Class Struggle

October 24, 2022

Capital’s Card Tricks: student debt relief amid rising interest rates & inflation

The Democrats have spent the majority of the past two years kissing the feet of the party’s rightmost members, fossil fuel lackey Joe Manchin and Arizona-based narcissist Kyrsten Sinema, and trying to hide Joe Biden from TV cameras. After a total lack of response to the catastrophic overturning of Roe v. Wade, and with their poll numbers in the mud, it seemed like they were a party adrift, no longer driven even by the paper-thin motivation to win elections. In the run up to the midterms, however, the Democrats have shown that they still have a few tricks up their sleeve in the form of (some) student debt relief—that is, if the right-wing doesn’t block it through its allies in the judiciary.

October 1, 2022

by Anahita Tehrani

Uprising in Iran and International Solidarity

More than 76 people have died and hundreds have been arrested during two weeks of protests in Iran. Protests broke out on September 17, the day the funeral was held for Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman killed while in the custody of the morality police (the baseeji). She was arrested on September 13 for not properly covering her hair as mandated by Iranian law.

Protests have spread to over 80 cities in Iran and across all 31 provinces, with students striking to join the protests and oil workers threatening to strike if the government doesn’t end its repression of the protests.

September 21, 2022

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Marx Against Moloch

The fact that the real nature of capital has been completely and utterly mystified is evidenced by the currency of the phrase “human capital.” In the same way that legal titles to income or land become “capital” in the imagination of the landlord or the financial speculator, the liberal press and intellectual class imagine that the development of individual human beings can be classified as such, so that we are perpetually encouraged to see ourselves as little entrepreneurs investing in ourselves as we pay exorbitant costs for a university education and take out loans which only enrich the bankers. Today, however, this logic is being taken to a new extreme. A piece in the New Yorker about a delightful bit of innovation in financial technologies provides a glimpse into the idyllic future capitalism has in store for us: Soon, you will be able to sell yourself!

September 11, 2022

by Bill V. Mullen

What Should Revolutionaries Say About Constitutions?

The recent defeat of a proposed new state constitution by voters in Chile was a setback for Left forces. The Constitution, which would have enshrined new rights for Chile’s multiple indigenous populations, guaranteed national health care, granted rights to the environment, and affirmed gender and sexual self-identification; was the product of Chile’s left-center government which won state elections last year.

July 19, 2022

by Justin Akers Chacón

The Making of a System in Crisis: the ungovernability of 21st century capitalism

As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in their foundational exposition of historical materialism and the dialectics of social transformation, a mode of production in crisis does not collapse under the weight of its own malfunction; it has to dismantled and replaced through the self-conscious action of a rising revolutionary class.
The multiplying crises of capitalism have led to internal dysfunction and debilitations that render its operations increasingly out of sync with the needs and basic sustenance of the vast majority of humanity and the rest of the natural world. It is rapidly reaching the limits of its own capacity for self-reproduction, and cannot seem to persist without inducing even greater calamity and instability. As the capitalist system trudges on in this linear trajectory, a cumulative transformation is well underway: where more will have to be sacrificed so that capitalism may live on.

June 30, 2022

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Victory for Colombia’s Left, but the Fight is Just Beginning

In a historic outcome, Gustavo Petro, a self-declared socialist and former guerrilla, has been elected president of Colombia. After decades of bloody repression against the left, Petro is considered to be Colombia’s “first leftist president.” While the mainstream press is rushing to stoke fears of Petro as a threat to democracy in Colombia, some on the Left are eager to hail the victory as a model for an electoral path to power for “left populism” and a vindication of the politics of “pink tide” social democracy.

May 30, 2022

by Atlee McFellin

The Revolutionary Passion of Those Who Suffer Most

Most people know who Karl Marx was, at least to one extent or another. Remarkably and, yet also unsurprisingly, it’s Jenny Westphalen (aka Jenny Marx) whose understanding of the world we desperately need right now. The sensuous materialism she briefly expressed in her letters to husband Karl illuminates a path of hopeful imminent communal revolution.

Roughly a year after they married and less than a month after the birth of their first child, Karl unfortunately left Jenny for Paris to cosplay as revolutionary less than three years after completing his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Awaiting him was a meagerly paying job as an agitational socialist journalist. In June of 1844, less than a month after he left, she wrote to him that her “heart is yearning” and for even just “a few words to tell me that you are well and are longing for me a little.”

May 23, 2022

by Diana Sierra Becerra

Toxic Tears: White Women’s Power in Nonprofits

My first political lesson was at age five. I had recently migrated to the United States, when I witnessed a white woman refuse my mother a glass of water as she cleaned her home. I will never forget how my mother’s hands smelled of bleach or the many times she called me sobbing while locked inside her employer’s bathroom. My experiences as a former undocumented immigrant and survivor of domestic violence led me to work in the immigrant rights and labor movement.

February 2, 2022

by Richard Velázquez Perales

Recovering Radical Tejas: Mexican revolutionaries against settler-colonial capitalism

Racist populations have lived in Texas (or Tejas as it was originally named when part of Mexico) since the onset of Spanish colonization, only to escalate in intensity during Anglo colonization. This reality has indisputably remained the unfortunate reality for non-white Texans. The state continues to be controlled and dominated by a very reactionary minority of people whose actions reverberate across the country. I would argue that Texas is now the vanguard of the settler colonial project. This reality is not new but a continuity from the period studied in this project. The goal is to demonstrate that a radical alternative has been imagined, debated, and that many people have been moved to action for this better world for over a hundred years regardless of the state’s hostility.

January 7, 2022

by Zack Frailey Escobar

What kind of party do we need?

This is a crucial moment for the socialist movement. There has been substantial growth of socialist organization in the last four years and the highest point of public support for socialism since the 1970s. But it would be a mistake to believe that socialism’s popularity will simply continue along this trajectory indefinitely, or that this necessarily translates to a fundamental shift towards class struggle. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), largest U.S. socialist group in the US, has recently plateaued. The second largest group, the International Socialist Organization, collapsed 2 years ago. To make matters worse, the trend within DSA which had been moving toward a break with the Democrats and the formation of an independent party has undergone a reversal. If this trend becomes dominant within the socialist movement, the trajectory towards socialist party building will become stunted, and a new generation of potential revolutionaries will be funneled back into the Democratic Party like so many before them.