Good ideas don’t just grow legs and start wandering around in the world, changing things for the better. History, for good and for ill, is made by organised political forces. Helping to build such a movement that can fight for socialism is one important reason for running electoral campaigns.
The global picture is clear: the traditional reformist parties are utterly bankrupt, unpopular and incapable of standing up to the threat posed by the far right.
Women today have achieved formal equality in most spheres of life. They have much greater choice about what to do with their lives. But they are still a long way from being equal to men, and even further from liberation.
For left-wing people, it has long been uncontroversial to welcome into Australia refugees and migrants. Yet hostility towards so-called settler migrants has emerged among those espousing “anti-colonial” politics.
Joel Geier recounts the history of socialist organisations relating to the Black liberation movement in the United States, which began with the civil rights struggle in 1956 and ended with the Black Power movement in the early 1970s.
Recognising the Democratic Party as one of the chief pillars of a system that maintains exploitation and oppression in US society is the first step toward building a socialist alternative to it.
