"We still have a working-class majority in this country. Their occupations may have changed, but their struggles are the same. They’re still struggling with health care costs, with bad bosses, with low wages. The party is still confronting an electorate that’s majority working class, and it needs to think about how to win in those conditions.

The important thing here is that the party’s economic program really came first. So in 1993, Clinton comes into power. Democrats push through this very capital-friendly, business-friendly economic program, and then in ’94 they reap what they sowed.

They were conscious of that. There are these memos and interviews, oral-history accounts of people in the White House at the time, and they are talking about how even in ’93, they knew what was going to happen with NAFTA, with budget austerity. They knew they were going to lose a lot of working-class voters."

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/democrats-class-dealignment-working-class

"Today, a well-paying manufacturing job requires a hard science background, centered around engineering, technical proficiency, or in many cases, wiring and operating complex automated technology.

"We don’t want to bring back the jobs of yesterday — we want to enable the operational efficiency and innovation of tomorrow," Kenworthy says, stressing the need to "skate to where the puck is going" as manufacturing roles continue to evolve.

The exact type of manufacturing the U.S. hones in on will factor heavily as well. Textile and garment industry jobs aren't likely to attract American workers, Kenworthy theorizes, given the relatively low pay, poor hours and high physical demands. The focus instead should be on "anything in the high-tech sector," including the semiconductor sector, pharmaceuticals, automotive and aerospace, all of which beget the need for highly-skilled, well-trained workers with engineering backgrounds.

The problem right now, though, is that the infrastructure to educate and entice these workers simply doesn't exist, and there are currently no plans to build that out anytime soon, all while the Trump administration has sought to deport the very people who would want those manufacturing jobs the most.

"A broad program to empower and build a next-generation manufacturing workforce would be what is necessary to make this effective," Kenworthy posits. "Without that, all this effort to bring manufacturing back to the United States is not going to be effective.""

https://www.supplychainbrain.com/articles/41659-a-fools-errand-the-fatal-flaw-behind-a-us-manufacturing-revival

"We considered journalists to be those who worked for a media outlet with an identifiable focus on news, and who earned at least 50% of their income from journalism or worked at least 50% of their working week as a journalist. To be included in our survey, respondents also needed to work for a news outlet with a UK base and that was aimed, at least in part, at a UK audience.

After data cleaning, we retained a final sample of 1,130 respondents, a sufficient size to achieve a confidence level of at least 95% and a maximum error margin of 3%.

Our survey is part of the international Worlds of Journalism Study, which uses the same core questionnaire across 75 countries. The survey covers a wide range of topics, including journalists’ demographics, working conditions and their experience of safety and wellbeing.

For the UK study, we added two questions regarding journalists’ socioeconomic background. First, we asked what job the main earner in their households held when the respondents were 14 years old. Second, we asked about the school journalists attended: fee-paying private or state primary and secondary school, non-fee-paying selective secondary school (such as grammar school) or a school not in the UK.

The question on parents’ occupation allowed respondents to write in the title of the relevant job. We coded the replies manually using the nine categories of the Office for National Statistics’ 2020 Standard Occupational Classification.

Seventy-one percent of journalists in our sample came from a privileged background, with the main earner in their childhood household holding a job within the three top categories of the classification. Only 12% of our respondents came from a working-class background (sales and customer service occupations; process, plant and machine operatives and elementary occupations)."

https://theconversation.com/new-survey-shows-the-extent-of-class-privilege-in-uk-journalism-254838?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=bylinelinkedinbutton

"In Finland, manufacturing accounted for 24 percent of GDP. By 1991, it had declined to 17. In Sweden, manufacturing as a share of GDP declined from 21 to 16 percent during the same period. But by the early 2000, Finland brought its manufacturing share of GDP back up to 24 percent, and Sweden raised its manufacturing share of GDP to 20 percent.

The same trend can be observed in Singapore. Singapore experienced quite a significant decline in manufacturing in the mid-1980s, from 27 percent to 20 percent. But by the mid-2000s, it had recovered back to 27 percent. By the way, Singapore, despite what people think, is one of the most industrialized countries in the world: in terms of per capita manufacturing output, it ranks in the top five globally. There’s an interesting myth about it being a service economy.

The most industrialized country in the world is Switzerland. You think that the Swiss are dealing in the black money from Third World dictators and selling cow bells and cuckoo clocks to American and Japanese tourists. Actually, it is literally the most industrialized country in the world, if you count in terms of manufacturing output per person.

These countries have managed to revive their manufacturing industry, and since then they have declined a bit. But the lesson here is that these countries could do that only because they had a deliberate policy to revive manufacturing. What Donald Trump is trying to do is wishful thinking. Countries that have successfully increased their manufacturing output have deliberate policies to support manufacturing. In the Swedish and Finnish case, it also extended to retraining the workers made redundant because of the decline in traditional manufacturing sectors and then turning them into workers for new industries."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/tariffs-protectionism-manufacturing-industrial-policy

"Trump's policies reflect a transformation of the global trade and capital regime that had already started. One way or another, a dramatic change of some kind was necessary to address imbalances in the global economy that have been decades in the making. Current trade tensions are the result of a disconnect between the needs of individual economies and the needs of the global system. Although the global system benefits from rising wages, which push up demand for producers everywhere, tensions arise when individual countries can grow more quickly by boosting their manufacturing sectors at the expense of wage growth—for example, by directly and indirectly suppressing growth in household income relative to growth in worker productivity. The result is a global trading system in which, to their collective detriment, countries compete by keeping wages down.

The tariff regime Trump announced earlier this month is unlikely to solve this problem. To be effective, American trade policy must either reverse the savings imbalance in the rest of the world, or it must limit Washington’s role in accommodating it. Bilateral tariffs do neither.

But because something must replace the current system, policymakers would be wise to start crafting a sensible alternative. The best outcome would be a new global trade agreement among economies that commit to managing their domestic economic imbalances, rather than externalizing them in the form of trade surpluses. The result would be a customs union like the one proposed by the economist John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Parties to this agreement would be required to roughly balance their exports and imports while restricting trade surpluses from countries outside the trade agreement. Such a union could gradually expand to the entire world, leading to both higher global wages and better economic growth."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/global-trading-system-was-already-broken#

"A few days ago, Federal Reserve economist economist Ricardo Marto published an important paper on what happened to the economy in the period after Covid struck. What he found, after crunching numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is that there was massive redistribution of wealth upward, from working people to big business.

According to Marto, domestic non-financial corporate profits doubled, to $4 trillion a year. As a percentage of total economic output going to profits, they went from 13.9% to 16.2%, while the labor share modestly declined.

There are two other disturbing elements in the paper. First, these profits went to reward shareholders in the form of dividends, not to investment to build more capacity. And second, profit levels have remained elevated. Throughout the pandemic recovery period, economists were vehement that profit increases did not reflect increased concentration, and that increased profits were temporary. Yet this research shows that such assumptions were wishful thinking.

Indeed, the most serious domestic policy failure of the Biden administration was allowing their economists to aggressively avoid addressing this shift upward in wealth from working people to big business. And now let’s fast forward to the current moment. We are in a trade crisis, and this crisis has some echoes of the post-Covid supply chain mess. And I suspect Donald Trump might be repeating Biden’s mistake.

This new crisis, of course, is the one that’s been wrought by Trump’s own abrupt tariff policies."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-monopolies-could-exploit-the

"There is perhaps no organization with a better reputation among leftists around the world than the MST. Its admirers will tell you that the group has managed accomplishments that elude progressive movements elsewhere: It maintains a radical approach, pushing for revolution in the long term while providing homes and incomes for working-class Brazilians in the short; it has adapted to shifting conditions without suffering major rifts; and it fought to get Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s once and current president, out of prison in 2019 and back into power, all while keeping its independence from the ruling Workers’ Party. “We have been very inspired by the MST as a political and social movement,” Enzo Camacho, from the ALPAS Pilipinas, a group that works to organize the Filipino diaspora in Berlin, told me. Belén Díaz, a sociologist and a member of the left-feminist Bloque Latinoamericano collective, put it more bluntly: “The Landless Workers’ Movement is the most respected social movement in the world.”

In October 2022, the Workers’ Party won back the keys to the presidential palace and, despite a January 6–like coup attempt by Bolsonaro and his supporters, Lula took up residence the following year. With democracy secured and the reactionaries out of the executive branch, the MST shifted into a more offensive posture: It began to seize more unused land and to occupy illegal farms once again. The movement’s return to its pre-Bolsonaro form seemed to surprise Lula’s administration, and it generated some mainstream attention
(...)
Though Bolsonaro was defeated in 2022, his Partido Liberal won the largest bloc of seats in Congress. Lula must work with the right-wing forces funded by rich landowners and rapacious agribusinesses, lest his administration risk impeachment or abuses of the legal system"

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/brazil-mst-landless-workers-movement/

"What will it take to beat Amazon? Much more of what we’ve seen this past year, escalating to disruptive actions sustained over time and coordinated systematically on a global scale.

To get there, we will need union drives that embrace three principles: First, a class-struggle organising approach, recognizing that this is a fight between two opposing interests: Amazon workers, who demand the full fruits of their labor and rights at work, versus their bosses, who want to maximize profit and control. Second, the movement must be driven by bold, concrete demands that clarify what is at stake. Amazon workers have shown they will make extraordinary sacrifices if they are strongly motivated by the prospect of changing their lives. And third, there must be thorough and democratic shop-floor organising. There are no shortcuts to building the strength and resiliency necessary to withstand the blows of Amazon’s union busters.

This must be a coordinated, global effort."

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/04/how-amazon-workers-can-organise-globally/

"The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

"The bad news, as demonstrated by the American story, is that an age of leisure will not automatically flow from increased productivity. The good news is that political interventions can bring us closer to this vision.

“While Keynes’ predictions regarding productivity growth have actually been exceeded over the past nearly 100 years,” conclude Behringer, Gonzalez Granda, and van Treeck, “the obstacles to more leisure time are primarily socio-political in nature.”

The Scandinavian social democracies, even in their recently weakened states, offer the starkest counterexample. They are highly productive, but their workers put in six to ten fewer hours per week than their American counterparts do, a trend that holds for low and high earners alike.

Unions have proven essential in translating productivity gains into shorter working hours. American union membership has collapsed since the postwar period; Scandinavian union rates have fallen recently, but workers in the region still maintain a powerful, centralized collective bargaining system that secures shorter workweeks, generous paid leave, and predictable schedules.

The comprehensive welfare systems in these countries further reduce overwork. With universal health care, subsidized childcare, free education through university, and robust social safety nets, Scandinavians don’t face the same financial pressures that drive Americans to sacrifice their free time for a paycheck. Importantly, these welfare policies have also increased female workforce participation, reducing women’s spousal dependency and decreasing the pressure on men to work long hours to support their families.

Scandinavian societies have seen inequality expand and their welfare states erode in recent years, but these features are still significantly more pronounced than in the United States."

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/work-keynes-scandinavia-class-leisure/

I'm reading a lot of "analysis" that says Democrats should focus on class issues and downplay culture wars. While I agree, if "downplay culture wars" means "throw trans people under the bus" get out of here with that. Abandoning your values for political power is how we got here.

"Many factors contributed to Democrats’ losses, but party loyalists — especially the ones who oversaw the destruction of small-town and industrial America, are always happy to point the finger at bigotry. It’s a handy excuse for ignoring the party’s many flaws, including its capture by billionaire donors who directed Harris to back off her brief, tepid foray into economic populism.

Despite the rhetoric of the last decade, trying to win elections by exhorting Americans to exorcise their racist demons seems a dubious endeavor and one that, as scholar Adolph Reed has noted, risks “undermining the possibility of a political-economic challenge coming from the lower class.” Under the tutelage of Robin DiAngelo and earlier anti-racist gurus, social justice progressives have been trying for decades to train away the racism they believe is harbored in every “white-skinned body.”

The result? Democrats have now lost the trust of working America. If Democrats’ favorite refrain is that the voters are the problem, the party may as well fold up its tent."

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/democrats-biogtry-trump-harris-election

"According to a new study published FGS Global, they see a technology that will primarily benefit large corporations, be used to surveil them and invade their privacy, and over which they will have little power. FGS interviewed 800 union workers, 800 nonunion workers, as well as industry and political leaders. (Disclosure: The study was commissioned by the Omidyar Network, where I was previously a reporter in residence.)

Workers are excited about the potential productivity benefits the technology enables, but are also keenly aware that as it stands, those benefits will be captured by management, and that they will have little control over how AI is ultimately used in the workplace.

In other words, I would say that, by and large, workers are seeing right through Silicon Valley’s hype, and AI for what it is. They get it."

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/workers-know-exactly-who-ai-will

"An independent left media will not create the same controlled environment many Democrats and their patrons have come to rely on: paid advertisements, social media posts, and highly selective engagements with professional news. Hopefully, the 2024 election compels Democrats to move beyond these safe spaces. A vibrant left media sphere — with different strains of Democrats and leftists engaging in meaningful debate — would likely cool some of the animosity that festers when some views and communities are kept isolated. It might also counter factionalism and splintering across the left-of-center coalition.

The reluctance to engage new voices extends far beyond elected Democrats. Many progressives instinctively resist calls for outreach beyond the base. Some radicals cling to the fantasy that simply exposing more people to radical views will inspire a groundswell of support. Some wealthy backers may fear the unpredictable demands that new voices might introduce. Some activists fear that calls for “outreach” are just a coded push for moderation and tacking to the center. Given how often moderation is framed as the only path to grow a coalition, this skepticism is warranted. But building a left media sphere isn’t about compromising — it’s about forging new pathways to the Left."

#Media #News #Politics #AlternativeMedia #Journalism #WorkingClass #ClassWarfare https://jacobin.com/2025/03/left-media-working-class-right/

A quotation from Richard II

You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were and rustics you are still: you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. How ever, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course you want to follow.

Richard II of England (1367-1400) King of England (1377-1399) [Richard of Bordeaux]
Speech (1381-06-22) to the peasant followers of Wat Tyler at Walthamstow, St Alban’s Chronicle

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/richard-ii/75301/

"I just wish working people acted in their class interests as much as the billionaires do." Erik Loomis
#ClassWarfare #WhatNext #Community
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/02/billionaire-class-interest

“These guys have, both at the corporate level and at the individual level, been even better at avoiding taxes than in making good products,” Stiglitz said. “The level of taxes they pay as a share of their profits should be an embarrassment to them.” The 24 superbillionares declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment.

https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/meet-superbillionaires-worlds-ultra-rich-cb7a797c?st=7un8Cf&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Right on brand
The Trump Regime plans mass firing at office that funds homelessness programs
#Politics #Economics #Classwarfare #Project2025
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/22/g-s1-50199/doge-trump-hud-cuts-homeless-housing-programs