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Independent Politics

Can A Labor-Backed Candidate Inspire More Working-Class Independents?

January 21, 2025 Steve Early, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
While running for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, working class candidate Dan Osborn characterized the Senate as “a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires.” In November, he almost crashed their party. Osborn, a 49-year old former local union president who helped lead a multi-state strike against Kellogg’s cereal company, was recruited by railroad workers to challenge two-term incumbent Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican. Rail is a major industry in Nebraska, and Fischer had voted to break the 2022 national railroad strike. She also opposed the Railway Safety Act.

Labor Movement Must Unite Working Class

November 10, 2024 UE Officers, Portside. , , , ,
For over half of a century, working people in the U.S. have seen stagnating wages, worsening working conditions, the loss of good jobs, and constant increases in the cost of living. This is the result of corporations’ never-ending thirst to squeeze as many profits out of workers as possible. Throughout this time, both major parties have been complicit in this corporate assault. They have maintained their power, and a corrupt two-party system, by dividing the working class along lines of race, gender, and education. Frustration with the Democrats and their unwillingness to confront corporate power or offer real solutions to working people’s economic concerns led many working people to vote for Donald Trump on Tuesday, giving him the margin of victory.

United Kingdom: Shock Of General Election Downplayed By Media

July 6, 2024 James Wright, The Canary. , , ,
Five pro-Palestine independents won seats in the general election. That’s the same number of seats as Nigel Farage’s Reform won. They include Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North and Shockat Adam in Leicester South. Adam unseated Labour’s shadow paymaster general Jonathan Ashworth who previously had a majority of 22,000 in 2011. Yet judging by the corporate media coverage, you would think Reform was the shock story of the night. Each of these pro-Palestine independent victories represents a shock upset. Corbyn and Iqbal Hussain Mohamed of Dewsbury and Batley won spectacularly. Mohamed was victorious over the Labour candidate to the point where he’s 7,000 votes ahead of her in the West Yorkshire constituency. Corbyn, meanwhile, won by almost 8,000 votes.

How We Move Forward Together: The Rank And File Project

January 30, 2024 Abdullah F., Cyn Huang and Marsha Niemeijer, Convergence. , , , , ,
Most major advances toward a more equal and just society come about because organized working people use their power to disrupt capitalist profits. And we think that’s the only force that can ultimately end capitalist exploitation and establish a truly democratic society. For that reason, many on the Left see labor unions as essential to making radical change. But unions today are often top-down and undemocratic in structure, weak, defensive and even conservative in their politics. The labor movement lacks a coherent, organized left-wing leadership that could help re-found the movement on a democratic, class-struggle basis.

Remembering Leo Panitch

December 21, 2020 Ronan Burtenshaw, Tribune Magazine. , , ,
My first meeting with Leo Panitch didn’t go so well. I was sitting in a restaurant before the 2016 Labour Party conference in Liverpool with Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara. Leo arrived dressed in a sharp leather jacket and looking far too young for his age. Unfortunately, he seemed to have travelled from Canada with a determination to debate Bhaskar about something or other, and a spirited conversation ensued. I literally didn’t get a word in and we barely exchanged names before he had departed again, already late for a meeting with another of his many mentees. Things didn’t swiftly improve. Bhaskar and I had been involved in organising one of the headline events of the first World Transformed festival, a discussion of the legacy of Ralph Miliband involving Leo Panitch, John McDonnell, and another of Leo’s protégés, Max Shanly.

The Politics That Led To The ‘Worst Debate’

October 2, 2020 Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
The rich man’s media are calling it “the worst debate in modern American history,” but that’s because the truth is often painful to watch. The Biden-Trump confrontation revealed, with crystalline clarity, that the real “genius” of the American electoral process is its total imperviousness to popular demands for a healthier, more just and less economically precarious society and a peaceful, ecologically stable world. Instead, the Democratic alternative to the white supremacist Republican in the White House is — another lifelong racist, mass-incarcerating, corporate-serving, warmongering old white man. 

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