Eric Blanc covers the Arizona teachers strikes in the context of longstanding privatization policies there and Kate Aronoff covers the teachers strikes in Puerto Rico. Cooper and Gowan discuss the need for more social housing.  In honor of Marx's second centenary, Dissent republishes Marshall Berman's essential forward to the Communist Manifesto. Sarah Jaffe explores in depth "Why did a majority of white women vote for Trump?"

In effect, the working class has been organized out of US politics. The “Golden Rule” - those with the gold make the rules - is stronger than ever. As the political scientist Thomas Ferguson puts it, the Democratic and Republican parties are bank accounts more than anything else, and only candidates and policy positions that attract an adequate level of financing make their way into the political system.
 
How did this play out in the 2016 presidential campaign?
 
A recent study led by Ferguson takes a look at the competing investor blocs that lined up behind the various candidates. Trump powered through the Republican primary campaign largely on the strength of his own resources and small donors. This is what allowed him to flout GOP orthodoxy without being punished by powerful donors. After he won the nomination, big business interests and big-money donors came in from the cold, and began to infuse huge amounts of money that spiked in the final days of the campaign. It’s likely that this last-minute surge of dark money helped to push him over the line in the crucial battleground states that his campaign wisely targeted.
 
By contrast, the Clinton campaign was extremely reliant on large donations from a cross-section of corporate America. Its dependence on corporate largess prevented it from speaking meaningfully about the desperate challenges facing the masses of people in this country. It was a content-free campaign that focused almost exclusively on personality and qualifications, one that had nothing much to say to struggling voters in the states that ultimately decided the outcome (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc.), states where the unionization rate, not coincidentally, has dropped sharply in the last few years. 
 
The truly new development in US politics was the Bernie Sanders campaign. The scale of his achievement has yet to be fully apprehended. As Ferguson observes, this is the first time in modern US political history that a competitive major party candidate did so well with basically no support from major business interests or large donors. Bernie mobilized a vast army of small donors and supporters who were moved by his truth-telling and the call for a political revolution against the billionaire class.
 
Trump certainly represents a departure from the norm, but the Bernie breakthrough signals the possibility for a truly new era in US politics. The thirteen million people who cast votes for Sanders in the Democratic primaries, together with the masses of people in the “Party of Non-Voters,” constitute the potential social base for left politics in the US today.
 
We can’t count on “The Resistance” to organize that base. Groups like Indivisible appeal to middle- and upper-middle class liberals, and its tactical orientation is short-termist and purely defensive. This milieu will eventually line up behind any Democratic candidate on the ballot in the midterm elections, and it will berate anyone on the left who doesn’t share their enthusiasm. It will be very interesting to see how the dynamics around the midterm election play out within groups like DSA.
 
Despite the severe limitations of The Resistance, it would not be wise to dismiss everyone who’s drawn to this milieu as a lost cause. Roughly two million people participated in Women’s March activities in January, and while we shouldn’t have illusions about their potential it makes sense to appeal to at least some of those who marched under its banner. We need to be willing to take our politics to anyone who’s fed up with the current situation and looking to fight back.
 
Still, DSA and the broad left will not be able to take advantage of the Bernie breakthrough unless we find a way to re-establish the severed link between socialism and the working class. We must reject any politics that views an orientation to class struggle and the labor movement as outdated or irrelevant, or as an expression of insensitivity to matters of social oppression.
 
Sanders himself offers an excellent example of how this might be done. Despite widespread claims that Bernie’s so-called “class reductionism” appeals primarily to white people and “brocialists,” polls consistently show that he wins his highest approval ratings from women and people of color.
 
Socialists must fight expressions of discrimination and oppression wherever they occur. This is why we have always been in the front lines of the fight for civil rights and liberties; against attacks on immigrants and racial minorities; and for the full equality of women and queer people in our society.
 
But these fights cannot ultimately succeed without attacking the underlying economic roots of social oppression: the competition for jobs and resources that pits working class people against each other at the bottom of society. And that won’t be possible in the absence of a compelling program of economic justice for all, advanced by a movement that cuts across identities and speaks to the needs of the working class majority in all its variety. The growing fight for Medicare For All is a prime example of what one aspect of such a program would look like in practice.
 
Rebuilding the left and changing the world is not going to happen overnight. It is the project of a lifetime, and probably more than that. Remember the words of Engels: “Where it is a question of the complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves have already grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for...But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long persistent work is required...”