White workers accrue skin privileges in the form of higher wages and salaries, superior health care, access to quality schools and safer neighborhoods, promising job opportunities and promotions, longer life expectancy, and more compared to their brothers and sisters of color. I’m hardly the first one to make this observation in recent years. A legion of commentators have made the same point far better than me. But what goes unmentioned in many instances is the other side of this dialectic. Which is that white privileges, which are a product of racist exploitation and oppression, aren’t an unalloyed blessing for white workers.

If that is so, and I believe it is, one of the great challenges of our time is to convince white workers that in joining with their sisters and brothers of color in a common class and anti-racist struggle, they have much more to win than to lose, politically, economically, culturally, and morally.

I think the term “bourgeois democracy” is more trouble than it’s worth. It should be quietly retired. In the interpretation of too many on the ideological left, the term is understood and employed in such a way that it minimizes the importance of democratic structures and governance in a capitalist society. They’re more hollow than substantive. And who needs that at this moment when the future of democracy in our country, not to mention many other countries, hangs in balance.

Any measure of class understanding and development of the labor and working class movement has to account for the fact that a substantial section of organized workers – in the 40 per cent range and more – voted for Trump in the last election. And that includes trade unionists in the midwest states. The current strike surge that goes back to 2018 is reflective of a new level of class militancy and confidence, but it isn’t yet clear to what degree it expresses a new level and scale of class consciousness across the working class. The elections next year and then two years later will in many ways provide a rough answer to both questions as well as the degree to which the working class and labor movement is politically bifurcated.

Watching Ray Allen and Reggie Miller in pregame at MSG, the mecca of basketball. Reggie and then Ray were career leaders in 3 point shots. Tonite, Steph Curry will break Allen’s record. And both of them are so gracious towards Steph. They know how much sweated labor goes into being a great 3 point shooter, as they were and Steph is. For a kid who lived, breathed, and survived thanks to basketball, this is a special moment.

The implosion of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries of Eastern Eastern Europe forced me to rethink the role of democracy in socialist society. Among other things, I arrived at the conclusion that democracy in socialist societies had to be real and substantive, not formal and hollow.

It should include an independent press (as opposed to state controlled media), a robust civil society, transparency and accountability, an independent judiciary, a multi-party system, the protection of individual rights and liberties, the expansion of social, economic, and democratic rights, democratic planning and so forth.

E. P. Thompson, the great Marxist historian, once wrote. “I am told that, just beyond the horizon, new forms of working class power are about to arise which, being founded upon egalitarian productive relations, will require no inhibition and can dispense with the negative restrictions of bourgeois legalism. A historian is unqualified to pronounce on such utopian projections. All that he knows is that he can bring in support of them no evidence whatsoever. His advice might be: watch this new power for a century or two before you cut down your hedges.” (Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act)