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the-left

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How Young Karl Marx Got Radicalized
How Young Karl Marx Got Radicalized
Karl Marx started out in a liberal milieu where the primary concern was abolishing religious authoritarianism. In time, he came to believe that abolishing capitalism was necessary for true freedom — and that only the working class could do it.
·jacobin.com·
How Young Karl Marx Got Radicalized
Spain’s Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz Is Working to Rebuild the Left
Spain’s Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz Is Working to Rebuild the Left
Spain’s labor minister Yolanda Díaz is a Communist — and her success restoring workplace protections has made her the country’s most popular politician. Now her new electoral platform Sumar is trying to use that popularity to revitalize the Spanish left.
No representatives of Podemos attended Díaz’s candidacy launch, as party leader Ione Belarra insisted a bilateral agreement between Sumar and her formation on left primaries and the internal distribution of funds would be needed to secure her presence. In the wake of this public display of disunity, both sides have gone on the attack in the media ratcheting up tensions further.
Yet in an interview with Jacobin’s Eoghan Gilmartin, PCE leader and Izquierda Unida MP Enrique Santiago argues that the Left is ultimately “condemned to work together.”
For example, the 2022 labor law reform, which cracks down on short-term precarious work contracts and secures new trade union protections, was not vetoed by the EU. Or after the European Commission repeatedly told us that we could not intervene in the energy markets, it ultimately had to accept the so-called “Iberian Exception” [under which Spain and Portugal passed a partial cap on the cost of electricity production].
Sumar as a political project is not about moderating political discourse or renouncing principles but rather widening the Left’s limits to form a majoritarian project capable of changing the political balance of forces in this country.
In contemporary societies, which are ever more complex, parties alone only have a certain social reach; but new processes of political aggregation require opening up participatory mechanisms beyond internal party structures.
The latter include major reductions in the cost of public transport, even making commuter trains free of charge.
We are condemned to work together and to reach an agreement. There is no other option. One Podemos leader told me the other day, as we were negotiating coalition for May’s local and regional elections, that “we don’t like that you are sitting down with splinter groups that broke off from us [such as Íñigo Errejón’s Más País].” My response was, “You were formed as a splinter group from us, and we are constantly working with you.” And if we go back far enough, we are all splinter groups from the Socialist International!
·jacobin.com·
Spain’s Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz Is Working to Rebuild the Left
Mike Davis’s Specificities | Gabriel Winant
Mike Davis’s Specificities | Gabriel Winant
The US working class was forged, for Davis, through its compounded historical defeat, which gave it a distinctive contradictory, battered, and lumpy form that could not be evened out through appeals to abstraction. Most importantly, the cycle of defeat and accommodation had separated the official labor movement from the Black working class, which he saw as the only possible “cutting edge” for socialist politics.
·nplusonemag.com·
Mike Davis’s Specificities | Gabriel Winant
Former Bolivian President Evo Morales calls for a Global campaign to eliminate NATO | MR Online
Former Bolivian President Evo Morales calls for a Global campaign to eliminate NATO | MR Online
In interview with British journalist, Morales says the U.S. uses NATO to provoke wars and sell weapons. U.S./UK-backed coup against him in 2019 was undertaken for lithium and because his government advanced an alternative economic model to the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”
·mronline.org·
Former Bolivian President Evo Morales calls for a Global campaign to eliminate NATO | MR Online
On Barbara Ehrenreich | Gabriel Winant
On Barbara Ehrenreich | Gabriel Winant
Ehrenreich’s work has always acknowledged that power operates at the intimate level, and that this is part of what makes it difficult to resist. To engage in political struggle is not just frightening, it is painful, because power is not just out there: it is also a voice in your own head—projection, inner fear. This is a distinctively feminist insight and not by coincidence.
·nplusonemag.com·
On Barbara Ehrenreich | Gabriel Winant