government of those basic facts deserve our respect and our thanks.

Previously Portside published Michael Brie's, The Tragedy of Party Communism and responses from three socialist activists - what lessons there may be to draw on, and which to forget. Here are additional responses from Nina Udovicki, Gilberto de Leon, Dynamite Hallinan and Scott Tucker. Those responding see capitalism as a system that needs to be abolished and socialism as an alternative - A socialism that is different from the past, and democratic.