The radicalization of workers isn’t a steadily and inexorably upward process. It ebbs and flows for any number of reasons. Class understanding is made and unmake. And to understand each of these moments of making or unmaking requires a concrete analysis of that moment. In his analysis of the current GM strike, veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse unearths the background and larger canvas that prompted GM workers to go on strike after a long hiatus during which the strike weapon was put on the back burner. Of no small significance here were the recent strike actions by teachers and other groups of workers.

Jeremy Corbyn’s recent speech to the Trade Union Congress is impressive. It is an unmistakable and uncompromising challenge to class power, privileges, and prerogatives, But I was also surprised by what it didn’t say, that is, the absence of any mention of other dimensions of the larger democratic struggle. Or the necessity of a policy of alliances in current and upcoming struggles with key social constituencies besides labor. Or the spike in xenophobia and racism in the wake of Brexit. If this isn’t an example, albeit an unfortunate one, of what the left in the UK calls “labourism,'” I’m not sure what is. But I’m not sure if the left there sees matters this way.

Defenders of Corbyn’s speech, of course, might say that he was talking to a trade union audience, but, actually, that is all the more reason to mention what went unsaid. The requisites of defeating the right and constructing a just society there as well as here and across the globe require concepts of analysis and struggle — class and otherwise — that are broadly constructed and elastic.

More to the point, they require an appreciation that class and democratic struggles aren’t separate, occupying different lanes at the analytical and practical level, Instead, they are organically joined by multiple threads and on many levels.

A narrow class approach, even when dressed in militant and substantive clothing as Corbyn’s speech to the Trade Union Congress was, ends up missing these interconnections, and thus doesn’t meet the political, strategic, and tactical test of this moment.

Indeed, if persisted in, it can easily demobilize necessary allies of labor, yield ground to the racist, xenophobic, and anti-labor right in Britisih politics, and shortchange the ideological understanding of a substantial section of the British working class that has been left behind by economic and technological change and neoliberal policies. A wider lens would serve labor and the UK well.

In what amounts to an editorial, Bhaskar Sunkara and Micah Uetricht write in Jacobin, what I consider, an unnecessarily scathing, counterproductive, and silly take on the Working Families Party endorsement of Elizabeth Warren. Their editorial in some ways says less about the politics of WFP and more about the politics of the editors of Jacobin.

There’s nothing wrong with taking issue with the WFP’s decision, but that isn’t the issue here. It’s how the authors do it. I could mention their dismissal of Elizabeth Warren and her many supporters with faint praise, among other things, but I will offer only the editorial’s concluding paragraph.

“The Sanders base,” Sunkara and Uetricht write, “isn’t going away, whatever the election results next year. The future of progressive politics lies with them. The Working Families Party has waited decades for that future, but the party may have just written itself out of it.”

Wow! Somehow I missed the anointment of Sunkara and Uetricht as the arbiters of all things left and Sanders’ supporters as the lodestar of the left.

Much of the media assume without any evidence yet that Iran was the site of the attack on Saudi oil fields. We’ll see. If you step back from the present situation playing out in the Middle East, it hard not to see the hand of the Trump administration as the cause of the exacerbation of tensions and conflict in that region of the world.

Maybe a starting point to deescalate tensions is for the Saudis to stop their genocidal war against the people of Yemen and for Trump to end the punitive sanctions against the Iranians. And, even if it turns out that the Iranians were behind the attack, the first and subsequent steps should be diplomatic, not threats, saber rattling, and war.

After listening to early Dylan and then some of his later stuff on my recent road trip to Detroit, I couldn’t help but think that I’m so glad he went electric and had the courage to evolve as an artist, despite the pressure not to do so. That said, I have to admit I spent more time listening to Springsteen on my 12 hour drive.

I think I listened to Promised Land 10 times!