International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 20th Century US South

Charlie Post — 2020-07-04T06:32:59Z

Mainstream commentators in the US, both liberal and conservative, tend to portray the South as a region whose culture makes it a permanent bastion of reactionary, racist, and anti-labor politics. Michael Goldfield's new book, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford University Press, 2020), challenges these truisms, revealing the possibilities for a racially egalitarian industrial unionism in the South during and after the Great Depression and how the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) squandered those opportunities. Spectre's Charlie Post interviews Mike Goldfield about his provocative contribution to discussions of race and class in the US.

- IV546 - July 2020 / United States (USA), Racism and Islamophobia

Marxism and the race problem

Charlie Post — 2019-03-03T07:48:34Z

Marxism has had a difficult relationship with non-class oppressions like gender and race. For most, historical materialism is “race” and “gender-blind,” providing an explanation of only class exploitation. Those working in our tradition have either reduced race or gender to capitalist manipulation or adopted an intersectional approach in which class, race and gender are separate but intersecting systems of oppression.

- Features / Marxism, Women, Racism and Islamophobia

The Republicans' Trump Problem

Charlie Post — 2016-04-24T07:43:29Z

The Republican Party has a problem. At the time I am writing (March 24, 2016), Donald Trump enjoys a clear lead in the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination. With nearly 60% (739) of the 1,237 delegates required for the nomination, more than both of his remaining opponents, Ted Cruz of Texas (465) and John Kasich of Ohio (143). According to Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com website, Trump is expected to win all or a majority of delegates from Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Indiana, West Virginia, Washington, California, and New Jersey. If he wins significant minorities of delegations from the remaining states (Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, Montana, and New Mexico), he will be in striking distance (1,208 pledged delegates) of the nomination by June 7.

- IV495 - April 2016 / United States (USA)

The New Militant Minority

Charlie Post — 2015-07-07T13:17:09Z

Despite significant changes in the economy, mass worker organizing is still possible. Since the publication of False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness in 1973, Stanley Aronowitz has been one of the most important left critics of the official US labor movement. His latest book, The Death and Life of American Labor, builds on and synthesizes much of this previous work, and is a provocative contribution to discussions of the road out of organized labor's current crisis.

- Reviews section / United States (USA), Trade unions/workplace organizing, Reviews

We're All Precarious Now

Charlie Post — 2015-06-22T14:12:41Z

Neoliberalism isn't a new concept any more. Using it, along with “deindustrialization,” to describe changes in the core economies since the 1970s has become a kind of truism. But more recently, activists have started to consider what the implications of this regime of capital have been on class structure: is something fundamentally new and different happening? Does the condition of insecurity and fragmentation of labor change radical perspectives on the labor movement, invalidating strategies for trade unionism and reform?

- Debate / United States (USA), Debate section

Piketty on Capital and Inequality

Charlie Post — 2014-09-12T07:28:57Z

The issue of growing inequalities of inÂcome and wealth in the advanced capitalist world over the past four decades has been the subject of both social scientific research and political struggle. On the one hand, there is an extensive literature that amply documents the growth of inequality globally since the mid-1970s. While ideologues of neo-liberalism have attempted to dismiss this evidence or diminish its importance, [1] there is a consensus among social scientists that inequality has been on the rise. [2]

- Reviews section / Economy, Reviews

A German Lenin?

Charlie Post — 2014-01-19T21:36:12Z

For radicals and revolutionaries engaged in rebuilding an anti-capitalist movement in the early 21st century, the 20th century appears to be a record of disaster. Capitalism survived two great economic crises (1914-1934 and 1966-1982) that many on the left believed spelled the end of this form of class society.

- Reviews section / Germany, Reviews, Historical events and figures

Why the Tea Party?

Charlie Post — 2012-07-12T10:46:10Z

The anti-capitalist left in the United States and around the world faces a paradox. A mere five years ago, the world capitalist economy entered a new long period of falling profits, stagnant accumulation, and growing long-term un (and under-) employment. The 2007-8 financial crisis threatened a wave of bankruptcies across the capitalist world that seemed to herald a collapse of major sectors of industry and finance. The dominant economic orthodoxyâ€”neo-liberalismâ€”with its worship of unregulated and self-correcting markets appeared to be in ruins.

- IV450 - July 2012 / United States (USA)

Lenin Reconsidered

Charlie Post — 2011-11-03T07:37:30Z

Few historical figures on the international revolutionary left have been the subject of as much historical myth-making as Lenin. Born V.I. Ulyanov in 1870, the son of a liberal Tsarist educational official, Lenin (the pseudonym he adopted in the 1890s) became a central leader of the Russian socialist movement, in particular its Bolshevik (majority) wing. The Bolsheviks not only led the world's first successful workers revolution in 1917, but launched the revolutionary Communist International in 1919.

- Reviews section / Marxism, Reviews, Historical events and figures

How should the left relate to Obama?

Charlie Post — 2009-07-31T10:38:02Z

There is a broad consensus on leftâ€”from those who actively campaigned on his behalf, through those who sat out the election, to those of us who supported the independent candidacies of Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Naderâ€”that the election of Barack Obama represents an important opening for anti-capitalists and radicals in the US.

- IV414 - July 2009 / United States (USA)