Independence from capitalist parties is a fundamental principle of Marxism. History has demonstrated that any support for the Democratic Party catastrophically dilutes our politics and forestalls revolutionary organizing. Instead, for the foreseeable future, revolutionaries should embrace “electoral nihilism” — a politics that is hostile to electoralism and elections.
The turmoil and depravity of the second Trump administration must be understood not as an aberration but as a result of the long-term decline of US imperial primacy. State violence against the oppressed, the instability of the “America First” agenda, and open support for genocide are all desperate attempts to shore up the power of the increasingly reactionary US capitalist class.
Ridding society of the police is both a practical demand in the struggle against oppression, and an integral part of socialist revolution. brian bean’s new book, Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, is an excellent intervention in the debates on a future without state violence. As bean argues, the movement to abolish the police is really the movement to abolish capitalism.
Stop the genocide Israel’s settler-colonial project has again shown its true nature. In retaliation for the new military phase of the Palestinian liberation movement that started on October 7th, the Zionist entity is committing open genocide against Gaza. Israeli...
Repression has always been a problem for people seeking social change. From direct physical attacks by police and vigilantes to the firing and evicting of union activists, the ruling class doesn’t make it easy to challenge their power. Contemporary methods of...
Whenever the “international community” starts talking about Israel’s right to self-defense, Palestinian civilians head to the bomb shelters. Or they would, if they had any — the Israeli government prevents the Gaza Strip from importing the necessary construction...
“We don’t have a mass revolutionary party. If we did, I would join. Once upon a time, a revolutionary vanguard existed. After the defeat of the New Left, the vanguard has to be rebuilt. We need to knit together activists. Without soviets there would have been no...
I want to start off by admitting that I am totally what you might call a “basic girl.” I love overpriced oat milk lattes, and going to Target as a form of therapy. For the past two years in a row, I was in the top .03% of Taylor Swift listeners on Spotify. It’s a...
The starting point for developing a revolutionary Marxist approach to the Niger crisis begins with the recognition that the right to determine who governs Niger and how it is governed belongs to Nigeriens and them alone. This is an especially important lesson of the...
Forging closer ties and meeting new comrades In our first appearance as Firebrand, we brought a contingent of ten, five Denver Communists, two Seattle Revolutionary Socialists, one Greensboro Revolutionary Socialist, and two contacts to the 2023 Socialism Conference....
In Indianapolis on Labor Day last September, a group of about thirty neo-Nazis from an organization called Patriot Front marched downtown. Cosplaying in their faux military garb and carrying shields and colonial-themed US flags, this crew of sad grotesques was easily...
Dear Natalia and Tempest comrades, I am writing here in response to your article, “The blush is off the rose.” Some of your assessments are spot on. I disagree sharply with others. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is clearly in decline and has been...
Andor is a breath of fresh air for the Star Wars franchise, and for television in general. A prequel to 2016’s Rogue One, the Disney+ series is unexpectedly one of the most compelling and gripping in memory. Its combination of dark, dystopian mood, wrenching suspense,...
Earlier this month, I attended Socialist Alternative’s Socialism conference in Sydney. For readers outside Australia, I’m referring to the Australian Trotskyist organization (which was a cousin of sorts to the ISO in the US before the latter disbanded), and not the...
The July 25 tentative agreement (TA) comes up short. Gains like the gradual addition of air conditioning in package cars, no forced overtime for drivers on days off, the end of two-tier classification for 22.4 drivers, protections against subcontracting, and partial...
“There really is an upper layer of the working class, supported by a thousand kinds of ‘direct and indirect’ benefits flowing from imperialism. Its starkest expression is a massive labor bureaucracy that’s becoming more integrated into the imperialist capitalist...
In the eyes of the capitalist ruling class, workers are deprived of their humanity and are reduced to profit-producing machines. Our basic human needs are locked behind a paywall, leaving us the choices of starving to death or purchasing our right to survive another...
Too often morality is the only guide to politics on the left. Oppression and exploitation are obviously disgusting — however, overcoming them takes analysis and strategy, not just outrage. One example of this is the widespread dismissal of workers in the United States...
Continued from Part One After my first experiences with the International Socialist Organization (ISO), what convinced me to join was the sincere belief that my views and actions mattered. After meeting up with some comrades from the organization in early 2011, we...
A revolt contained, but polarization continues In 2020, we witnessed the biggest wave of protests in the United States in the past 50 years, if not ever. The George Floyd rebellion was the highest phase so far in a long series of cycles in the recent Black liberation...
The anti-racist and anti-police brutality movement has turned toward abolitionism in recent years. It has called for the complete elimination of police and prisons. This is a radical turn and to be applauded, but it does have its problems. One of the key arguments for...
Introduction “Trotsky considers the opportunist current and its leaders somewhat as victims of circumstances… There is no doubt that opportunism, like all else in the world has its objective causes in external conditions. But in politics more than anywhere else, to...
What kind of party do we need? Or what kind of party should revolutionary socialists be focused on building? I want to propose some answers to the organizational questions we’re facing. But more than that, I want to invite those who are asking the same questions to...
Every year I teach an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. In the section in which we focus on socioeconomic class, I ask my students to read and interpret the famous first pages of the Communist Manifesto. These are the pages in which Marx and Engels broadly...