Phil Butland

When a Zionist riot is reported as an antisemitic pogrom

The US election is symptomatic of a new, gloomier political reality facing those concerned with global efforts to avert climate catastrophe. Since the issue of climate change first gained widespread attention in the early 1990s, it has never been far from the centre of political debate in most Western countries. As the pace of warming has increased, and its impacts have become more visible, you might expect that it would retain that place or even gain in importance in the minds of politicians and the voting public. In the US this year, the opposite has happened.
Not even the multiple weather-related disasters the country endured during the presidential campaign could shift the dial. Hurricane Helene roared out of the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the southern Appalachian mountains in late September with devastating winds and catastrophic flooding. Entire towns were swept away, and more than 230 people were killed. Two weeks later another major hurricane hit Florida. It didn’t matter. The climate crisis didn’t rank as highly as it previously had in <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/">polls of voters’ concerns</a>, and it was barely mentioned by Joe Biden, his replacement as Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris or Donald Trump during their campaigns.
The lack of discussion of or concern about climate change in this election wasn’t a sign that efforts to limit warming are going well. Quite the opposite. The decades of green rhetoric by politicians and the never-ending round of global climate summits have got us nowhere. Total global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and the rate of increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere (which are the most accurate measures of lack of progress) is accelerating. 
Over time, the gulf between the rhetoric used by politicians hoping to establish their green credentials and the grim reality of a society still well and truly hooked on fossil fuels has become harder and harder to ignore. This is, no doubt, part of the explanation for the growing phenomenon of “climate apathy”. For many years now, every time an election comes around we’ve been told by supposedly progressive parties like the US Democrats and Labor in Australia that climate change is a major challenge demanding urgent action. Again and again, though, when these parties come to power they fail to do anything more than the bare minimum about it.
You might object, in the case of the Biden administration, that the green rhetoric was matched to a degree by action. To the extent that Harris sought to draw attention to climate policy at all during her campaign, it was to highlight Biden’s “trillion dollar” investment in clean energy. At the same time, though, she made clear her continuing enthusiasm for fossil fuels. She was proud, she said, that the administration had “increased domestic gas production to historic levels” and that during her time in office the US has carried out “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history”. On both counts, she had every right to brag: in the 2010s the US overtook countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the largest oil and gas producer in the world, and it hasn’t looked back since.
Taking climate change seriously demands finding ways to wind down the fossil fuel economy. With something like this, you can’t “have your cake and eat it too”. However much you might invest in clean energy (and it’s true the Biden administration invested a lot), if that investment is being directly counteracted by significant increases in the production and consumption of fossil fuels, then what’s the point? 
We’ve had years of “climate wars” and “climate elections”. This time it was different. This was, when it comes to the climate, a “what’s the point?” election. We shouldn’t be overly surprised. When—despite what the scientists have been saying for decades and despite their own green rhetoric—those in power continually send the message that it’s not only okay but commendable to continue to expand the fossil fuel economy, it’s only natural that some would start to question whether climate change is really worth worrying about.
Donald Trump, of course, was only too happy to capitalise on this sentiment. Unlike the Democrats, Trump has always been very open about his enthusiasm for fossil fuels and disdain for climate science. During his campaign <a href="https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1852547593873526930">he promised</a> to “terminate the green new scam, one of the great scams in history”, and scoffed at the prospect of sea level rises, saying “Who the hell cares?” and joking, in <a href="https://www.rev.com/transcripts/elon-musk-and-donald-trump-interview">an interview with Elon Musk</a>, that “you’ll have more oceanfront property”.
Trump sought to link the Democrats’ climate initiatives to the inflationary wave that hit the US and much of the rest of the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Biden administration, he said in July in his <a href="https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/read-donald-trumps-full-rnc-speech-accepting-gop-nomination/3432055/">speech to the Republican National Convention</a>, has “spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the green new scam, and that’s caused tremendous inflationary prices”. He promised to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the cost of energy for US consumers.
The Democrats had no real answer to this. Having established that they too were enthusiasts for the “drill, baby, drill” mentality, they could hardly turn around and denounce Trump for it. So, by and large, they remained silent. This strategy, predictably, didn’t work well. While Trump supporters were thinking “What’s the point of action on climate change?”, many potential Democrat supporters were thinking “What’s the point of voting?”. Millions of those who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home this time. The Democrats’ promise of a “Trump-lite” administration inspired few.
Last time he was in power, Trump implemented a range of policies favourable to the fossil fuel industry—including reversing or rolling back almost 100 environmental regulations related to things like carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars. He also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, a (theoretically at least) legally binding international treaty committing countries that signed up to it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His second term in the White House is likely to bring more of the same.
“That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe”, Walter Benjamin once wrote. “It is not that which is approaching but that which is.” Another four years of Trump is no new catastrophe for the planet. The catastrophe was already here. The terrifying thing is that this election will reinforce the tendency for people in countries like the US and Australia to think “What’s the point in trying to do anything about it?”

James Plested

‘Drill, baby, drill’: Climate change ignored in the US election

Is the Democratic administration of Joe Biden pro-worker or anti-worker? Opinions differ. Take Bernie Sanders. The day after the 2024 election, the Vermont senator issued a statement denouncing Biden, Vice President Harris and the Democratic Party for having “abandoned the working class”. The language was punchy, direct, withering and accurate. The Democratic leadership, Sanders wrote, has nothing to offer workers. The party, controlled by “big money interests”, does not understand workers’ “pain and political alienation”. As an inevitable consequence of this, workers of all races are abandoning it. 
But there are other currents of opinion about the Harris-Biden Democrats. For example, that Joe Biden is “the most pro-working-class president in modern American history”, with an agenda that speaks “to the needs of the working class”. He is “the most effective president in modern history”, “a good and decent Democratic president with a record of real accomplishment”, who “wants to tax the rich so that we can fund the needs of working families”. These were the words of, um, Bernie Sanders, a few months ago. 
It was easy to lose track of Sanders over the last few years. He has not been worth paying much attention to. But over the last decade, Sanders has gone from being the scourge of the Democratic establishment to one of its most reliable surrogates.
In 2016 and 2020, he stood against establishment Democratic candidates, achieved widespread support, was buried by the Democratic apparatus and then rolled over to campaign for the people who crushed him. Each time he ran, the process embedded him more deeply into the party machine. In 2024, he didn’t even challenge Biden or Harris. His email list has become a Democratic Party fundraising tool—reliant on worn-out catchphrases and in-jokes from his past presidential runs that are only marginally less groan-worthy than the coconut-pilled bratmongering of the official Harris campaign.
Sanders once used hard-hitting, pro-worker language to attack the record of the mainstream Democrats. But throughout 2024, he used the same rhetoric to demand loyalty and obedience to the leader —whoever that leader might be.
When even the corporate liberal press could see that Joe Biden had to step aside, Sanders and his protégés in Congress became the president’s most aggressive and reliable bodyguards. It was a head-spinning role reversal. Establishment mouthpieces like the Washington Post and the New York Times were stating an obvious truth: Biden was past it and would have to drop plans to run for a second term. 
Sanders devoted himself to a transparently dishonest campaign to defend and promote Biden as a champion of the workers. In a major Times op-ed, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/opinion/joe-biden-president.html">extolled</a>
Biden’s allegedly pro-worker record and demanded that Democrats “stop the bickering and nit-picking”. A couple of weeks later, Biden threw in the towel. Sanders, the loyal mouthpiece of the Biden leadership, was left holding the bag.
I don’t care who leads the Democrats. But the incident proved that Sanders was now officially part of the dishonest, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/13/biden-sanders-aoc-liberal-lifeline/">deal-making Democratic machine</a>. Even most right-wing Democrats weren’t as willing as Sanders to burn their reputation in defence of a collapsing Biden candidacy. 
It didn’t stop there—and it wasn’t only Sanders. When Kamala Harris took over the reins, Sanders carried on his role as a key public advocate for a genocide-enabling neoliberal (and former prosecutor). His extra-special <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5MThSniiY">Palestine-themed video manifesto</a>, in which he demanded that Palestine supporters swallow their pride and fall in behind the vice president, was a low point. “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/4868310-bernie-sanders-liz-dick-cheney-kamala-harris/">I applaud the Cheneys</a> for their courage in defending democracy”: that was another.
His surrogates and allies, now an entrenched Democratic faction, joined in—and went further. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Democratic National Convention to praise “leaders like Kamala and Tim [Walz]”. Her speech could have come from the mouth of any careerist Democrat of the Bill Clinton generation. 
Sanders at least acknowledged he disagreed with Harris on Gaza. Nothing like that from AOC. She assured the audience of party officials and donors: “[Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home”. (No Palestinians were permitted to speak at the event.) The rest of the campaign brought further embarrassments. American politics moves quickly. AOC is now irrevocably cringe. To paraphrase George Orwell: If you want a picture of the future of the Democratic Party, imagine <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAnKayYSStM">AOC livestreaming Madden with Tim Walz—forever</a>.
As Donald Trump’s election proves, dishonesty is not a decisive disadvantage in capitalist politics. Leftists with functioning memories might roll their eyes to see Sanders suddenly remember that the Democrats are actually quite bad. But many will be grateful to hear someone stating obvious truths and calling for pro-worker politics. Still, there are some lessons to be drawn from Sanders’ brat summer.
First: how quickly, and comprehensively, political “harm minimisation” turns into loyal advocacy. Maybe Sanders thought he’d extracted some concessions from Harris and Biden. Maybe he really believes that Trump is a fascist danger who must be stopped at all costs—fair enough. Either way, Sanders seems to think that a Democrat in power is a necessary condition for social progress. So any doubters must be convinced—even if they’re doubting for good reasons. By this mechanism, “pragmatic” leftists become delusional Biden loyalists. People like Sanders, with authority on the left, devote themselves to justifying—and lying about—the allegedly pro-worker and anti-genocide outlooks of people like Biden and Harris.
But a Democrat in office isn’t necessary for social progress. Yes, America needs a form of politics that is pro-worker, anti-racist and not beholden to the oligarchy. But just as much, it needs a form of politics that operates outside elections—and that can function no matter who’s in the White House, the Supreme Court and the Congress. It needs a pro-worker politics that draws its power from strikes and social movements, not fundraisers and TV advertising. That form of politics isn’t going to come from the Democrats.
If an alternative isn’t constructed, most of the people issuing these broad-left denunciations of the Democrats—no matter how strident and accurate—are going to end up back as captives of a future Harris or Biden equivalent.

D. Taylor

Bernie’s brat summer

King Felipe of Spain, along with the Spanish prime minister and the Valencian president, visited the flood-ravaged town of Paiporta on 3 November. They were greeted by crowds of angry residents chanting “Murderer!” and had mud thrown at them. 
The furious reception was in response to disastrous floods in the Valencia region in late October. The floods, caused by massive rainfall—in some locations a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours—were the worst natural disaster in Spain in decades. More than 215 people have been killed and about 1,900 are missing. 
This part of Spain typically receives a lot of rain at this time of year, but as global temperatures rise, the air carries more moisture, leading to more extreme events. 
While the flooding is a result of climate change, the death toll is a product of neglect. The day before the downpour, the meteorological agency issued warnings, which the regional government of Valencia largely ignored. 
It was only at 8pm on the day of the floods that the government sent a warning to every mobile phone, instructing people to stay at home or move to higher ground. By this time, flood waters had already hit many towns, trapping people in their houses or in cars on their way home after work. 
<a href="https://youtu.be/XEqfDG8Xn00?feature=shared&amp;t=43">One young man berated the King</a>: “It was known, and nobody did anything to avoid it”.
In line with other disasters, such as <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/rescuers-find-body-worker-swept-tennessee-factory-hurricane-115409477">Hurricane Helen</a>e, there seem to have been several cases of bosses preventing their workers from leaving work early to seek safety. One widely shared video <a href="https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2024/10/30/criminal-companies-outrage-as-mercadona-sends-driver-out-into-deadly-floods-while-other-firms-are-slammed-for-endangering-employees/">shows a delivery driver for Mercadona</a>, one of Spain’s major supermarket chains, being saved by rescue workers. 
After the floods, Juan Roig, president of Mercadona, was <a href="https://x.com/NombreFalso1231/status/1852851619211223496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1852851619211223496%7Ctwgr%5E50476688fdf2e8e70c2e6c13fc8a9205673e97ce%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarxist.com%2Fspain-monarchs-pelted-with-mud-as-rage-over-avoidable-deaths-boils-over-in-valencia.htm">confronted by angry shoppers</a> at a supermarket. “You have no shame. You sent your workers out to die”, one said. Graffiti reading “Your profits, our dead” summarises the sentiment. 
The Valencia Emergency Unit, which had been created to coordinate emergency responses, had been disbanded as a part of budget cuts by the conservative regional government last year. The government also initially refused help from firefighting agencies from other parts of Spain and France in an effort to show that it had everything under control. This left some of the worst affected areas without heavy machinery for up to six days. 
One consequence is that residents have had to organise the cleaning effort themselves. One, Ana Isabel Zomeno, told ABC News: “The street here was full of piled cars. Nobody came here, but all the neighbours in this street have organised themselves very well to do the clean-up. It looks this clean now because of us”. 
People throughout Spain have donated supplies. Volunteers from the region have travelled around to help others clean up. On one day when the government put a call out, up to 15,000 people volunteered to help. 
Video shows mud everywhere. It carpets the ground and is caked onto walls. The people are covered in it—from the flood and from cleaning up afterwards. 
The visiting politicians, and even the king, ended up covered in it too, for different reasons. That was one piece of good news coming out of this disaster.

Ben Lourie

Spanish floods highlight the muck of capitalism

Preliminary analysis by the Wall Street Journal points to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/voter-turnout-election-2024-927a102c">a stunning drop in turnout among Democratic voters</a> in the United States on 5 November. 
The Republicans swept the elections for president, Senate and possibly the House of Representatives (counting continues in several districts). The precise reasons for their victories will become clearer in coming months as the results are dissected and more data comes to light.
But one statistic, highlighted by staff writers John West and Kara Dapena, already appears to be among the most significant: voter turnout declined by around 6 percentage points in counties won easily by President Joe Biden in the 2020 elections. By contrast, in counties won by then-President Trump by more than 10 percentage points, voters turned out at higher rates this year—despite overall voter turnout being down across the country.
To put it a little simplistically: Trump motivated Republicans more than Harris motivated Democrats. 
For example, in counties with the highest share of Black residents, college residents, Hispanic residents or union members, voter turnout dropped by more than the national average. In particular, voter turnout was down by an estimated 4.7 percent in counties with the lowest median income, and by nearly 4 percent in counties with the highest share of Black voters.
In working-class Detroit, behind Memphis the second-largest majority Black city in the US, the city clerk only a week before the election <a href="https://www.bridgedetroit.com/detroit-clerk-predicts-turnout-for-presidential-race-could-be-highest-in-a-decade/">predicted a record turnout</a>. In the end, Democrats overestimated Kamala Harris’s pulling power in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/talking-gaza-in-detroit">the devastated city</a>, turnout being reported as 47 percent of eligible voters, compared to the Michigan statewide turnout of more than 73 percent, which was a record high.
“People don’t feel like they’re put back together coming out of the pandemic”, Branden Snyder, director of Michigan Election Defense Coalition, told Malachi Barrett from local news outlet BridgeDetroit. “[Harris’s] policy platform was more robust than Trump’s; he wasn’t offering any specifics. People were looking to hear what can government do, what can she do. That was a miss. There wasn’t enough conversation about the rising cost of rent, student tuition, good jobs.”
This sort of anecdotal feedback is common in media reports across the country. It confirms election day surveys, and polling for months in advance, showing that the economy was a decisive issue. 
Yet Democrats spent a great deal of energy trying to win over affluent Republicans—the so-called never-Trumpers—who are much closer ideologically to the elites who control the Democratic Party apparatus: wealthy donors and politicians in bed with the national security apparatus. 
There will be other stories to tell from this election, such as what now seems a clear and consolidated shift among Hispanic voters to the Republican Party, and the further fraying of working-class support for the Democrats.
But nothing thus far tells the story quite like Harris underperforming Biden by millions of votes.

The Democratic voters who stayed home

In Buenos Aires, the Workers’ Socialist Movement (Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores, MST), a Trotskyist party, is holding a day school for militant workers from the Italian Hospital. It’s 8:30am and the worker militants are trickling in, carrying pastries, sandwiches and maté gourds (a local tea). They are here to discuss everything from the history of the Argentine workers’ movement to the concept of exploitation and the legal framework in Argentina under which unions operate. Some comrades are dressed in their hospital scrubs.
These workers are facing a fierce offensive from President Javier Milei and the hospital bosses and are struggling for their own living conditions and the rights of their class. 
Argentinian workers have experienced a protracted crisis for most of the 21st century. Hyperinflation has eaten away the purchasing power of workers’ salaries as much as it has eaten away the credibility of the major political parties. This includes Peronism, the nationalist party that historically has attracted working-class allegiances. Since last year’s election of Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist and far-right outsider, a new offensive has been launched against every aspect of working-class life. In the first six months of the Milei government, poverty levels rose by more than 11 points to reach 53 percent of the population. 
Two significant sectors facing attacks are health care and universities. Nurses and medical professionals from the Italian Hospital are discussing the history of the Argentine workers’ movement to prepare for the struggles of today. Between sips of maté they give thoughtful answers to questions about labour history and thought experiments about how left-wing trade union militants should respond in various scenarios.
One of the questions passed around on slips of paper and discussed in small groups is something like: “You’re creating a new trade union. What principles should it adopt to prevent bureaucratisation?” Another is: “A local factory is being shut down. What political and legal tactics do you adopt?” 
These are not purely hypothetical questions. In 21st century Argentina, there have been waves of working-class struggle resulting from debt crises, hyperinflation and a series of bosses’ offensives attempting to radically restructure government and society in favour of capitalists. In 2001, under President Fernando de la Rúa, a wave of protest known as the Argentinazo
was unleashed. Protests, strikes, factory occupations and unemployed workers’ struggle partially pushed back a government offensive and toppled five presidents in the space of two weeks. 
Today, the workers are answering very practical questions, and some have direct experience of trying to figure out how to respond to workplace closures. A discussion about the limitations of workers’ cooperatives ensues. They also talk about the possibility of demanding the government nationalise private firms. 
In the crisis of the early 2000s, a range of strategies were adopted by Argentine workers, many of whom were left with factories and workplaces abandoned by the bosses. Some were occupied and transformed into cooperatives, but most of these could not last after government subsidies were withdrawn. As one comrade comments, “The market forces us to exploit ourselves”. Other workplaces struggled for nationalisation: “That workplace closed down, but each worker was guaranteed a job”. 
Our translator, Frederico, tells us the period during and after the 2001 Argentinazo was important in rebuilding the influence of Trotskyist groups, including the MST, in the trade unions. Influence was built through hard-fought battles against the entrenched Peronist leadership. When Frederico says “hard fought”, it is not a metaphor. Going against the hegemonic Peronist leadership in trade unions is no small thing in a country where Peronist trade union bureaucrats are willing to cheat, collude with the bosses and threaten the left with hired muscle. 
On our lunch break, the comrades share pastries, including those named by the anarchists of the early Argentine workers movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were given outrageous titles, which parodied the villains and methods of the workers’ and radical struggles: bolas de fraile (“friar’s balls”), facturas
(“bills”) and bomba (“bomb”), so named after the anarchist penchant for individual violence. Cesar, a socialist militant introducing the discussion, references these pastries as an example of the hidden history of the working-class struggle that existed long before the arrival of Peronism in the ’40s and ’50s. 
A revolutionary socialist lawyer joins the second half of the meeting to teach the delegates about their rights and the relative and always conditional protections of capitalist law. The lawyer comrade is conscious of conveying the gulf between the pretty words of the law and the reality of workplace exploitation. As she says of a UN convention on labour rights, of which Argentina is a signatory: “The bosses use this paper to wipe their asses”. 
Delegates, she says, should know their rights so they can be steadfast defenders of the workers they represent. She is quick to demonstrate, through legal precedent and a wealth of practical examples, that the courts cannot be relied on: they enshrine only those rights that are backed by the organisation and force of the workers.
On Wednesday, we head to the Hospital Garrahan, the largest paediatric hospital in Argentina. Norma Lezana is chairing a meeting of health workers from across the country. Norma is another MST militant and secretary general of the union. They meet in a room in the hospital; others join on Zoom. Worker after worker rails against the inaction of the dominant trade union bureaucrats. One says:
“Enough of controlling the nurses and saying that we are doing politics; the truth is the bureaucracy should be ashamed. We don’t want more [leaders] who don’t represent us. We want true union representation that defends the workers and the entire health team, of course, but for us nurses, as the most discriminated against in the entire health system, there is total disgust and total indignation.” 
Another comrade from the province of Río Negro talks about the collusion of the provincial governors with Milei’s austerity plan, including Peronist governors: 
“Their relation to the privatising project is explicit. The governor of our province? He invited us to withdraw from the public health system if we are not satisfied with that. And this has been happening. The [health] teams are empty in the mountains. They’re closing! They’re closing the intensive care services.”
In attendance at the meeting are activists from the universities. Two socialist students from the medical faculty of a Buenos Aires university speak on the importance of linking the struggles of the public health sector to the fight for public universities. The students are preparing for a march on 12 November, building from a wave of university occupations last month. They invite the health workers to their demonstration and explain that the medical school is discussing the struggle taking place at the Hospital Garrahan. 
Another speaker, Luciana Franco, from the nursing graduates’ association, talks about the struggle of Buenos Aires nurses to win official recognition as “professionals”. Nurses from the association are about to attend the Buenos Aires legislature to pressure politicians to adopt their plan for professional recognition. They have been invited there by Cele Fierro, a deputy from the Workers’ Left Front—an electoral coalition of revolutionary parties from the Trotskyist left. 
After the meeting, Norma invites us back to the hospital later in the week. From 10 in the morning to 10 at night workers from the Hospital Garrahan will be on strike. A festival will take place all day as part of the struggle. As Norma says, this fight is to defend three sectors: the public health system, the families of the patients who rely on the hospital and the workers inside it. 
On Wednesday morning, we wake to the news that Donald Trump has won the presidency in the United States. What this means for workers in the US and around the world is still unclear. Surely it will give a boost to far-right projects the world over, including the government of Javier Milei. Milei believes, or hopes, that Trump will waive debts that the Argentine government owes to the US. If delivered, this could significantly boost the credibility and success of the Milei’s economic shock plan. 
The left the world over could learn a lesson from the serious, hard-headed organising taking place in hospital wards and tyre factories, on the streets and in the universities in Argentina. In the face of rising inequality around the world, a climate crisis and the surging influence of the far right, no-one is coming to save us but us.

Chloe Rafferty

In Argentina, the struggle continues

Simone McDonnell

Israel’s war on Lebanon: ‘a mortal threat to the whole region’

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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No matter who wins the presidential election, a central fact of US politics is that there is an unmovable conservative bloc of about 46 percent of the electorate. It’s Trump’s floor of support, and it’s the reason so many people ask themselves how, after everything Trump has revealed about himself, the race can be as close as it appears.
There are many explanations. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn reviewed many of them <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/02/upshot/democrats-trump-election.html">here</a>. Cohn argues that the “national political environment just isn’t as conducive to a Democratic victory as many might imagine”. He hangs that judgment on several factors: the unpopularity of President Biden, opinion polls showing that large majorities feel that the country is “on the wrong track”, and the pattern of backlash against ruling parties in the post-covid world of disruption and inflation.
These factors may explain why Trump has a consistent support of 46 percent in the current polling averages (46.9 in <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/538">ABC’s 538 average</a>). But they don’t explain why he received 46.8 percent of the popular vote in 2020 or 46.1 percent of the national popular vote in 2016. In other words, a solid conservative bloc in the electorate is willing to support Trump no matter what. And it has persisted for quite a long time. Even in the 2008 election—held during an historic meltdown in the economy that should have reduced the incumbent Republicans to non-existence—Republican John McCain received 45.7 percent of the vote, against Democrat Barack Obama’s “landslide” of 52.9 percent.
Despite the media’s obsessions with Trump’s alleged working-class base, it’s clear that most people who voted for him in 2016 were the same people—or at least the same types of people—who voted for stuffed-shirt capitalist Mitt Romney in 2012 or for faux cowboy George W. Bush, the scion the quintessential Republican establishment family, in 2000 and 2004.
For more than a generation, the Republicans have depended on solid support from 20 states in the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain West. Various GOP (Grand Old Party) interest groups and voters have been held together by the Republican trinity of tax-cutting economic policies, a bloated Pentagon and security state, and conservative positions on social issues such as opposition to abortion.
The Republicans built a mass base for these politics using what’s been called a “dog-whistle” approach to racism—they avoided openly racist rhetoric, but the intended recipients got the message from racially tinged rhetoric on issues like “drugs” and “welfare”. Although on the losing end of the biggest presidential landslide in US history, Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign road-tested that approach. Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act as an infringement on private property rights.
While the electorate overwhelming rejected Goldwater, conservatives found that they excited passions not when they talked about property rights, but when they focused on so-called “cultural” issues that appealed to sections of the population—particularly to white Southerners moving away from the Democratic Party as the civil rights movement challenged the old order.
Later, Paul Weyrich, a leader of the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s, explained the strategy: “We talk about issues that people care about, like gun control, abortion, taxes, and crime. Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation”.
These social factors made it possible for right-wing pro-business politicians and activists to pose as “populist” opponents of “big government” and “the liberal elite”, rather than being viewed more correctly as water carriers for big business. Right-wing leaders were very conscious of this. As right-wing pugilist Pat Buchanan wrote in 1977: “If there is any political future for us, it is forfeit, so long as we let ourselves be perceived as the obedient foot soldiers of the Fortune 500”.
Today, the Christian right is viewed primarily as the vehicle by which conservatives built opposition to women’s rights and gay rights. But one of the foundational events in the formation of the Christian right in the 1970s, which was led by one-time segregationist ministers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was a fight with the IRS to preserve tax-exempt status for Christian schools, the majority of which were formed as “white academies” in the wake of school desegregation decisions.
The conservative political positions that the Republicans promote regularly garner support from a minority of the US electorate. The average GOP voter is a middle-aged, affluent white person, more likely to be a man than a woman, in a country that is increasingly less affluent, less white, and less religious, and in which women make up most of the population and electorate.
That’s a central reason the Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight national presidential elections while scoring big political gains during low-turnout “midterm” elections between the presidential votes every four years.
The Republicans rely on mobilising a shrinking “base”, which has led their key political operatives to turn every election into a death match against nefarious forces who are “taking away” the idealised 1950s version of the US that conservatives embrace.
This is the dirty secret about the Republican base that the 2007-08 Great Recession uncovered. Not only did economic devastation push at least a section of the conservative middle class to embrace more far-right politics, but free-market economics has delivered less and less to them. So, to keep them hitched to the GOP coalition, the Republicans amped up their “culture war” and turned it not simply against liberal policies like abortion rights, but into a defence of what the liberal historian Allan Lichtman called a “white Protestant nation”.
Despite media speculation to the contrary, <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support">Trump’s base is not the “white working class”</a>. It is a new incarnation of the 2010 Tea Party—specifically, <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/tea-party-donald-trump-ted-cruz/">in the words of Kate Aronoff, writing in Jacobin</a>, voters that the Tea Party movement activated who “are partial to candidates that buck the establishment, and thus extremely receptive to the billionaire’s appeals”.
Research has shown that these conservatives are less concerned with free-market nostrums, and more “worried about sociocultural changes in the United States, angry and fearful about immigration, freaked out by the presence in the White House of a black liberal with a Muslim middle name, and fiercely opposed to what they view as out of control ‘welfare spending’ on the poor, minorities, and young people” in the words of <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/jane-mayer-dark-money-review-koch-brothers-gop">political sociologist Theda Skocpol</a>.
Undercurrents of racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and socially conservative politics have long coincided with the economic conservatism supported by the more upscale voters among the Republican base. But the 2008 financial crisis discredited the kind of elite-friendly, neoliberal politics that the Republican establishment promoted, and shifted a section of the middle-class Republican base in a more extreme direction.
Of course, the irony here is that Trump—the supposed “populist” <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2018/01/04/the-phony-populist-delivers-for-the-rich">standing up for the “forgotten American”</a>—delivered as much, and probably more, for big business and the rich than any establishment Republican could have. Trump’s con game is so transparent—and, to date, so successful—that the rest of the party is following suit.
But it isn’t just the dynamics of US politics that will preserve Trumpian “populism” as a viable right-wing politics in the Republican Party. Trumpism is part of a worldwide phenomenon that has taken hold in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
In country after country, the recession produced a political polarisation that has firmly established the more extreme right. Longtime governing parties, from mainstream conservatives to social democrats, embraced neoliberal austerity, while right-wing “populist” parties like the National Rally in France and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, blaming immigrants and Muslims for deteriorating living standards, presented themselves as opponents of a corrupt status quo.
<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/104/choosing-or-refusing-take-sides-era-right-wing-populism">As the late Marxist historian Neil Davidson wrote</a>, these forces filled a vacuum created when the two major political blocs in capitalist politics—the traditional right and the social democratic or liberal “left”—converged around neoliberal economic policies. With substantive differences over economic policy taken off the table, differentiation between the two blocs often came down to differences on “cultural” issues like religion, race and immigration.
The Great Recession shattered whatever popular appeal neoliberal economics had, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/18/populism-european-politics-right-left-bavaria">breaking up the stable bipartisan regimes</a> that dominated most rich countries. As Davidson put it:
“The revival of the far right as a serious electoral force is based on the apparent solutions it offers to what are now two successive waves of crisis, which have left the working class in the West increasingly fragmented and disorganised, and susceptible to appeals to blood and nation as the only viable form of collectivism still available, particularly in a context where the systemic alternative to capitalism—however false it was—had apparently collapsed in 1989-91.
“The political implications are ominous. The increasing interchangeability of political parties gives the far right an opening to appeal to voters by positioning themselves as outside the consensus in ways that speak to their justifiable feelings of rage.”
In many countries, one part of the broader conservative side of the spectrum sliced off in an anti-immigrant or “populist” direction, with the mainstream right accommodating itself to that. For example, in the wake of a huge economic collapse in Brazil in the late 2010s, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won over sectors of the traditional right, like agribusiness, and a radicalised middle class that used to form the base of the mainstream neoliberal party of <a href="https://www.vientosur.info/spip.php?article14236">former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso</a>.
In the US, the same global forces are at work, but the US’s national particularities remain. Despite the seriousness of the 2007-08 recession, the US did not plunge to near-depression levels like Greece or Spain—or Brazil. So, the echo of the far right was fainter in the US, and it found a hearing in and around the main conservative party, the Republicans. So far, the polarisation that, in the Spanish state, cracked the previously bipartisan regime into, initially, at least four main parties, has mostly remained within the confines of the two main parties in the US.
The Trumpification of the GOP has proceeded apace since Trump first emerged on the scene. Indeed, <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-electio">as socialist Sam Farber warned</a>: “The alliance of religious conservatism and white nationalism that Trump built may turn out to be more solid and enduring than the Republican neoliberal-religious alliance that preceded it”. That has remade the GOP into more of an “illiberal” anti-democratic party like Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary. It has also given license to the organisation of far-right forces like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—the street fighters in the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot that tried to install Trump as president after he lost the 2020 election to Biden—under the broader Trumpist umbrella.
The story so far has been about how the modern GOP built itself as part of the conservative backlash against the gains of the 1960s civil rights, women’s and LGBTQ movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But the GOP would not have gotten as far if the other part of the capitalist party duopoly, the Democrats, didn’t help—or at least not impede—it. Since 1992, the first post-Cold War election, Democrats have held the White House for 20 of 32 years. In that time, they became, in some ways, the most zealous advocates of market reforms, free trade and global military deployment for “humanitarian intervention”.
As Bill Clinton’s administration presided over an economic expansion in the 1990s, his party itself transformed, in the words of political analyst Kevin Phillips, “into a party of the wealthy cultural and technological elite, indeed one whose fortunes and supporting middle-class numbers in the North matched those of the GOP”. The Clinton administration pushed through conservative policies—such as ending welfare payments as a right and balancing the federal budget—that Republicans never could have implemented. Former Federal Reserve chair, the conservative Alan Greenspan, quipped that Clinton was the “best Republican president we’ve had in a while”.
Abetting the shift to the right in the Democratic Party was the atrophy and decay of the popular constituencies that comprised the party’s New Deal and Great Society coalitions from the 1930s through the 1970s. Organised labour’s continual decline (today representing about 10 percent of US workers from twice that in the 1980s) has left it without significant influence on the Democratic agenda. The same decay in vision and mobilising power among labour unions also took hold of civil rights and women’s rights organisations. Increasingly, these organisations became little more than lobbying groups whose independent political stances became indistinguishable from those of Democratic politicians.
“For far too many decades, the mainstream pro-choice movement has relied on Democrats to protect the right to legal abortion, even as Democratic Party politicians from both the White House and Congress have consistently failed to fulfill their pro-choice campaign promises”, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/abortion-rights-turning-back-the-clock-way-way-back/">wrote Sharon Smith in 2022</a>. “The consequence is that abortion rights have been so eroded over the last decades—with restrictive waiting periods, parental notification and consent laws, laws criminalising transporting a patient to another state to procure an abortion, and the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding for poor women’s abortions, reinstated each year by Congress since 1976—that there was little left to salvage.”
The current reality, after the Trump-packed right-wing Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022, is a hellscape in much of the country. But the Democrats now see that abortion is overwhelmingly popular. Most activists knew that for decades, while Democratic politicians accommodated the right by insisting that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”. 
By running away from defending abortion, Democrats amplified anti-abortion messaging. Today, they are doing the same with their insistence, for purely electoral calculations, that they are “tougher on the border” than Trump. And they wonder why public opinion has shifted against the benefits of immigration to the US.
The hope that a Democratic victory in 2024 will defeat Trumpism is in vain. Trump may end up in prison, but the forces he helped to concentrate will remain. Without a mass upsurge in working-class or social struggle that alters the political balance of forces in the US, the same pressures will continue to batter the two-party system.
If the Democrats in power think that they can resume their normal, wonky bipartisan ways, they are in for a rude awakening. They might even face a more extreme right-wing opposition, whose leaders will be far more competent—and thus more dangerous—than Trump and his entourage.

Lance Selfa

Why is the US election so close?

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
--------------------
With a little over a week until election day, the polls show the closest race in a long time. The final New York Times poll had the race tied 48-48, and the most recent poll for CNN showed a 47-47 race. In the polling aggregator 538, Harris led Trump by <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/">1.4 percentage points on 26 October.</a> In the seven swing states that will determine the electoral college votes, surveys show the race to be tied or within a point or two for either candidate. Democrats believe that Harris leads in the bare minimum states she needs to win 270 electoral votes: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and a single congressional district in Nebraska.
Most people who aren’t Trump supporters continue to ask themselves how the race can be this close. After all, Trump was a terrible president who tried to overturn the last election. He is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a fraudster, a bigot, a racist. Dozens of people who worked in Trump’s administration have called him a menace and endorsed Harris. Trump’s one-time chief of staff, John Kelly, a conservative former general, has labelled Trump a “fascist” and reported conversations in which Trump signalled admiration for Adolf Hitler. Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, may be more unpopular than Trump.
To understand how we find ourselves here, we need to take a step back and look at the national, international and historical backdrop to the 2024 election. There are conjunctural and structural reasons for Trump’s staying power. 
First, the conjunctural. By many accounts, the US economy has had the strongest recovery from the pandemic of all its peers. Yet it still suffered from an increase in prices unseen in 40 years. While the inflation rate has dropped closer to historic averages, prices are still much higher than they were pre-pandemic. This means that for most of Biden’s term, working people’s living standards declined. And the Biden administration ended COVID-era social supports. 
If we look across the world and elections over the last year or so, we can see that most COVID-era incumbent governments have lost to the opposition: Britain, New Zealand, Argentina and the Netherlands, to name a few. Polls currently predict a landslide loss for Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada. So Trump benefits from a “throw the bums out” anti-incumbent feeling. 
From this viewpoint, the strength of the US economy and the unpopularity of MAGA (“make America great again”—Trump’s slogan) might be the only things keeping Harris in the race.
The “structural” point is that there is a large conservative bloc representing about 46-47 percent of the electorate that supports Trump no matter what. Half of these people are Christian religious conservatives. This is where most people who support conservative politics and are averse to social change and the like gather. Trump’s politics might be called “restorationist”, as in returning the US to the 1950s—or even to the idealised pre-COVID Trump years. 
A second structural feature that keeps Trump competitive is the electoral college, a constitutional relic of the 1700s designed to preserve the support of slave-holding southern states in the early US republic. The votes that elect the president are cast state by state, and are disproportionately allocated to conservative and rural states. 
Even though the Democrats have won more votes than the Republicans in seven of the last eight national presidential elections, the Republicans (including Trump in 2016) “won” the presidency twice while losing the popular vote. This is why the entire presidential campaign is focused on winning seven “swing” states, whose electorates are closely divided between the two parties. 
While Trump winning the popular vote is conceivable, most observers assume that Harris will win the national popular vote. But Trump could still end up as president by winning enough “swing state” votes to win the electoral college.
Does all this mean that Trump will win outright? There is no way to tell. But we can assume that unless (or even if) Harris wins decisively, Trump will declare victory and claim that the election was “stolen” from him. Trump and the Republicans <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/opinion/trump-election-crisis.html">have laid the groundwork for a series of challenges</a> to votes in states and to election certification, and other court challenges that might prompt the Trump-friendly Supreme Court to rule in his favour. 
In contrast to 2020, when Trump relied on a Star Wars-bar collection of lawyers to prosecute his case, and when key Republicans refused to go along with his “stolen election” lie, the GOP is more firmly on board with Trump’s strategy today. 
Moreover, as pro-Democratic Party legal expert Neil Katyal points out, for Trump to have succeeded in 2020, he would have had to reverse the electoral votes in several states. If the election is as close as it appears today, it could come down to the vote in one or two states. That would give Trump’s strategy a better chance of succeeding.
The Democrats aren’t without advantages. Harris has raised an astounding $1 billion in the last three months. Democratic ads dominate airwaves, and they have a huge advantage in the level of organisation, including paid staff and volunteers across the swing states. Democrats say they are more <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/649397/democrats-drive-surge-election-enthusiasm.aspx">“enthusiastic” to vote than Republicans report.</a> The Democrats’ most motivating issue, abortion rights, will be on ten states’ ballots, including swing states Arizona and Nevada. Those referendums could bring a more pro-Harris electorate to the ballot box. The key question is: Will all these factors overcome the conjunctural and structural factors that support Trump?
Harris’s campaign appears to be aggressive, with a media blitz, many rallies and ridicule of Trump. Trump’s appearances reveal his incoherence and malevolence. The Harris campaign also seems to think (and presumably they have data to back this up) that there is a non-trivial section of Republicans who will cross over for them. This is why the Harris campaign has emphasised support from Trump’s generals and has campaigned with the likes of former Republican representative Liz Cheney. 
<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/">By some estimates, Biden won almost one-in-five of the minu</a>scule number of self-described “liberal” or “moderate” Republicans in 2020. But overall, Biden won the support of only 5 percent of Republicans, compared to the 4 percent who voted for Clinton. Perhaps Harris will gain more Republican support than Biden did, but that’s hardly a mother lode of votes.
And what message does Harris’ courting of Republicans send to the Democratic Party’s core supporters? Harris and her team wouldn’t allow the symbolic concession of a Palestinian-American elected official to endorse her at the Democratic National Convention. And now she’s celebrating former Vice President Dick Cheney, who millions consider a war criminal for his role in engineering the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. If nothing else, Harris’s welcoming of anti-abortion, conservative Republicans into the Democratic “big tent” tells you what the Democratic Party really is: a centre-right party of the capitalist status quo.
With the election as close as it is, and it hinging on a few tens of thousands of votes in swing states, there could be a hundred reasons why one candidate wins and the other loses. The Arab Uncommitted movement said it <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/politics/uncommitted-movement-kamala-harris-trump/index.html">couldn’t endorse Harris, but it didn’t want Trump to win</a>. That can be interpreted as an indulgence to say that people who voted Uncommitted against Biden can still vote for Harris. But if they don’t or they vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or sit out the election, or skip the presidential line on their ballots, could that cost Harris Michigan? If so, the Democrats would have only themselves to blame.
No matter how the election turns out, its political meaning will be contested. If Harris wins, her supporters will take it as validation of the outreach to Republicans and inoculating themselves by endorsing the military and a “tough on the border” immigration policy. If Harris loses, no doubt Democratic “centrists” will say that didn’t <a href="https://thedemocraticstrategist.org/2024/08/teixeira-democrats-are-super-happy-working-class-voters-are-not/">move far enough to the right</a>. And social democratic progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will most likely say she wasn’t left wing enough. 
Right now, both sides are holding their fire and giving cover to Harris. If Harris loses, most of her supporters will despair of the country’s condition and wonder if they have completely lost touch with it.
The Democratic side feels <a href="https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/closing-strong-with-nv-senator-cortez">optimistic about what they are seeing “on the ground”</a>. So far, the early vote and new registrations seem to be trending to them. Their side will oversee the election machinery at the state level in most of the swing states. It’s still too early to tell how the election will swing with only a few days left.
If nothing else, the current state of the election should point out the absurdity of the system, its complete domination by the rich and the fact that neither candidate is addressing the underlying issues facing humanity today: global warming, economic precariousness and a migration crisis.

The final stretch of the US election

The same scene is playing out in more than 70 university campuses across Argentina: students fill gymnasiums, outdoor spaces, lecture theatres and streets. They sit, stand, drape themselves, drink maté, a herbal tea. They’re occupying their universities, and they’re planning a fight. “The students have awoken”, hospital worker and socialist Cesar Latorre told Red Flag via WhatsApp.
In February, far-right President Javier Milei cut university funding by 71 percent. Students responded with mass protests, including a million-strong march in April. In early October, Congress passed a bill to increase funding for state universities and to raise staff salaries to deal with the effects of inflation, which reached an annual rate of 236 percent in August and left many university staff impoverished. Milei threatened to block the bill, so students and staff held another set of nationwide mass rallies to defend it on 2 October. In the early hours of the following day, Milei vetoed the bill.
And so, on 5 October, at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Philosophy and Letters campus, students crowded around Ari, a young socialist holding a microphone. “They tell us we need to take the money from someone else”, she said. Milei has insisted that if universities want proper funding, Congress will have to take it from other sections of the budget, likely pension or welfare payments.
“If you want to know, in the opinion of the students, and of the teachers, where the money will come from for the increase in the budget for universities”, Ari declared, “we have to take it from the IMF, the church and the multinationals!” The crowd of students and teachers roared.
The occupations began in early October in the Philosophy and Letters faculty and the Psychology faculty of the UBA. The banners hanging from the buildings read, in big black letters, “tomada”, meaning “taken”. It’s more apt than “occupied”, because what the students are doing goes beyond a conventional sit-in. They’ve taken over the running of the faculties, establishing committees to take responsibility for cleaning, security, holding lessons and organising food.
During the day, they bring in supportive teachers to give lessons in the street, blocking off roads with their desks. Staff are allowed to clock in for their shifts (so that they get paid) but are promptly sent home. Senior staff, like the faculty deans, are banned altogether. As it gets dark, crowds move to the thrum of street drums, and barbecue smoke lingers.
When Milei vetoed the bill, students in Buenos Aires convened mass assemblies and debated what to do. They overwhelmingly voted to “take” despite their lack of experience in doing it: the last occupations of this scale happened in 2018. Socialist groups have a significant presence at universities nationwide, leading the argument for occupying alongside independent left-wing students. Now, they’re trying to draw more unaligned students into the committees and leadership of the occupations.
Student unions across Argentina are run by students from right-wing political traditions. In many places, the student union leaders argued against occupations while attempting to portray themselves as oppositional to Milei. Some of these leaders are Peronists, a nationalist political current that dominates the trade unions and ran the government before Milei came to office, presiding over an inflation crisis and austerity for workers.
The most significant political group in the student unions is the Radical Civic Union, a traditional centre-right party. But despite the weight of these groups in official student politics, videos posted online show vote after vote being carried nearly unanimously for occupying, from Buenos Aires to the remote provinces, with glee on the students’ faces and cheers filling the gymnasiums.
Universities are one of Milei’s favourite punching bags for his right-wing culture war rhetoric. In a speech to the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he said that public education is where “leftist educational curricula proliferate, openly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, in a country where what is needed is more capitalism and more freedom”.
His attack on public education stems partly from his ideological opposition to universities, but more from his desire to slash and burn as many public services as possible—from hospitals to airlines, oil refineries to cinemas. In fact, at the same time as the students were marching in defence of the Congress-approved education bill, Milei was <a href="https://twitter.com/wolfofwallst/status/1841516226272784774">meeting</a>
with Jordan Belfort, the criminal stockbroker turned free market culture warrior whose fall from grace was depicted in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Milei has systematically tried to divide the population and turn them against each other to dampen the prospects of a fight against his government. He’s tried to turn workers and middle-class people against the poor by complaining that they don’t work hard enough to deserve welfare benefits.
He has attacked state employees by using the “drain the swamp” rhetoric of former US President Donald Trump, painting public services and those who administer them as a bloated bureaucracy stealing from the country.
When cutting funding to the arts, he painted them as luxuries undeserving of public support. Now, he’s portraying universities as elite institutions that serve “no-one but the children of the rich and those of the upper-middle class”.
It isn’t true. According to economist Daniel Schteingart, Argentina’s university population has <a href="https://twitter.com/danyscht">increased</a>
from just 275,000 in 1970 to nearly 4 million today, and the expansion of higher education has overwhelmingly benefited the working class. For example, at the National University of La Matanza, in the outer suburbs of Buenos Aires, around 80 percent of students are the first generation in their families to attend university, according to the vice-chancellor.
Argentina’s working class remains highly organised compared to most other countries, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent for formal workers. This, along with a considerable presence of socialists in some important unions, helped to push union officials into calling two general strikes in January and May. Those strikes defeated some of the harshest aspects of Milei’s program, including the privatisation of the state airline and the state oil company.
But since then, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), Argentina’s main union body, has refused to call a third general strike. The CGT is linked to the centre-right Peronist party. Milei’s draconian attacks on the right to unionise, compulsory union membership and dues, and union control over pension funds threaten the social position of top CGT officials. Yet the CGT officials prefer to negotiate with the government while Milei’s attacks devastate workers’ living standards.
The poverty rate is now at a two-decade high of 53 percent. Substantial public spending cuts have slowed the rate of consumer price inflation but also caused a recession. In addition to Milei’s mass lay-offs in the public sector, there have been huge job cuts in the private sector. Without the call for a third general strike, which could unite the union movement, resistance has become increasingly restricted to the better organised sections of the working class like healthcare workers, public sector employees, teachers and aviation workers.
The failure of the CGT to continue a serious fight has emboldened Milei. He sees an opportunity to privatise industries he failed to sell immediately after taking office. For example, the important victory that the first two general strikes achieved in stopping the privatisation of Aerolineas Argentinas is now at risk of being undone. Aviation workers are well organised and have held several days of strike action, causing major disruption to the economy.
In a significant act of solidarity, the Brazilian aviation workers’ union declared that it would not allow its members to operate domestic Argentine flights. And on 30 October, broader layers of transport workers will hold a 24-hour national strike. This will be supported by a 36-hour national public sector strike scheduled to start the day before and carry over into the next.
There has been an ebb in action since the general strike in May. But the students have provided a new spark to the broader movement and have pulled university workers into the fight. On 21 October, university workers began a 48-hour national strike. Workers in one of the big university unions voted to extend the 48-hour strike to an entire week and said that supporting the student movement was one of the main reasons for extending the strike. And while a recent 24-hour strike was passive and didn’t include a march, the week-long strike will include open, public classes held in the streets.
Student assemblies in the streets outside university buildings will decide the future of the occupations over the coming weeks. Can they sustain the movement into November—and will workers’ strikes spread?

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Why is the US election so close?

The final stretch of the US election

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

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