Decaying Institutions, Rightwing Insurrection, and the Need for a Mass Movement
By: Cihan TuğalJanuary 11, 2021
The rise of the radical right is based on interrelated but distinct dynamics: market capitalism’s destructiveness; the Left’s failure to respond to market capitalism; and the Right’s ability to sustain the belief that the Left is still a threat.
It would be devastatingly stupid, complacent beyond belief, to expect US democracy to remain sufficiently stable in the coming years to deny this incipient fascism more opportunities to congeal, and grow.
In this easily accessible, passionately argued intervention, Dawson gives the reader both a valuable primer on contemporary struggles for energy justice and an entry into the theoretical debates whose outcome will inform and guide movement strategy going forward.
We should let Miguel Cardona know we have his back if he defends what schools, teachers, students really need – while we simultaneously prepare for his not doing so.
Though Trump lost the election, his base has been strengthened over the course of it. To say now that the Left is winning downplays—perhaps unintentionally—the growing relevance and threat of the Right.
Biden will endorse the old normal Obama handed to Trump, but he will also push profiteering and control of education through technology, a project supported by both Democrats and the GOP from the start of Trump’s administration.
Historically, workers made gains economically and politically during periods of labor upheaval. When workers used their power to strike, they were able to force employers and governments to make concessions.
It is misleading to see the election as a victory of democracy over authoritarianism. Biden’s win is the triumph not of democracy but of an oligarchic status quo, itself an increasingly authoritarian system.
Many of us watching with envy from afar—“envy” because the destruction of democratic institutions has gone much further in our countries—have nothing but admiration for the way in which a would-be dictator has been peacefully overthrown.
Because capitalism and racism are intertwined, and because of the role that racism plays in dividing the working class, if we want to fight against capitalism and class inequality, anti-racism has to be at the center of our activity.
Biden is committed to U.S. domination of world affairs and the wars necessary to ensure that. The left will have to rebuild an anti-war movement to resist Biden and to fight against U.S. imperialism, militarism and war when it erupts.
Already it is clear that progressives have had little impact on Biden and the far left will have to organize to confront a government incapable of passing any major reforms.
In the most contentious Chicago budget vote in a generation, four “progressive” alderpeople buckled to Lightfoot’s pressure and allowed an antiworker austerity city budget to pass for 2021.
With the virus rampant, once again schools and businesses are closing, and more workers being laid off. We now have 20 million jobless, with ten million receiving federal unemployment benefits that will end with the New Year, as will protection for 30 million who face eviction. Not a happy Thanksgiving.
An atomized, racially fragmented, demoralized working class will always be prone to Trumpism. If Biden and the Democrats stick to the policies they have implemented and backed ever since the late 1970s, disorganized workers will either further shift to Trumpism or (as is more likely with Blacks) simply abstain.
Trotsky in Tijuana recognizes the importance of Trotsky’s revolutionary vision and leadership in the years before he was exiled from Russia. And it shows that the force of his commitment to the transformative power of the working class continued into the 1930s.
C.R. Mills argues that the current ‘teachers vs. parents’ framing surrounding school reopenings, must be reframed.
Having lost the election, what is Trump’s future? At the top of his agenda is arranging a pardon for himself, for crimes of which he has not been convicted. He might try to use the presidential pardon to pardon himself, which would almost surely end up in the Supreme Court.
A satirical headline from the day the presidential election was called, captures the feeling of much of the Left: “Jubilant Reaction to Trump’s Defeat Quickly Soured by News of Biden Win.”
The Left mantra that ‘no one is going to save us but ourselves’ has been painfully understood by hundreds of thousands who have used direct action, creative resistance, self-organizing and fearless militancy—from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter to the Women’s March to fighting fascism in the streets.
What can be done to show solidarity with Syrians who have risen up against their tyrannical government and its bloody allies? We in Promoting Enduring Peace thought a great gesture would be to give our Gandhi Peace Award to Syrians doing humanitarian work.