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Full audio and transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/micahuetricht

We spoke with Micah Uetricht, managing editor at Jacobin Magazine and co-author of the recent Verso title, Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From The Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.


"Bernie's campaign, and the campaigns that have followed his, should show that there is also a way to do electoral politics that is actually spurring more class struggle, not tamping it down. Marxism is about both the objective conditions that you face, as well as the subjective efforts you can make to change the world. Good Marxism, in my opinion, always focuses on doing both of those things. What opportunities the objective conditions present to you, but also what you as an individual can do swimming outside the tides of history."


In Bigger than Bernie, activist writers Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht give us an intimate map of this emerging movement to remake American politics top to bottom, profiling the grassroots organizers who are building something bigger, and more ambitious, than the career of any one candidate. As participants themselves, Day and Uetricht provide a serious analysis of the prospects for long-term change, offering a strategy for making “political revolution” more than just a campaign slogan. They provide a road map for how to entrench democratic socialism in the halls of power and in our own lives.


Bigger than Bernie offers unmatched insights into the people behind the most unique campaign in modern American history and a clear-eyed sense of how the movement can sustain itself for the long haul.



What is the relationship between race and class, and which should be the primary focus to address on the level of political organizing? Questions such as these, argues our guest Asad Haider, misses the mark as these views seek to make determinations about the world at the level of conceptual abstractions. Furthermore, he suggests, such questions slide into a muddled debate between advancing either universal or particularist demands, identity politics or class politics, when the reality is that the abolition of white supremacy is by necessity a universal program aligned with the waging of class struggle.


“Abstract disputes over race and class, identity politics versus class reductionism, are obstacles. But it’s also an obstacle when we can’t conceive of any other form of human life. We think that higher wages, universal healthcare, and so on are the only possible goals that can be achieved, and that winning elections and working within the existing political structure is the only way we can achieve them. The overall perspective has to be one which says that we can conceive of human life in which people are not dependent on wages for survival. Not only that they should make higher wages, but that we should not have to depend on wages just to live. And that we should be able to control our own lives as members of the human community rather than transferring our power to a minority that defends its position with weapons and prisons. It’s possible I think to conceive of a society beyond that.”


Works Referenced

Asad Haider

Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump

Zombie Manifesto

On Depoliticization

Kimberle Crenshaw

Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color

Further Resources:

Viewpoint Magazine

Verso Books


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