Progressive Populism & Socialism: Which Way Forward

Monday, August 23, 2021 - 1:00pm
CDT
Bhaskar Sunkara

Is it possible today to maintain that a socialist politics can be oriented to rebuilding the labor movement or has recent history shown that only oppressed ethnicities can be the agents of progressive social change? Do we write off the white working class as being only susceptible to right-wing populism or can it also be open to progressive populism and socialism? Progressives find themselves at a crossroads where binaries abound. Class/race? Climate challenges/growth? Immigration/job security? How can we transcend them? What kind of socialist and progressive politics can we build in the 21st century under the Damoclean sword of climate change and increasingly virulent methods of surveillance by states and their corporate handmaidens? How do we build solidarity and organize to confront the challenges of right wing populism and a pitiless capitalistic drive of accumulation in our digital age?

Bhaskar Sunkara will give his perspective on these vexing questions during our webinar on August 23. Bhaskar is an American political writer. He is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin and publisher of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy[1] and London's Tribune. He is a former vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality as well as a columnist for The Guardian US.