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US Politics and Society·
Left
The case for an independent Left party
From the bottom up
By Howie Hawkins
Issue #107: FeaturesShare
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If the 13.2 million votes received by self-styled “democratic socialist”
Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries
accomplished nothing else positive, it put the questions of socialism
and independent working-class politics up for public discussion. I have
been critical of Sanders’s socialism because his policy platform was New
Deal liberalism, not socialism. More importantly, by entering the
Democratic Party, Sanders broke with the socialist principle of
independent working-class political action.1 He became the “sheepdog”
herding progressives, who had the option of voting for the Green ticket
of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka in the general election, back into a
party run by the billionaire class he professes to oppose.2
Nevertheless, the broad liberal to radical American left is now
discussing what socialism is and debating whether the Left should be
inside or outside the Democratic Party—or both inside and outside. These
are good discussions to have.
As we enter the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Trumpism is
weakening under its own self-inflicted wounds, the ambivalent legitimacy
of Trump’s election by a popular minority due to the eccentricities of
the Electoral College, and a spreading realization that behind the
economic populism of his campaign rhetoric is the most reactionary
Republican economic and social policy agenda since the late
nineteenth-century era of Social Darwinism and Jim Crow. A massive
resistance against Trump and his administration has emerged, and it is
in the main counting on a Democratic restoration to save us. The
Democrats may replace the irrationalities and racist revanchism of
Trump, but they won’t replace the austerity capitalism and militaristic
imperialism to which the Democratic Party is committed. It is a key
institution upholding the broad policy consensus of America’s ruling
class and its political representatives in the two-party system of
corporate rule.
To avoid the political cul-de-sac of choosing between a greater and
lesser evil, the Left must commit itself to building an independent,
membership-based working-class party. Such a third-party insurgency in
the United States must be built from the bottom up in two complementary
ways. First, it must organize the working-class majority at the bottom
of the social structure into a political party that speaks and acts
independently for itself. Second, it must mobilize that base to
participate in social movement and electoral activities to win and
consolidate power and reforms first in cities, then states, and finally
in the nation.
Will Ackerman’s party-within-the party work?
The Sanders wing of the resistance is debating whether to take over and
reform the Democratic Party or lead reform Democrats out and into a new
progressive party. Many in this camp advocate a so-called inside-outside
strategy of supporting progressive Democrats or independents, depending
on the dynamics of the particular race. The Working Families Party has
pursued this approach since the 1990s, using the fusion tactic of
running Democrats on their own ballot line as well as the Democratic
line in the seven states where cross-endorsement is permitted.
Seth Ackerman’s “Blueprint for a New Party,” featured in the
postelection issue of the socialist journal Jacobin, advocates a
party-within-the-party model where a democratic, mass-membership
organization would function as a political party—only without its own
ballot line due to the obstacles thrown up by America’s close state
regulation of parties, which serves to protect the two-party system. In
Ackerman’s blueprint, the new working-class party would run its own
candidates on Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot lines,
depending on the race.3
The inside-outside and party-within-the-party approaches are nothing
new.4 The failures of fusion go back to the political suicide of the
People’s Party in 1896, when it cross-endorsed Democrat William Jennings
Bryant for president. A succession of parties over eighty years in
fusion-friendly New York—the American Labor Party, the Liberal Party,
and the Working Families Party—have been co-opted into being adjuncts to
the Democratic Party, not alternatives to it. The initially independent
Vermont Progressive Party has embraced fusion with Democrats in recent
elections and appears to be headed toward the same destination.5
The party-within-the-party approach has been tried in a variety of forms
since the late 1930s by labor’s PACs (political action committees),
waves of reform Democratic club networks, McGovern’s new politics,
Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America, Jesse Jackson’s
Rainbow Coalition, Howard Dean’s Democracy for America, Dennis
Kucinich’s Progressive Democrats of America, Obama’s Organizing for
America, and now Sanders’s Our Revolution. Over the course of these many
efforts over many decades, the reformers have been defeated and
co-opted, with the corporate New Democrats steadily displacing liberal
New Deal Democrats.
The political dynamic of all inside-outside approaches leads
increasingly inside in the Democratic Party. One must disavow outside
options in order to be allowed inside Democratic committees, campaigns,
primary ballots, and debates. Instead of changing the Democratic Party,
the Democratic Party changes inside-outside activists. Careerism sets
in. Many of the veterans of these inside-outside organizations who at
one time talked of “realignment” of the parties to create an American
Labor Party or Rainbow Party became Democratic operatives and
politicians whose careers depend on loyalty to corporate Democrats.6
Sanders followed this logic from the start of his presidential campaign
when he conceded—in order to be accepted onto primary ballots and into
debates—that he would support the Democratic nominee and not run as an
independent. He has continued further down this path since the election
with his support for progressive candidates for Democratic Party offices
in an effort to “transform the party” as well as for progressive
Democratic candidates for public offices.7
Ackerman’s blueprint astutely criticizes most of these efforts,
including Sanders’s Our Revolution, for being top-down nonprofits
without accountability to an organized membership. But his blueprint
still falls into the same trap of failing to establish the Left’s public
identity as an alternative advocating socialist system change that is
opposed to and independent of the pro-capitalist Democrats. By failing
to act on its own and speak for itself in US elections since the late
1930s, the Left has disappeared from public view. It lost its voice and
a platform from which to be heard.
Ackerman’s blueprint offers no answers for the inevitable practical
pitfalls that his party-within-the-party, like previous inside-outside
efforts, would face. When progressives lose Democratic primaries, the
inside-outside groups must support the corporate Democrat as the lesser
evil to the corporate Republican if they are to remain accepted inside
the Democratic Party. When progressive Democrats win, they must caucus
with corporate Democrats and muffle their criticisms of them in order to
remain acceptable. They end up providing a progressive patina to the
thoroughly capitalist Democrats they set out to change.
For an independent working-class party
So what would a socialist alternative to the capitalist Democrats look
like, both as a program for social transformation and as a movement of
the working class for its own freedom? Sanders’s regulatory and social
insurance reforms of capitalism do not end the polarization of society
into rich and poor flowing from the exploitation of working people.
Those reforms do not end the oppression, alienation, and disempowerment
of working people. Those reforms do not stop capitalism’s competitive
drive for mindless growth that is devouring the environment and roasting
the planet. Socialism as a program has traditionally meant economic
democracy—social ownership of the means of production for democratic
planning and allocation of economic surpluses—as a necessary condition
for full political democracy and freedom. But in the absence of a
sizable socialist Left that runs its own candidates against both
capitalist parties, socialism has been reduced in popular parlance to
simply government programs.8
An even more problematic confusion about socialism created by Sanders’s
presentation of it is his abandonment of independent working-class
politics. Socialists support most of the limited reforms Sanders
advocates. Any competitive election campaign necessarily focuses on what
policies a candidate can realistically advance in office, however much
socialist candidates should take any good opportunity to expound upon
the inherent problems of capitalism and present the full socialist
alternative. If Sanders had not explicitly rejected social ownership of
the means of production and instead had substituted the Scandinavian
welfare states system for democratic socialism, his focus on immediate
reforms in the heat of the campaign would have made his vision of
socialism clearer.
But more than a program, socialism is the movement of the working class
acting for itself, independently, for its own freedom. The socialist
program that has historically been developed by that movement calls for
full economic and political democracy as the institutional framework for
full freedom. But when self-styled socialists like Sanders urge the
working class to subsume its independent identity and political action
inside a party that represents and serves business interests before all
else, the working class surrenders its independent power, the socialist
movement disappears as a distinct alternative, and working-class
politics is reduced to begging and bargaining over the conditions of
domination and exploitation rather than building the power to end those
conditions.
The history of independent working-class parties
The independent Left was a force to be reckoned with in US politics from
the 1830s through the 1930s. A succession of third parties—the
Workingmen’s Parties, the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, and the
Republicans—carried the causes of cooperative labor, abolition, land
reform, and Radical Reconstruction from the 1830s through the 1870s.
With post–Civil War industrialization and the capture of the Republicans
by big business interests, the pre-war reform movements evolved into the
populist farmer-labor Greenback Labor and People’s Parties of the 1880s
and 1890s, which made their issues—monetary and banking reform,
cooperatives, publicly-owned utilities, anti-monopoly measures, and
voting rights—central election issues.
After the collapse of Populism into the Democratic Party, its radicals
were central to the formation of the Socialist Party of America, as well
as regionally based labor, farmer-labor, nonpartisan, and progressive
parties between 1900 and 1936, which added social insurance, public jobs
for the unemployed, and public enterprise in basic industries to the
independent farmer-labor politics agenda. Together, these late
nineteenth and early twentieth-century movements elected hundreds of
local officials, scores of state officials, and dozens of members of
Congress.
Those successes fueled widespread agitation for an independent labor
party based on the unions, which reached a peak as the 1936 election
approached. Unfortunately, the unions and the Communist Party’s Popular
Front policy led most of labor and the Left into the Democratic Party’s
New Deal Coalition in 1936. Labor and the broad progressive Left have
remained captive to the Democratic Party ever since. Unlike almost every
other industrial nation, the United States has yet to consolidate an
independent working-class party as a major party.
What has made America a difficult terrain compared to other
industrialized countries for developing a major working-class party is
rooted in how its democratic forms initially developed.9 From the
American Revolution and before, America’s landed and business elites
supported a popular electoral franchise. Though initially extended only
to propertied white males, political rights were articulated in
universalistic terms, which other groups were able to appeal to in the
course of American history to win the franchise for themselves.
In other industrially developing countries, workers and peasants had to
form their own independent workers parties to fight for the voting
franchise and social reforms against the new business elites as well as
the old landed elites. That reality became the first principle of
socialist politics: independent political action by the working class.
Except for some socialist traditions in the ideological Left,
independent politics has never taken hold as a principle in the popular
Left in America.10 It has been particularly weak as a political
principle since the unions and the Popular Front policy of the
Communists in 1936 took the popular left as well as the majority of the
ideological Left into the New Deal Coalition in the Democratic Party.
Most American progressives to this day regard the question of whether to
run in the Democratic Party or independently as a tactical question to
be decided according to immediate contingencies. If a third party based
in the working class is ever to be formed in the United States,
independent politics will have to be a principle, not a tactic to be
picked up or discarded with each election cycle.11
The populist parties of the 1880s and 1890s and the Socialist Party of
America and locally and regionally based labor, farmer-labor,
nonpartisan, and progressive parties between 1900 and 1936 came close to
establishing a major third party on the left with a working-class base.
They demonstrated that independent working-class politics can overcome
the structural barriers to a third party posed by
single-member-district, winner-take-all elections, as have labor-based
parties in similar electoral systems in other countries, including
Canada, the UK, France, New Zealand, Mexico, and Venezuela. The failure
to sustain independent labor parties in the United States can be found
in their mimicking of the traditional American party structure developed
by the Democratic and Republican parties instead of building a
grassroots, mass-membership party funded by party member dues.
American capitalism’s memberless parties
If the Left in America is to challenge the capitalist two-party system,
it will have to build a political party based on working-class
independence from the corporate rulers and their political
representatives in the Democratic and Republican Parties. To build that
kind of party, it will have to build a mass-membership party that is
structured quite differently from traditional American parties. Its
members will have to be organized into local branches and finance their
party with member dues, just as labor unions do, which is why unions
have by far the most resources of any institution on the popular left. A
dues-paying mass-membership party has been the missing ingredient in
third-party politics throughout American history.
The history of third-party insurgencies on the left in American history
teaches us that they have all floundered by structuring their parties on
the traditional American party model, with the notable exception of the
Socialist Party in the early twentieth century. In this structure, the
representatives to the committees and conventions of the party are
apportioned from jurisdictions according to the general population, the
party registration, or the vote in a recent general election.
Representatives in this structure are not elected by an active and
organized party membership in those jurisdictions.
These parties don’t have members with rights and responsibilities in the
party structure. This structure yields representation and control by
party insiders who have no ongoing accountability to rank-and-file party
supporters. The party insiders are the politicians and their paid staffs
who sell themselves first to wealthy funders and then use those funds to
sell themselves to voters.
American parties are not organized parties built around active members
and policy platforms; they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial
candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the Democratic and Republican
Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are capitalistically
run enterprises.
Parallel to the evolution of capitalism from competitive to monopolistic
stages, the major party campaign committees have become monopolistic
players in the candidate market in recent decades (on the Democratic
side, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and
their state-level counterparts). They have been playing an ever-greater
role in the selection and management of federal and state candidates
using the flood of private money into party coffers that has swelled in
concert with the growing concentration of wealth and income in the hands
of the 1 percent since the 1970s.12
Party conventions were an American invention of the 1820s. But in the
post-Civil War period they evolved from deliberative assemblies that met
irregularly only as elections approached into patronage boss-controlled
rituals. The membership was not organized into active local parties that
engaged in regular meetings for education, debate, decisions, and
actions. No active membership was organized to elect and hold
accountable delegates to the higher councils of the party.
The primary system was instituted in the 1910s and was promoted by the
progressive-era good government reformers to take the process of
candidate selection out of the hands of the party bosses and put it back
in the hands of the people. But because the people remained an atomized
mass of unorganized party followers, the primary process was actually
encouraged by the party bosses, who became the brokers of contributions
from wealthy donors for candidate-based political operations, which
progressively diminished the influence of the older patronage
machines.13 Primaries became plebiscites on politicians who were
effectively preselected by the wealthy funders of incumbent or aspiring
politicians.
The Socialist Party: A precedent of a membership-based party
The Socialist Party (SP) is the only significant left third party in
American history that was based on a dues-paying membership organized
into local chapters, which was the norm for labor parties in the rest of
the world. The mass-membership organization was the invention of the
labor Left. It was absolutely necessary if working people were to have
labor unions and political parties they controlled and with the
resources needed for effective concerted action. It was the only way
working people could compete politically with the old top-down elitist
parties, which had evolved earlier out of legislative caucuses that were
funded by rich sponsors and provided no formal structure for
rank-and-file participation and accountable representation.14 The
Democratic and Republican Parties retain these elite-serving top-down
characteristics. It was the labor-based socialist parties that led the
fight to extend the franchise to working people in countries around the
world.15
The founders of the SP, many of them veteran populists, were well aware
of the need for a mass-membership party structure that chose its
platform and candidates at a yearly democratic membership convention.
The socialists drew two organizational lessons from the demise of the
People’s Party. First, they secured their political independence by
banning fusion candidacies in the party constitution. Second, only
dues-paying members were allowed to vote on party decisions in order to
protect the Socialists’ internal democracy from being overwhelmed by the
contemporary Progressive movement that might flood their meetings with
different agendas and motivations like the shadow populist movement had
done to the People’s Party.
The Socialists faced an additional barrier to organizing in their own
way with the spread of primary elections, which took nominations out of
the hands of party conventions and put it in the hands of a
state-regulated party enrollment that was different from the active
party membership. Direct primaries made American parties creatures of
the state, rather than voluntary private associations. The state, not
the party, set the conditions for “membership” by establishing the
conditions for voting in party primaries.
These conditions vary from state to state depending whether or not the
state keeps party enrollment lists and on the type of primary the state
uses (open, closed, semi-open, top two, or blanket). But in all their
variations, primaries tend to hand power to professional politicians
sponsored by wealthy interests who can dominate an unorganized
electorate in a top-down plebiscite. The Socialists maintained their
membership convention system alongside the primary system. They
nominated by convention and then campaigned for their nominees in
primaries if necessary, nearly always winning those primaries.
Arthur Lipow explains that commentators at the time primaries were
introduced foresaw the implications for democracy between party
membership conventions and direct primaries.
In the United States, it was only in the internal structure of the
Socialist Party that the democratic and representative type of party
organization was developed. Writing in the middle of the Progressive
period’s mania for “direct democracy” [i.e., primaries and referenda],
the University of Chicago labor economist and historian Robert F. Hoxie
pointed out that “it is a little known fact that the Socialists are
introducing among us a new type of political organization and new
political method very much in contrast with those to which through long
usage we have become habituated.” He suggested that the democratically
organized convention system represented “a political organization and
political methods that are worth consideration on their merits as
possible contributions to a more wholesome, more democratic, and more
Progressive expression of the social will.”16
In a discussion of the spread of primary elections, the Socialist Call
in 1914 denounced the progressives’ push for direct primaries: “In their
eagerness to get the reputation for being democrats, those
pseudo-democrats who are running things just now want to break up
political parties. If they really wanted to have real democracy, they
would pattern parties after our party.”17
The two-party duopoly ruling New York State would soon confirm the
Socialists’ indictment of the memberless American parties. Ten
Socialists were elected to the New York State Assembly in the 1918
election. But in the climate of the Red Scare and Palmer Raids against
the antiwar Socialists following World War I, the New York State
Assembly expelled the five socialists elected in 1920. A special
election was called to replace them. Their districts reelected all of
them. Again, they were not seated by the assembly.
To justify its actions, a special Joint Legislative Committee
Investigating Seditious Activities soon issued a massive 4,428-page
report on Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose, and Tactics
with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required
to Curb It. The long section on the Socialist Party of America begins:
The expression “Socialist Party of America” is really a misnomer, for
the group operating under this name is not in reality a party. . . . The
Socialist Party is in reality a membership organization. . . . A
distinction must be drawn at this time between the members of the
Socialist Party of America and the enrolled Socialists. . . . A person
enrolling under the Socialist Party emblem on registration day in this
state does not thereby become a member of the Socialist Party of America.18
In other words, for the memberless capitalist parties, it was subversive
for the Socialist Party to be a membership organization. The last thing
the capitalist parties wanted was for the working class to become well
organized politically.
Although the progressive-era electoral reforms (direct primary,
nonpartisan election, initiative and referendum) were nominally aimed at
the corruption and boss control of urban patronage machines, they have
been very effective in preventing the emergence of an independent left
party in the contemporary period. Those growing out of the 1960s New
Left such as the Peace and Freedom, People’s, and Citizens Parties did
not organize as mass-membership parties. By contrast, the SP in 1973 and
the Green Party USA in 1984 did form as dues-paying membership
organizations.
However, both the Socialist and Green parties faced challenges to the
mass-membership structure from state party affiliates that acquired
ballot status in the 1990s. The state parties demanded more
representation in their national committees and conventions based on
their state-maintained party enrollment rather than their paid
membership as provided for in the parties’ rules. In the case of the
Green Party, the state-regulated party enrollment and primary system
effectively disorganized and defunded the national party, leading to
replacement by 2001 of affiliated locals of dues-paying members with a
federation of state parties in a new Green Party of the United States
that is organized around party committees peopled by party insiders who
are self-selected, appointed from above, or (very rarely) elected at
primaries, just like the Democratic and Republican parties.19 In the
case of the Socialist Party, the challenging Oregon party soon lost its
ballot line and later disaffiliated from the national party.
Uniting the working-class majority
Building a mass membership party is not only important for creating an
accountable democratic structure that expresses the will of the
membership. It is essential for unifying the working-class majority to
take power. Local branches should serve as forums for political
education where the disparate elements of the working class can find
their common interests. The working class is segmented and mutually
suspicious in contemporary society. A central mission of an independent
left party must be to overcome that segmentation and unify the
working-class majority politically.
American capitalism is divided up into three classes structured by its
central organizing institution, the corporation. These are the ruling
class (about 2 percent of the population), the middle classes (about
one-third of the population), and the working classes (about two-thirds
of the population). The corporate form and class structure extends from
private businesses into government and nonprofit agencies, with their
executive management at the top, professional staff and supervisory
management in the middle, and workers at the base. The revolving door of
executive management between the for-profit, nonprofit, and government
sectors keeps the ruling class in charge in all three sectors.
The ruling class could not rule without the widespread political
allegiance of most of the middle class. The middle class is a mix of a
declining “old middle class” of self-employed and small business people
and a growing “new middle class,” the professional, technical, and
managerial employees embedded inside corporate structures. About ten
million people are self-employed in their own small businesses on which
they depend for most of their income. These small business owners are
caught in the middle between big business and the working class. Unlike
the Populist era when many small farmers and businesses tended to seek
allies in the emerging working class against the banking and railroad
establishment, today they tend to identify culturally and politically
with the big businesses they hope to become.
The professional, technical, and managerial middle class in corporate
society is comprised of supervisors, accountants, lawyers, engineers,
technicians, doctors, nurses, college professors, and teachers, who by
virtue of their specialized knowledge and skills have considerable
autonomy and flexibility at work and supervisory authority over workers
but who themselves are subject to supervision and discipline by top
management in the corporate hierarchy. Some of these occupations are
being increasingly pushed into the working class, particularly teachers
with the advent of high-stakes testing; college professors with the
proliferation of non-tenure, part-time, adjunct positions; and nurses
and even doctors, who are increasingly subject to insurance company and
hospital management decisions about what care will be paid for and for
speedup of the patient-doctor encounter to increase “productivity.”
About twenty million work as professionals and, including their
families, comprise about 20 percent of the population.20 Politically,
they tend to be socially liberal, which is consistent with their
professional standards and knowledge based in science and rationalism.
But on the economic class issues, their allegiances are mixed. Some
groups, notably teachers and nurses, tend to identify more with the
working class as they fight to protect their independent professional
expertise and judgment from encroaching corporate management.
Many others in the professional-managerial middle class tend to identify
politically with the ruling class and support more conservative economic
policies that are stingy on social spending for the services and
benefits that workers use and favorable to policies that shift tax
burdens to workers and benefits to the middle and upper classes. About
half of all wage and salary income accrues to the middle-class elements
of the corporate hierarchy, which makes their incomes on average more
than double the income of workers and growing relative to workers.21
With workers widely alienated from the political process and voting at
low levels, the middle class has been the mass voting base for the
conservative economic policies of the two major parties.22
The working class is comprised of those who work as directed by
supervisory management with little to no autonomy, flexibility, or
authority on the job. Using this definition, Michael Zweig in The
Working Class Majority put the American working class at 96.7 million
people, or 63 percent of 152.7 million people in the workforce in 2010.
That left 55.9 million people drawing wages and salaries in the middle
and upper classes. US Department of Labor statistics put
“non-supervisory” workers at 82 percent of the workforce, although that
included professionals with considerable job autonomy who are not in
supervisory management.23 For our purposes here, the exact numbers are
not as important as noting that workers are the majority and the middle
classes provide the mass voting base for the two corporate parties.
The working class may be the majority, but it is divided into four
segments that tend to see each other as competitors, not allies: (1)
mostly non-union, competitive sector, small business workers; (2)
sometimes unionized, oligopolistic sector, corporate workers; (3) often
unionized, public sector workers; and (4) workers under state
supervision in the welfare and correctional systems.24
Crossing all these segments of the working class are racial and ethnic
divisions that have divided the American working class throughout its
history. About 35 percent of the working class is Black, Asian, or
Hispanic compared to 22 percent of the middle class.25 While people of
color make up 30 percent of the US population, they account for 60
percent of those imprisoned.26 School segregation by income as well as
race has been growing since the 1980s and now comparable to what
obtained when Brown v. Board of Education struck down school segregation
laws.27 Residential segregation is greater today than it was in 1940 and
unchanged since 1950.28 Racial exclusion and discrimination within
progressive movements has been the Achilles’ heel that divided and
undermined the potential strength of every working-class and progressive
reform movement so far in American history.29
All these segments of the working class share the experience of being
directed by others at work or in the welfare and correctional systems.
They all do not enjoy the full fruits of their labor, the surplus of
which above their wage is appropriated by business owners as profits and
higher salaries for top management and the professional-managerial
middle class. They share a common interest in pursuing public policies
that ensure economic human rights to decent employment, living wages,
health care, quality education, affordable housing and transit, and a
clean and sustainable environment. They share a common interest in more
progressive taxes and a more equitable allocation of public spending on
schools and services. They share a common interest in democratizing
economic decision-making and the disposition of economic surpluses so
that all can enjoy the full fruits of their labor and all can
participate in the planning, management, technology choice, and other
economic decisions that affect their lives.
With the working class divided into separate occupational and racial
silos, an independent left party must organize across these divisions to
bring different segments of the working class into accessible, local
public forums where people can talk about their problems and develop
their ideas for resolving them. In the course of that self-education
process, working people can find their common interests and break down
the myths, suspicions, and resentments that divide them.
In the absence of such a party, the divided working class sees other
segments as competitors for scarce job, education, and housing
opportunities. The racial dimension of this competition is long standing
and well known. But any observer of the political narratives of
right-wing radio, the corporate mass media, and major party politicians
can see how the competitive, corporate, public, and administered sectors
of the working class are encouraged to see each other as competitors
rather than allies on such issues as schools, taxes, pensions, and
welfare. An independent left party will have to find ways to break
through these resentments if it is to organize a voting base that can
elect its candidates to office.
Bottom-up organizing, not top-down mobilizing
A mass party that organizes working people into local parties that
provide a forum for political discussion and decisions about policy
positions and actions is crucial to building the sense of empowerment
and self-confidence that working people need to take on the entrenched
political powers. The ruling-class/middle-class political alliance
prevails in elections because working people vote in such low numbers.
Many attribute this to apathy.
But in my experience talking to working-class people in political
campaigns for more than four decades and in running for office many
times in the last two decades, that apathy is rooted in alienation from
the political elites and demoralization at the slim prospects of making
changes against their perceived overwhelming power. Many working people
feel the politicians of both parties have no idea what their lives are
like and what their issues really are. They feel invisible to the
politicians. Many just stop paying attention to politics because it is
so painful to feel they can’t make any difference. They believe the
politicians are going to do what they want to do and voting won’t make
any difference.
The campaign strategies of the major parties reinforce low turnout by
working-class communities. During elections, campaigns target
middle-class voters and precincts with histories of high voter turnout
and neglect working-class voters and precincts with low voter turnout as
a waste of limited campaign resources. Between elections, they make no
effort to engage the low turnout voters.
An independent party of the Left can build its base by filling this
political vacuum and engaging working-class people who are now
disaffected from and neglected by the political process. It needs to
engage them between as well as during elections. Crucially important in
organizing from the bottom up, an independent left party must prioritize
organizing Black people, Latinx, and other people of color. If not
centrally involved, their particular concerns tend to be neglected. If
not involved from the beginning of organizing, the barriers to later
inclusion are difficult to overcome given the existing patterns of
residential and social segregation and the long historical legacy of
racism that yields suspicion and skepticism when a majority white
organization attempts belatedly to include people of color. With more
than a third of the American working class comprised of people of color,
a working-class party that is not well-rooted in working-class
communities of color and championing their demands has failed to
organize the whole class and will not realize its potential electoral
majority.
The labor movement also tends to reproduce the corporate class
structure. Some unions do practice a social movement unionism that
engages their members in education and decision-making and seeks to
build a class-wide movement with labor and community allies. But most
unions practice a transactional business unionism where the officers and
top staff make the decisions and cut the deals and the members’ role is
minimized.30 With automatic dues deductions administered by the payroll
systems of employers, most unions’ top leaders control a budget and make
decisions with little participation from the membership. The
professional-managerial staff tends to be college graduates, sometimes
of labor studies departments, who mobilize the working-class membership
for elections and sometimes demonstrations when the union wants to lobby
for a bill or put pressure on an employer during contract negotiations.
Few unions organize their members for political education and lateral
communications. The union bureaucracy tends to worry that an organized
membership would vote them out of office. Incumbent politicians,
especially Democrats, receive union endorsements and donations for
election campaigns, not because they are great champions of labor’s
cause, but because union leaders want access to the politicians in
power.31 So union decisions, like nonprofit advocacy decisions, tend to
be made from the top down. As Arun Gupta reported on the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU) Fight for 15 campaign,
There’s little evidence of worker-to-worker organizing. . . . Victor
(not his real name) in Seattle says the campaign is faltering because
workers are “babied at the meetings.” He says the process involves
workers getting “amped-up” and “rubber-stamping some decisions that are
already made,” which wears thin after the first meeting.32
Bottom-up organizing, as opposed to top-down mobilizing, means assisting
working people to come together to make their own decisions. An
exemplary case of this kind of organizing was how the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964. Led by well-educated students and
teachers like the Harvard-educated mathematician Bob Moses, SNCC’s main
organizer of Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the SNCC organizers did not
put themselves into leadership positions in the MFDP. They organized
Freedom Schools to provide both basic and political education to the
sharecroppers, small farmers, and farm and factory laborers they were
organizing. They let these people choose their own leaders.
When the integrated MFDP delegation challenged the segregated
Mississippi Dixiecrat delegation for seating at the National Democratic
Convention, it was a sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer who was elected as a
cochair to speak for the delegation. President Johnson sent three
prominent liberals—Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota attorney
general Walter Mondale, and United Auto Workers president Walter
Reuther—to offer the MFDP a compromise of two non-voting at-large seats
on the convention floor. The middle-class leaders of the mainstream
civil rights and liberal organizations, including Martin Luther King
Jr., at first urged the MFDP to take the compromise as progress.
But Fannie Lou Hamer said, “We didn’t come all this way for no two
seats,” and persuaded the MFDP delegation to vote to reject the
compromise as tokenism.33 That is what happens when working people are
organized to speak for themselves and elect their leaders. Those leaders
have little to gain from selling out for token symbolic measures. They
will be ostracized by their organized peers if they do so. Middle-class
leaders, on the other hand, do have something to lose. Their careers are
at risk if they buck the system that pays them. They tend to be more
willing to compromise workers’ interests.
What the SNCC organizers did with the MFDP is what the socialist left
has long advised: build an independent party of working people and they
will take care of the policy program in time. When the Independent Labor
Party on New York, created by 175 labor unions in New York City,
nominated the non-socialist reformer Henry George as its mayoral
candidate in 1886, Frederick Engels advised the Socialist Labor Party in
America to support the campaign and participate in the Independent Labor
Party despite his misgivings about George’s platform:
In a country that has newly entered the movement, the first really
crucial step is the formation by the workers of an independent political
party, no matter how, so long as it is distinguishable as a labor party.
. . . That the first program of this party is still muddle-headed and
extremely inadequate, that it should have picked Henry George as its
figurehead, are unavoidable if merely transitory evils. The masses must
have time and opportunity to evolve, and they will not get that
opportunity until they have their own movement—no matter in what form so
long as it is only their own movement—in which they are impelled onwards
by their own mistakes and learn by bitter experience.34
For both the nineteenth-century socialists and the MFDP, the party and
the movement went together. For the socialists, participating in the
labor movement, organizing unions, fighting for better wages and working
conditions on the job were a central part of the party’s work.
Similarly, SNCC did not organize the MFDP in a vacuum. It was built at
the same time in 1964 that forty-one Freedom Schools taught an academic
curriculum focused on reading, writing, math, and basic science and a
citizenship curriculum focused on Black history, power structure
analysis, and movement history.35 In 1965, they organized the
Mississippi Freedom Labor Union among day laborers and domestic workers.36
The notion that the party should focus on electoral work and leave
movement work to others prevents the party from engaging working people
between as well as during elections. It is essential that the party not
leave educational and social movement projects to the corporate
structures of the foundation-funded nonprofit advocacy and business
unionism. The nonprofit advocacy groups and business unions rarely offer
a platform to independent left activists for fear of losing access to
Democratic funders and politicians. They just want the independent left
to show up at events in order to increase attendance without giving them
any voice in them. Their strategies are oriented to lobbying the
Democrats, not exerting independent power that, while it may move
Democrats on issues, has the strategic goal of replacing corporate
Democrats with third-party insurgents.
Building electoral power from the bottom up
If an independent left party can only be organized from the bottom up,
it can also only build power in elections from the bottom up, focusing
on local elections to establish a base for later effective forays into
state and national level elections.
Most local elections are on a small enough scale that a grassroots
door-to-door campaign can reach the voters without a large budget for
direct mail and paid advertising. Broadcast advertising is often an
irrelevant waste of money because most viewers and listeners will not
reside in the district covered. Many incumbents run unopposed in local
elections because most districts are one-party districts in our
winner-take-all system and the major party that is the minority in a
district often does not run a candidate. That means a third-party
candidate will often be the second candidate in a local election,
eliminating the incentives for lesser evil voting in a three-candidate
race in a winner-take-all election.
In the absence of a commitment to independent working-class politics as
a principle on the American left, it is not surprising to see the drift
away from independent politics by the Vermont Progressive Party and the
Richmond Progressive Alliance. Their electoral coalitions with Democrats
is consistent with the majority of post-1960s New Left progressive
electoral activity, which has mostly been directed through the
Democratic Party.37 These efforts have won some local reforms but have
failed to move the national Democratic Party to the left. To the
contrary, since the 1960s, the national Democratic Party has replaced
the leadership of liberal New Deal Democrats with the leadership of
corporate New Democrats. The national Democratic Party can tolerate a
few liberal local bases like San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York,
and even use them as examples to lure progressives back into what
remains a conservative pro-corporate political party at the top.
With over 39,000 municipal governments, nearly 13,000 independent school
districts, and over 500,000 elected positions in those governments,
there is no shortage of opportunities for an independent left party to
run candidates. Indeed, a significant proportion of local officeholders
are reelected with no opposition. The typical situation is that the
local elite, usually embedded in the real estate and development
industry, runs these municipal governments in a self-serving, if not
outright corrupt, fashion. They hold on to power because local
governments within the federalism of the American political system have
real powers.
Few local governments around the world have the autonomy and powers of
America’s municipal governments to tax, borrow, spend, invest, contract,
purchase, hire, zone, regulate, lobby, police, amend their charters,
start businesses as public enterprises, and even expropriate private
property for public purposes through the power of eminent domain. These
powers provide plenty of scope for an independent left party to advance
its program.
As an independent left party takes power in localities and demonstrates
its competence to the public, the door opens for winnable races at the
state and federal level. District races for state legislatures and the
US House of Representatives are local races, the next step up from
municipal district and at-large races. While money for advertising and
direct mail plays a far bigger role than in most municipal elections, a
well-organized third party can compensate with a strong field operation
for direct voter contact. A longtime advocate for a bottom-up strategy,
Gar Alperovitz, has called this the “checkerboard strategy.”38
The conditions are ripe
I have focused here on the subjective side—what third-party organizers
can do to build up an independent left party into a major party. But it
is also worth noting that the objective conditions for a working-class
major party have grown stronger over the past century. First, the
working-class majority is built into the class structure of corporate
society. It has grown from about a third of the population in 1900 to
about two-thirds of the population today as the corporate form of
property ownership and social organization has come to pervade society.
Second, sizable sections of the middle class hold progressive values and
are open to allying politically with a working-class party as opposed to
the more liberal Democrats in the ruling two-party duopoly. These
sections include many in the “helping professions” (teachers, social
workers, nurses) and many in the scientific and legal professions
(scientists, engineers, technicians, doctors, lawyers). These sectors
have been predominant base of the new Green parties around the world.
Many in these professions reject the growing constraints on their
professional autonomy imposed by corporate hierarchies.
This subjection to corporate hierarchies is becoming more like that
experienced by the working class. It has led some to propose that these
well-educated middle-class people constitute a “new working class.” That
thesis probably overstates the similarities in working conditions with
the working class proper. However, their high levels of education
predispose them to an optimistic problem-solving rationalism that is
characteristic of political progressives as opposed to the pessimistic
better-left-alone traditionalism of political conservatives. By winning
over a sizable segment of middle-class voters, a working-class party can
reduce the biggest voting bloc of support for the corporate elite’s two
major parties.
Third, the working class is better educated than ever. It is more
inclined to consider reason and evidence than to take things on faith
from religious or political leaders. It is therefore more capable than
ever of participating in democratic self-rule. This growing education
and rationalism also undergirds the steady growth for decades of more
egalitarian attitudes in support of racial, women’s, and LGBT equality.
The recent rapid transformation of public opinion from small minority to
growing majority in support of gay marriage in less than a decade
indicates this trend may be accelerating. These attitudes are strongest
in younger cohorts. This bodes well for the prospects of unifying the
working class politically across race, gender, and occupational lines.
Fourth, working-class living standards have declined over the last forty
years. Hourly wages for workers are slightly below what they were at
their peak in 1973. In attempting to maintain living standards, the
working class is buried in record levels of debt. The younger cohorts of
the working class face downward mobility due to difficulty finding
decent-paying jobs and a record level of student loan debt. Over these
same decades, the Democratic Party that by self-description looks out
for the working people has failed when in power to reverse the declining
fortunes of the working class. An independent working-class party can
step into the political void left by these circumstances.
Fifth, the urgency of environmental crisis, particularly the climate
crisis, requires a break with politics as usual. Society must make a
decisive turn toward rapidly reducing fossil fuels and ramping up clean
renewables if it is to avoid radical climate change that will
precipitate mass extinctions, food shortages, mass migrations of
environmental refugees, and wars for scarce resources. While opinion
polls show that voters across the class structure still prioritize
environmental and climate action below bread-and-butter economic issues
and some social and foreign policy issues, they also show that strong
majorities want action on climate and the environment.
The failure of the corporate parties to address these economic and
environmental problems has led to a growing alienation from both major
parties. The Pew Research Center’s tracking of party identification
shows poll found that Americans calling themselves political
independents has been trending upward and is higher than at any time in
the last seventy-five years. Independents at 40 percent outnumbered
Democrats at 30 percent and Republicans at 24 percent in 2015.39 Pew
found that 48 percent of millennials ages eighteen to thirty-three
considered themselves political independents in 2015. A 2013 Gallup poll
found that a record 60 percent of Americans believe the Republicans and
Democrats “do such a poor job of representing the American people that a
third major party is needed.” Only 26 percent said that, “the Republican
and Democratic parties do an adequate job representing the American
people.”40
The working-class majority is far more progressive, especially on
economic class issues, than the media pundits, the middle-class
leadership of advocacy groups and the business unions, and the
Democratic leadership would have one believe. These quarters repeatedly
claim that popular reforms are politically impossible. However, a recent
survey of the policy preferences of the wealthiest 1 percent compared to
the general population revealed a huge gap between what the elite wants
and what the people want. Among the results41:
Top 1%
Bottom 99%
Increase Social Security benefits
34%
73%
Minimum wage above poverty line
40%
78%
Government should ensure full employment
19%
68%
Publicly financed national health insurance
32%
61%
Federal spending sufficient for good schools for all
35%
87%
Federal spending to ensure all can go to college
28%
78%
This disjunction between popular preferences and elite policy-making
helps explain what happened in the 2016 presidential election, when a
largely progressive-minded working class stayed home and a smaller
minority voted third party in much larger numbers than voted for Trump.
The overwhelmingly Democratic Black and Latinx vote was down for Clinton
compared to Obama. Contrary to popular myth, white working-class
Democratic-leaning voters didn’t flip to Trump in large numbers. Of
those who abandoned Clinton, twice as many voted third party or stayed
home than voted for Trump. It was white middle-class Democrats who moved
in large numbers to Trump.42
A fundamental problem with American politics is that popular preferences
are not converted into public policy. A 2014 study examined 1,779
national policies enacted between 1981 and 2002 in the United States. It
compared the policies enacted to the expressed preferences of average
Americans (fiftieth percentile of income), affluent Americans (ninetieth
percentile), and large special interests groups. The study concluded
that the United States is ruled by its economic elites. “When a majority
of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized
interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status
quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large
majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get
it,” the study concluded.43
The policy outcomes in the study covered both Republican and Democratic
administrations. Both corporate parties respond more to the economic
elites that invest in them than in the people who vote for them. This
leaves a political vacuum that an independent working-class party could
fill—from the bottom up. And we need to build a socialist left that is
clear-eyed about the necessity of that task.
1.Howie Hawkins, “Bernie Sanders Is No Eugene Debs,” Socialist Worker,
May 26, 2015, https://socialistworker.org/2015/05/26/b....
2.Bruce A. Dixon, “Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging
for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016,” Black Agenda Report, May 6,
2016, https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie....
3.Seth Ackerman, “Blueprint for a New Party,” Jacobin, November 8, 2016,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/berni....
4.Howie Hawkins, “Safe States, Inside-Outside, and Other Liberal
Illusions,” CounterPunch, May 10, 2016,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/10/s... Howie Hawkins, “An
‘Inside/Outside’ Strategy or Independent Politics,” New Politics (Summer
1989), No. 7, Vol II.
5.Ashley Smith, “Vermont’s Cautionary Tale,” Jacobin, August 24, 2016,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/vermont-progressives-vpp-sanders-democrats-independent/.
6.Kim Moody, “From Realignment to Reinforcement,” Jacobin, January 26,
2017, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/democ....
7.Our Revolution’s website has a “Transform the Party” section, which
explains, “We are transforming the Democratic Party from the ground up.
Precinct by precinct, and county by county, all across the country (and
the world!), progressives have stepped up to run for positions of
leadership in their Democratic Party—and those have added up to hyooooge
wins in creating a people-powered party,” http://transformtheparty.com/.
8.Chris Maisano, “Isn’t America Already Kind of Socialist?” Jacobin,
January 1, 2016,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/democratic-socialism-government-bernie-sanders-primary-president/.
9.The outline that follows here of the historical obstacles to
consolidating a working-class party in US politics draws on the detailed
examinations of this issue in John McDermott, The Crisis of the Working
Class and Some Arguments for a New Labor Movement (Boston: South End
Press, 1980) and Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics
and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986).
10.Stanley Aronowitz introduced this useful distinction between the
“ideological left” of socialists, communists, and anarchists and the
“popular left” of labor, farmer, consumer, civil rights, peace, and
environmental movements in “Remaking the American Left, Part One:
Currents in American Radicalism,” Socialist Review, 63, January–February
1983.
11.See Eric Thomas Chester, Socialists and the Ballot Box: A Historical
Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1985).
12.Moody, “From Realignment to Reinforcement.”
13.Alan Ware, The American Direct Primary: Party Institutionalization
and Transformation in the North (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002).
14.Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and
Activities in the Modern State (New York: Wiley, 1966).
15.Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens,
Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992); Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy, The History of the Left in
Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
16.Arthur Lipow, Political Parties and Democracy (London: Pluto Press,
1996), 22.
17.Lipow, Political Parties and Democracy, 17.
18.Report of the Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious
Activities, Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose, and Tactics
with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required
to Curb It (Albany: New York State Senate, April 24, 1920), 510. This
4,428-page document covers socialist, communist, anarchist, and
syndicalist movements around the world in the wake of the Russian
Revolution. The section on the Socialist Party of America beginning on
page 510 provides much detail on the party’s structure, rules, and
policies. The document is online at
https://books.google.com/books?id=CujYAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=nys+assembly+judiciary+committee”https://books.google.com/books?id=CujYAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=nys+assembly+judiciary+committee.
19.For my take as a participant in the Green Party debates over
structure, see Howie Hawkins, ed., Independent Politics: The Green Party
Strategy Debate (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 24–25.
20.Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept
Secret, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 2012), 30.
21.John McDermott, Corporate Society: Class, Property, and Contemporary
Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 135; Stephen J. Rose,
“Trump and the Revolt of the White Middle Class,” Washington Monthly,
January 18, 2017, http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/01/18/....
22.Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
23.Zweig, Working-Class Majority, 31.
24.This discussion of four segments of the American working class draws
on McDermott’s Crisis of the Working Class and Corporate Society.
25.Zweig, The Working Class Majority, 33.
26.Prison Policy Project, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017,”
March 14, 2017, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie....
27.Gary Orfield et al., Brown at 60: Great Progress, a Long Retreat and
an Uncertain Future UCLA Civil Rights Project, May 15, 2014,
http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/brown-at-60-great-progress-a-long-retreat-and-an-uncertain-future/.
28.Richard Rothstein, Racial Segregation Continues, and Even
Intensifies, Economic Policy Institute, February 3, 2012,
http://www.epi.org/publication/racial-segregation-continues-intensifies/.
29.Robert L. Allen, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform
Movements in the United States (Washington DC: Howard University Press,
1983).
30.Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1988), 58–65.
31.Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform
from Above, the Promise of Revival from Below (London: Verso, 2007).
32.Arun Gupta, “Fight for 15 Confidential,” In These Times, November 11,
2013,
http://inthesetimes.com/article/15826/fight_for_15_confidential”http://inthesetimes.com/article/15826/fight_for_15_confidential.
33.Lani Guinier, “No Two Seats: The Elusive Quest for Political
Equality,” Virginia Law Review 77 (November 8, 1991): 1413.
34.Frederick Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, November 29, 1886, in
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 47 (New York:
International Publishers, 1995), 532.
35.Freedom School Curriculum Website,
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/ED_FSC.html”http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/ED_FSC.html.
36.Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the
1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 172.
37.Eric Leif Davin, Radicals in Power: The New Left Experience in Office
(New York: Lexington Books, 2012).
38.Gar Alperovitz, “A Checkerboard Strategy for Regaining the
Progressive Initiative,” Truthout, December 20, 2012,
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13592-....
39.Pew Research Center, “A Deep Dive into Party Affiliation,” April 7,
2015,
http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/.
40.Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., Perceived Need for Third Party Reaches
New High,” Gallup Politics, October 11, 2013,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/165392/perceived-need-third-party-reaches-new-high.aspx.
41.Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright, “Democracy
and the Policy Preferences of Wealth Americans,” Perspectives in
Politics 11 (March 1, 2013).
42.Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr, “The Myth of the Rust Belt
Revolt: Donald Trump Didn’t Flip Working-Class White Voters; Hillary
Clinton Lost Them,” Slate, December 1, 2016,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_p... Kim Moody, “Who Put Trump in
the White House?” Against the Current, January–February 2017,
https://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/... Mike Davis, “The Great God
Trump and the White Working Class,” Jacobin, February 2017,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-g... Charlie Post, “The Roots of
Trumpism,” Left Voice, December 16, 2016,
http://www.leftvoice.org/The-Roots-of-Tr... Jesse A. Myerson, “Trumpism:
It’s Coming from the Suburbs - Racism, Fascism, and Working-Class
Americans,” Nation, May 8, 2017,
https://www.thenation.com/article/trumpism-its-coming-from-the-suburbs/.
43.Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American
Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives
in Politics, Fall 2014, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/....
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Issue #64
March 2009
Hothouse Earth
Capitalism, climate change, and the fate of humanity
Issue contents
Top story
Hothouse Earth
Chris Williams .
.
Editorials
Letter from the editors
.
.
Obama’s mixed message
.
.
Features
The road to Gaza's killing fields
Toufic Haddad .
.
The right-wing counteroffensive
Ernesto Herrera .
.
The U.S. economic crisis
Fred Moseley .
.
Critical Thinking
Return of the one-state solution
Phil Gasper .
.
.....
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The International Socialist Review is published quarterly by the Center
for Economic Research and Social Change
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