Micah Uetricht
Bigger than Bernie: The Road to Democratic Socialism
Transcript April 6, 2020
[edited for clarity]
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Laborwave Radio in conversation with Micah Uetricht, managing editor at Jacobin Magazine, host of The Vast Majority podcast, and co-author with Meagan Day of Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From The Sanders Campaign To Democratic Socialism.
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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.
Works referenced and links at the end of the transcript.
Preface
"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."
Laborwave: At the time of this recording the book that you co-authored with Meagan Day, Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From The Sanders Campaign To Democratic Socialism, was just released so there hasn’t been much opportunity for people to engage with the content yet. Because of that I wanted to give you an opportunity to lay out some of the main arguments of the book. My understanding is that it’s largely an argument about how the “democratic road to socialism” is a possibility. Can you elaborate more on that, and other key highlights from the book?
Micah Uetricht: I would say that the main impetus for writing the book is the knowledge, which you will also hear from Bernie Sanders himself, that the election of Bernie Sanders, was never the panacea, or the one weird trick, of fixing the myriad social, political, economic problems we face. Bernie Sanders’ campaign slogan for 2020 is “not me, us,” which means there needs to be a broader movement beyond the election of a single figure like Bernie, or the election of a number of similarly politically aligned individuals. There needs to be a movement of millions of working-class people to change the world, and we take that seriously.
What sets Bernie Sanders apart from any other American politician in recent history is that it’s not that there is just a spectrum of politicians on a left-right spectrum and Bernie is a bit more on the left-side of that spectrum, it’s also that he conceives of social change happening in a different way than you hear articulated by any other mainstream politician. So we wanted to write this book to talk about what is special about Bernie, what we have learned about American politics from his campaigning, and also take stock of what kind of movement activity he has inspired. We focus on mostly electoral campaigns that have been run that are clearly inspired by his candidacy, along with grassroots movement organizing that has been inspired by his candidacy especially groups like Democratic Socialist of America, Movement for a Green New Deal, housing movement, and labor movement, and the rest of it.
We’re partisans in this fight, we’re not just neutral journalists chronicling this information even though we feel it’s useful. But we also want to see those movements succeed. Therefore the other part of the book is the strategic argument we’re making about what the “us” of the “not me, us” should be doing in the short, medium, long-term. That includes how we should think about and engage with the labor movement, how we should run electoral campaigns, the value of having a socialist organization like the Democratic Socialists of America. We end with a call for people to join that movement if they’re not already a part of it.
We tried to write the book in a way that is accessible to both people who are already part of that movement, or maybe are familiar with some of the basics that’s gone on with the socialist movement in recent years, so we wrote it in a way for folks with that baseline knowledge would find useful and probing. But it’s also pitched towards people who are just excited about Bernie’s campaign and want to know what they should do next.
LW: I want to ask more questions about what we do in the short, mid, and long-term, but before getting into that I want to zoom out a bit and think about this strategy in a broad sense. I know there are many people on the left who critique the strategy of engaging in the state arena and electoral politics as in itself undermining the possibility for independent working-class mass organizing that’s successful. What do y’all offer in terms of that critique and how do you respond to that?
MU: I don’t think that critique should be completely tossed out the window, as the argument has some merit and we speak in the book to the parts that do have merit such as the pitfalls of engaging in electoral politics. People who say that electoral politics, or the Democratic Party in particular, have been the graveyard of social movements and working-class activity are not completely wrong about that. But it’s also true that what those people have often has posited as the alternative hasn’t worked out either, where you don’t engage with electoral politics at all. In fact that has been a major part of what has been dominant on the American left for many decades, and that didn’t really get us anywhere.
Looking at the Bernie Sanders campaign it’s very clear that his campaign has helped stimulate class struggle in America. It has helped spur working-class self-activity, and led to more strikes and protests. It’s led to people being more comfortable with the idea that we need to take independent working-class action at the same time we need to fight to elect someone like Bernie Sanders, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or the half-dozen socialist city councilors in Chicago where I live. I don’t think anyone can say that we’re at a lower level of class struggle right now than we were before Bernie’s first campaign. His campaign has spurred more of that kind of organizing.
In order to continue to use elections to spur more of that kind of activity we have to go about elections in a particular way. We’ve learned from Bernie the kinds of possibilities that are out there that maybe folks who were skeptical of electoral activity didn’t think was possible before. It is possible to run a campaign for elected office and name and shame capitalist enemies, and talk about the distinct interest of the working-class and the capitalist class. It’s possible to run electoral campaigns that actually build movement infrastructure that can be used for non-electoral purposes. We have a whole section on that in focusing on the East Bay in California where they ran somebody named Jovanka Beckles for the state assembly. The campaign lost but the infrastructure that was built was used for supporting teachers when they went on strike last year.
I don’t want to say people are completely wrong to put out the pitfalls of electoral politics, and they are certainly correct in pointing out those pitfalls previous to Bernie’s campaign. But 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.
LW: Something that you all wrote that was excerpted in Salon that I appreciated was just a passing remark about state power, and how when the state was weaker, like in the moment of the Russian Revolution, it was possible to pursue insurrectionary activities that could topple the government and overthrow the state. Sounds like you all are putting forth the argument that the state is more powerful today, and it’s not really a possibility to just completely avoid and ignore it in this independent fashion that some people would romanticize. Would you say that’s an accurate assessment and is that what you’re trying to communicate?
MU: In the case of something like Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1959, the state was not seen as a legitimate body or was as firmly entrenched in Russian or Cuban society in the way that the US state is now. So you could something like in 1917 like storm the Winter Palace and the state would fall. We should be serious and sober about the situation we’re in now, and that’s not going to happen. If we were to storm the White House and toss Donald Trump in the front lawn, as cathartic as that might be, it probably wouldn’t really get us to where we want to go. And I’m a bit grateful for that because I don’t want to go through the Russian Civil War; that sucked! That was grinding misery for year, not fun. [laughter] There are opportunities for us to use the existing democratic process, such that it is, to advance the socialist project. We take great pains in the rest of the book to say, of course, that doesn’t mean capitalists will just let you use these small-d democratic processes that we have to fundamentally alter our society. In fact if you look at historical examples like in Chile in 1973, or France under Francois Mitterrand, or Sweden in the 1970s, the capitalist class will mobilize in ways that are not the full-out whites versus reds Russian Civil War. So we need to be cognizant and sober of those pushbacks that capitalists will engage in, but we want to fundamentally use existing democratic processes and do democratic organizing in the broadest sense.
Ralph Miliband, the late British Marxist thinker, wrote about how if revolution is to have a chance in the twentieth-century and today it will be through doing real mass democratic organizing of millions of people. You can’t just have small cadres of people carrying out organizing and think that will be enough. The Sanders campaign has shown us that this sort of organizing is possible. It’s also shown, obviously, the extent to which the media establishment, the Democratic Party establishment, and all the rest will move heaven and earth to try to destroy that candidacy, but we’ve seen that there are opportunities to use existing democratic processes to advance a socialist agenda.
LW: Thinking back to what you were just saying about the crisis of legitimacy that the Russian state suffered in 1917, I have been wondering about why this moment in time has enabled Bernie Sanders to rise to more prominence than what would have been feasible even in 2008 or 2012? Partly I think the election of Donald Trump did create a moment of the crisis of legitimacy, at least for a lot of progressives and liberals, but I’m also wondering right now what the implications are as we’re at the early stages of a pandemic, which has created another crisis of legitimacy exposing how incapable our state apparatus is in saving people’s lives. I mean if anyone isn’t for Medicare for All right now I just don’t even know what world they’re in.
Also, for a while I thought Bernie was going to win the primary and then win the presidency, but now I’m fairly convinced Biden will win it and will go on to lose the general election. So I’ve been ruminating on that prospect, what will that do for the Democratic Party? Will losing the general election just completely invalidate them for people and create a crisis of legitimacy for them that would allow mass movements that space to claim.
Those are just some rambling thoughts I have. What do you think about any of that?
MU: To your first point about the difference between now and 2008 and 2012, we talk about in the first chapter of the book on Bernie by tracking his biography along with the rise and fall of social movements throughout his lifetime. He was a product of his historical circumstances. He engaged in the Civil Rights Movement, and that obviously stamped his thinking very strongly along with his socialist political education through The Young People’s Socialist League. He was with the tides of history by being with the socialist movements of his age, and then he sort of swam against the tides of history in the 1970s and 80s by becoming mayor Burlington [Vermont] and going into congress.
Marxism is all about both the objective conditions you face as well as the subjective efforts you can make to change the world. Good Marxism, in my opinion, focuses on both of those things. What opportunities the objective conditions present to you, but also what you as an individual can do swimming against the tides of history.
2008 happened and it was a real crisis of legitimacy for our economic system, but of course the left was not ascendent at the time. The “ideas that were laying around” at the time were largely provided by the right. People eventually got angry about that, and then we saw the rise of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and that had resonance because of the expanding rise in inequality and the corporate bailouts. But all that energy dissipated and never cohered into a credible challenge to the status quo.
I think the reason Bernie has had so much resonance when he ran in 2016 is because those objective conditions were all there, and because he is this unique figure in American political history-- you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone like him in all of American political history. He was where he was in the Senate putting forward a politics that was not in vogue at the time. In 2016 talking about democratic socialism really would have gotten you laughed out of the room. I was an editor at Jacobin at the time and had just made my peace with the fact that I’d be toiling in obscurity for the rest of my life and no one would find any resonance with the stuff I was putting forward. I was putting it forward because it was the right thing to do, but not because it would actually make an impact on the world. Lo and behold Bernie’s campaign is able to cohere a critique of the system that was based on people’s rage at the objective conditions they were facing, and he says let’s funnel some of that energy into a campaign for the presidency and in doing so puts democratic socialism back on the national agenda, and inspires people like AOC into office and leads to the rebirth of the Democratic Socialists of America, and all the rest of it.
Not sure if that really answers your question, but it’s sort of a long-winded way of talking about what I think is unique and important about Bernie, and how his own unique subjective characteristics helped produce the moment that we’re in and pulled people together around an alternative political and economic vision. One that has certainly not won, but I think is in pretty good shape in terms of gathering momentum and gaining power and legitimacy. I think this grassroots movement is in a good place to be successful in the short, medium, and long term.
LW: I do want to return to the question about what happens to the Democratic Party when they lose this next election, but before that let’s talk more about the short, mid, and long term strategy. I do want to express resonance with what you were saying about how you imagined you would just be writing into obscurity, and I have had some similar experience in how now I can talk about socialism and radical politics without people looking at me like I’m from outer space. It’s very different than it was really not that long ago.
You were talking about the East Bay state assembly campaign as offering a concrete example of the short-term strategy toward democratic socialism. Can you talk more about what that campaign was and how it embodies the short-term strategy you think is available?
MU: That section was, unsurprisingly, written by Meagan who lives in the East Bay and participated in that campaign. They ran a woman for state assembly who was a local city council member in the city of Richmond, California. She had come from the Richmond Progressive Alliance, which has a long history and Steve Early wrote this great book called Refinery Town that was about the Richmond Progressive Alliance’s left electoral efforts which have been going before Bernie’s campaign. But they ran her, and she was a rank-and-file union member, Black queer Latina immigrant woman against someone named Buffy Wicks who was the California State Director for the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 and is nicknamed “Buffy the Bernie Slayer,” if that gives you some insight into what she’s all about.
So there’s Jovanka Beckles, a progressive leftist, running against this candidate, Buffy Wicks, this centrist political hack, and they ran a really valiant campaign. I actually visited East Bay once while the campaign was in full swing, and you could just tell by hanging out with East Bay DSA folks and driving around the area with signs everywhere that people were just on fire for this campaign. The campaign lost, which is not surprising given the power and money that Buffy Wicks had, but in going all in on this campaign and creating this campaign infrastructure through the East Bay DSA what they ended up doing shortly after that election was over, they had an opportunity to put all of that infrastructure to use by supporting the Oakland teachers strike.
I shared a panel at last year’s Socialism Conference in Chicago that was about how socialists engaged with that Oakland teachers strike, and it was very clear that the East Bay DSA was the most important organization outside of the union to marshal support for the strike. Any action, you name it, they were doing it. They were sending socialists out on roving picket lines at 6am in the morning to beef up picket lines, they were going all through the city putting up signs at local businesses supporting the teachers. They spearheaded the art and designing of signs that were ubiquitous throughout protests. They did a million different things that were used to support and beef up this militant teach strike. That’s the kind of example of how you can run a campaign toward democratic socialism. They were naming class opponents and talking about austerity, and using a campaign as purposefully as possible to build strength for grassroots movements. That didn’t happen accidentally, it was a product of how they chose to run their state assembly campaign, and it was not just a one-off effort where all the time and energy people put into the campaign just disappeared, but rather it continued to be used in future non-electoral campaigns. This is just a small example of how we should be doing these kinds of campaigns going forward, and an example of how electoral politics can be used in a way to strengthen class struggle politics rather than weaken them.
LW: In that example it sounds like the short term strategic plan is to use elections to build infrastructure, and then utilize that infrastructure to deploy support for local class struggle battles. That sounds like a good case study. How does that then translate into a mid-term strategy, so what do you do after that?
MU: To continue with the California example, I would not be surprised if they run Jovanka Beckles for higher office and win in that arena, maybe when Buffy Wicks runs for Senate or whatever on her march towards becoming president of the United States. But through the campaign they gained this electoral expertise that they could then use to help support Jovanka and any DSA people that might be willing to run for state office. They forged relationships with the Oakland Educators Association, the teachers union, that showed that they were reliable allies and could be called upon to put boots on the ground and devote their time and energy toward supporting those struggles. People became teachers around that time, because they were inspired and East Bay DSA had the idea that they could become teachers to join these struggles.
For the medium and longer term people saw opportunities to continue what they had done and expand it in both the electoral realm and the social movement realm. I think they also established themselves generally in the Bay Area as a political force to be reckoned with in politics generally. They showed that DSA is not some kind of arm-chair socialist organization that is just taking potshots with the capitalists and neoliberal Democrats from the sidelines, but they’re actually in the streets fighting those forces. It left them with the kind of longer term infrastructure that can be used to wage more class struggle, both at the ballot box and in the streets.
LW: My impression of the book on the surface and what I’ve been able to read from it is that your long-term strategy doesn’t necessarily require victories at the presidential level, or at least a victory for Bernie Sanders. Is that an accurate assessment, or how important is it to win those major elections at the state level for president and the senate and so forth?
MU: Well the left has a long history of trying to console itself when we lose, because we lose most of the time so we say “well at least we learned and taught some lessons.” We always have this sort of positive spin in the face of defeat. I don’t want to be dishonest and spin defeats into claims of victory. Of course the fact that Bernie looks like he will not win the presidency is a crushing defeat that we should parse the lessons of and accept that it’s a bad thing that he won’t win the presidency.
But I also think we should zoom out and think about where we are right now. It’s not weird that the Democratic establishment, mainstream media, and the capitalist class successfully stopped an insurgent democratic socialist presidential candidate. That’s not weird. What’s weird is that in a time when democratic socialism was still anathema, when you would still be subject to red-baiting and socialism would get you laughed out of the room as you and I both know, within just a couple of years that ideology and a cranky, old, Jewish, socialist guy, who doesn’t comb his hair and buys his suits from Kohls, came extremely close to winning the presidency. That’s amazing! That’s an incredible thing that was accomplished in a very short amount of time, and not only did he manage to do that but he helped spark a movement that is now playing a central role in the political arena. It sucks to lose, but we should have known from the beginning that this is a long-distance race.
We should think about potential historical analogies. I’m sure in 1964 when Barry Goldwater lost the primary for the Republican presidential nomination that the foaming at the mouth reactionary Republicans were devastated, but we know now that a decade and a half later the Goldwater campaign would translate into the Reagan presidency which would reshape politics for decades to come. It’s too soon to predict that Bernie is going to be our Goldwater, but it’s not inconceivable that this could be the case, and we should act accordingly. The people who lost in 1964 didn’t fold up their tables and toss out their reactionary list and go home. They doubled down their efforts and made more progress than they thought they ever could before that campaign, and it ended up paying off for them. We should do the same, but of course with the interest of the vast majority of humanity in mind as opposed to attacking working-class people and gay people and women like the Goldwater people did.
I think we’re in a good position to win this long term strategy, and people should take the time to mourn the Bernie campaign but they should also take that 30,000 foot view and realize that we’re in pretty good shape moving forward. Now is the time to keep pushing on this because we now have a toe hold in American politics and we should take that toe hold and use it to rise to the next level.
LW: I want to ask a two part question. What do you think has changed in terms of a response and a strategic plan in the midst of the current pandemic? After addressing that I’m curious to consider again about the upcoming presidential election, which is one I feel fairly confident will be won by Trump, so what happens when Trump wins again to the openings available in the Democratic Party because maybe the party won’t have any legitimacy for liberals and progressives anymore?
MU: To the first question of how the pandemic changes our strategy. Obviously this is the $64,000 question that as somebody that just wrote a book I should act like I’m just totally confident in my projections of what that strategy should look like.
LW: Well thank you for not being pretentious.
MU: [laughter] Like everybody else I’m just like what the hell I don’t know what to do. The lifeblood of left politics is getting together in public spaces and getting together with comrades to debate issues and being visible in protests. All of which is in some ways on hold right now. But of course the pandemic does create new opportunities. For one thing, just this week alone we have seen that the level of working-class militancy is through the roof because people rightly understand that their lives are at stake. We just heard about Amazon walkouts, Instacart walkouts, GE [General Electric] workers demanding that their factory retool to produce ventilators. There’s a New York Times op-ed that rounds up everything and it’s dozens of different workplaces and industries going on these wildcat strikes. Also healthcare workers such as in Oakland are staging public protests stating that their hospitals have been decimated by austerity. And the most obvious point of all that the pandemic really shows why we need Medicare for All. The fact that we have a for-profit health system has left us totally unable to respond to this crisis. The Medicare for All piece, in particular, was obviously the most important issue of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and that’s the one we have made the most progress on in terms of winning the American people over to our side. We can’t bang the drum enough about that right now in the middle of this pandemic. So much of the response to the pandemic really grates against a lot of people’s basic sense of humanity and historic wrong. When they hear that there are for-profit health companies that are profiting off the health crisis, or that people are being denied treatment for coronavirus. All of these things are just mind bogglingly horrific, and they make the case for Medicare for All for us. We need to do everything we can to exploit the moment to continue putting that demand for Medicare for All forward.
Also we’ve seen left-elected officials like Ilhan Omar and AOC taking the demands of the left and injecting them into the mainstream. They’re talking about the need to suspend rent payments at a time when people are experiencing mass unemployment and the kinds of stimulus being discussed are pitiful compared to even places like the United Kingdom. There are all kinds of obvious and blatantly immoral and wrong responses to this pandemic, and I think it falls upon socialists to show that we have another solution for what this could look like. We have a credible idea about what a better society might look like, and there’s not an alternative that’s being put forward by the so-called opposition party in the Democrats.
Your second question was what happens when Trump wins again. This is part of an argument we make in the book for why we should, despite the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and that they are fundamentally a capitalist party, engage with them in a combative way like Bernie and others have done. Even if we don’t win these elections we’re showing the total bankruptness of this party. I think for millions of people who are paying attention to the Democratic race they see someone like Bernie, who is putting forward demands for Medicare for All and has a steadfast moral vision and plan for the country, and then they look at the corpse that Bernie is up against. And they see the entire establishment trying to mobilize against Bernie to do like a Weekend at Bernie’s style campaign with Joe Biden, propping up this corpse of a man, and they’d rather see the corpse run against Trump than a guy who wants free healthcare and education for everybody. That’s a revealing thing for millions of people, and shows how craven these Democratic officials are and how they don’t have the best interest of humanity in mind. Through heightening those contradictions in the Democratic Party will open up new opportunities for the future. Of course the risk there is that if we can’t rise to the occasion and actually provide the alternative to the Chuck Shumer's and Nancy Pelosi’s of the world, then it will rebound for Trump and he’ll be the main beneficiary. We always say it’s socialism or barbarism, and there are new opportunities for socialism but through the continued bankruptcy of the Democratic Party there are new opportunities for barbarism too.
LW: Absolutely. The final question I wanted to ask you, going back to the Goldwater example you provided, that moment in time for the Republicans was an opportunity for them to see a pathway forward. Run this insurgent from the right of the mainstream of the party, and push forward until that becomes the norm. This then transitions into what’s been called the “Southern Strategy” where you build an apparatus at the base through winning local elections and elections for sheriff and the like so that the major elections become easier to win. What you were suggesting is that maybe Bernie could become the Goldwater for us, and I want to hear more about that but also I imagine there’s a lot of folks that would worry about that strategy in the sense of time. Do we really have the time for this strategic plan? Not even in just the pandemic moment, but the pandemic definitely heightens that sense of urgency, but also the climate crisis and the all the other heightened contradictions of capitalism where barbarism seems right at the door, if not already inside the house, so do we have time for this strategy?
MU: Everybody is worried about time as they should be given the impending catastrophe of climate change, or the already here catastrophe of climate change. But as I said this kind of strategic orientation has borne a lot of fruit in a very short period of time through the Bernie campaign. Just saying again that four and half years ago there was no DSA, socialism was not seen as something that needed to be responded to and shot down as a legitimate threat in the mainstream media and papers as it is now. Every other day Politico or The Atlantic or whoever the guardians of mainstream political thought are feeling the need to shoot down socialists. That’s a good sign. That means we have broken through on some level.
I also don’t think we have another option. We were way out in the wilderness for decades in the period when the left had decided to reject any engagement with the state and it meant that the state was basically uncontested between horrible, centrist, neoliberal hacks and absolutely craven, foaming at the mouth, reactionary Republicans. That’s a pretty bleak situation to be in. I think if we’re going to save our planet and society from the many catastrophes that we’re facing we have to be vying for power. That doesn’t mean that we need to just do the slowest, individual person by person base-building. That’s important obviously, but Bernie showed that great leaps are possible in short amounts of time. So let’s keep leaping.
Possibilities are there through this kind of politics that we’ve seen through Bernie and the DSA to save ourselves from catastrophes. The worst case scenarios are by no means written in stone and we really can change our society and the world.
LW: Do you have any final thoughts you wish to share with our listeners?
MU: The book was written for a couple of purposes. One, to try to connect with people who are interested in the Bernie campaign, but don’t know what to do afterwards. And we wanted to let them know to not get dejected or disheartened, rather join this movement that has accomplished a lot in the past few years. Meagan and I are both participants in this new socialist movement, and have been active in electoral and non-electoral fights and obviously we think that is a most pressing political task. But we also have found great joy and companionship and friendship and love with people through engaging in that kind of struggle. We’ve gotten great meaning in our lives through engaging with the socialist movement and engaging with all kinds of working-class fights. At the risk of sounding sappy people can find that kind of meaning, joy, and love through struggle. It’s not always easy. The Democratic Socialists of America is a robustly democratic organization, which is both good and sometimes maddening. You have to learn how to deal with people you disagree with and maybe don’t like, but that’s the stuff of democratic politics and for us there is no other way we’d rather live our lives than fighting for the struggle. It’s a good way to live, so we encourage other people to do it too.
Works Referenced and Further Resources
Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From The Sanders Campaign To Democratic Socialism
Meagan Day & Micah Uetricht
https://jacobinmag.com/store/product/69
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3167-bigger-than-bernie
Jacobin Magazine
The Vast Majority, a podcast from Jacobin with Micah Uetricht
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/vast-majority-podcast-micah-uetricht
Jovanka Beckles for State Assembly
“Why Bernie Sanders is just the beginning of an American turn to the left”
Meagan Day & Micah Uetricht, Salon
October by China Mieville
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2731-october
“Lenin’s State and Revolution” by Ralph Miliband
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/lenin-state-and-revolution-miliband
The Young People’s Socialist League
http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/ypsl.html
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
Charles M. Payne
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520251762/ive-got-the-light-of-freedom
Democratic Socialists of America
Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Making of an American City
Steve Early
Oakland Education Association
Richmond Progressive Alliance
https://www.richmondprogressivealliance.net/
“Despite threats from management, Amazon warehouse workers in Chicago strike to demand better coronavirus precautions.”
Julia Conley Common Dreams
“Why Instacart Workers Went on Strike”
Maximillian Alvarez In These Times
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22432/why-instacart-workers-went-on-strike
“General Electric Workers Launch Protest, Demand to Make Ventilators”
Edward Ongweso Jr. Vice
The Junius Pamphlet
Rosa Luxemburg
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm
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