June 9, 2023

Thorough review of the 2023 Socialist Register: where we are now and what are the tasks, via Portside.

A new book seeks to “explain the evolution and enduring power of a racially inflected understanding of freedom” in America, combing through centuries of history in an attempt to define how a basic right for all people has been coveted and redefined by the right. “More than half a century after he stood in the ‘schoolhouse door’,” this review concludes, “the ghost of George Wallace still haunts American politics.” From the London Review of Books, via Portside.

From The American Prospect via Portside: A historical look at transit (in)equity in Baltimore, as well as newfound hope that Maryland Gov. Wes Moore may finally oversee the building of the proposed Red Line light rail system — long delayed by racist fearmongering. “The cancellation of the Red Line is a transgression deeply etched in the collective memory of Baltimore. Few places are as haunted as this city is by the egregiousness of its systemic racism in public transit.”

Again from Portside, thousands of early-career researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have kick-started the process of forming a union. They are calling on the agency — the world’s largest biomedical funder — to raise pay and improve benefits, as well as to bolster its policies and procedures on harassment and excessive workloads. About 150 of these researchers rallied on the NIH’s campus in Bethesda, Maryland, on June 1 to celebrate filing their union petition. Also in Popular Resistance.

In Dissent, Nina Luo argues: “We are not close to building the powerful and sustained mass movements we need, in part because we have not yet figured out how to transform the power of money into multiracial working-class power. Such a project is much more complicated than just changing the decision-makers named on a website.  … any good organizer could diagnose [the error] almost instantly: because funders don’t have a clear strategy based on an analysis of power and outcomes, what remains is cyclical and beleaguered conversations about structure and capacity.” 

Moira Donegan writes in The Guardian: “It is not a coincidence that the states which have the most punitive and draconian bans on abortion have also adopted the most aggressive targeting of transgender people and medical care. The bills are part of the same project by conservatives, who have been emboldened in their campaign of gender revanchism in the wake of Dobbs. Both abortion bans and transition care bans further the same goal: to transform the social category of gender into an enforceable legal status, linked to the sexed body at birth[,] and to prescribe a narrow and claustrophobic view of what that gender status must mean.” Thanks to Marie and the #repro-justice channel for sending this our way.