Left Notes’ 2024 in Review

This year was less a year for the record books and more a year for the dustbin of history — at least from the point of view of left-wing politics. But we’re looking back on it anyway.

It’s the end of the year, and it’s a good time to take stock. Below we look back on the big stories and topics we covered plus a little about what comes next.

Nick’s List

1. The Bleak State of US Party Politics

I spent a lot of time this year, like Neal, following national US politics. At the beginning of the year, I wrote for Dollars & Sense about the ongoing student debt crisis, explaining the likely impacts of the Biden administration’s failures to keep its promises on student debt forgiveness. Later in the year, I wrote up an overall assessment of “Bidenomics” (shorter summary here). My view continues to be that left-wing enthusiasm for Joe Biden’s economic policies has been largely misplaced.

In the spring, in the face of increasingly aggravating admonitions from liberals to vote for the “lesser evil” in November’s election, I shared some reflections on the moral dilemma confronting conscientious voters asked to choose between two parties that were both backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And in August, I wrote for Jacobin about Bernie Sanders’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. He delivered the kind of rousing economic-populist message we’ve come to expect from Bernie, married to the quixotic hope that the Democratic Party might be a vehicle for fundamental social transformation. (On why precisely this is a quixotic hope, see Neal’s pieces on the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign, mentioned below.) My most recent and most viewed Left Notes piece of the year observed that Bernie and the socialist left have not been building any kind of organized faction in the Democratic Party.

For the fiftieth-anniversary issue of Dollars & Sense, I wrote about the evolution of the GOP’s economic agenda in recent decades into Donald Trump’s faux-populism. After Trump’s election victory, I argued that the success of his reactionary ideas is due in large part to the fact that the United States is increasingly a society of manifest injustice, thanks to decades of neoliberalism wrought by both parties. And in the wake of Jimmy Carter’s death, I reflected on the Carter administration’s role in this process.

2. Promising Sparks in the Labor Movement?

If national party politics was rather depressing this year, developments in the US labor movement continued to give some reason for hope. A year after the fact, I wrote about the NYC nurses’ strike of 2023, which won historic enforcement language for safe staffing ratios that could provide a model for nurses confronting the problem of short staffing elsewhere.

The solidarity with Palestine demonstrated by the United Auto Workers and other unions this year has also been a bright spot. For Jacobin, I interviewed UAW Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla about its support for students and faculty protesting the war on Gaza and the UAW’s call for a cease-fire. In May, I wrote about the historical significance of the 48,000-strong University of California academic workers’ union walking out for the sake of explicitly political demands. And as a former member of the UC academic workers’ local, I explored some of the complicated internal dynamics that led the union to that point.

In April, I discussed Hamilton Nolan’s argument that building the labor movement is key to changing US politics for the better. I certainly don’t disagree — but that will involve transforming unions to advance an ambitious, classwide political agenda, not just a generic “pro-labor” or union-centric politics.

On that topic, I have a piece forthcoming in the 2025 edition of Socialist Register that takes stock of the current moment in labor and potential openings for socialist adherents of the rank-and-file strategy. I will let you all know when it’s available! I also need to shout out the Rank & File Project here (recently featured in Teen Vogue!), a group I work with that is recruiting and training young activists to get rank-and-file-union jobs and help transform unions into democratic, militant, and left-wing organs of class struggle. Check it out if you haven’t already.

3. Philosophical Reflections

I also wrote quite a bit about philosophy. In May, I interviewed Daniel Tutt about his book on the left’s reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. I also wrote a couple pieces on why socialists should reject moral relativism, a subject I hope to come back to in 2025.

Later in the year, I waded into the discourse kicked off by political philosopher Joseph Heath, who argued that the liberal political philosophy of John Rawls helped kill analytical Marxism. I got Vivek Chibber’s thoughts on the matter in an interview for Jacobin, and took stock of a number of entries in the debate and provided some additional reflections for Left Notes.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the issues of justice that arise in allocating work in a socialist economy. Stay tuned for potential posts on that theme.

Neal’s List

1. The 2024 Election

A lot of my attention this year was directed toward the 2024 election. By October, it was increasingly apparent who was the real “change candidate” and who was defending the status quo. As I argued then, we live in a new reality where the Democrats are the conservative party and Republicans stand for a (reactionary and misleading) pro-worker, anti-neoliberal politics.

I don’t think we on the left have fully internalized this new reality, and worse still I think that many on the left are operating under two misconceptions coming out of this election. First, that the Democrats’ loss was devastating and will force party leaders to do a fundamental rethink. And second, that the election clearly shows that the party needs to embrace left populism to dig itself out of this hole. But the party’s losses were narrow, and I’d be surprised if it didn’t bounce back with easy in the 2026 midterms. And to the extent that party leaders are talking about winning back working-class voters, their preferred solution is cosmetic: “talk normal” and let daycare workers peel bananas. Finally, and most important, Democratic leaders lack the credibility and the will to champion a real left populist program (for more on this issue of credibility, see my piece from October: “Why Kamala Harris Won’t Rebrand As a Populist”).

The alternative? From my piece on the campaign:

As anyone who watches home remodeling shows knows, starting from scratch (while not easy) is often easier than a gut renovation. That’s why the basic line of the left wing of the labor movement and of democratic socialists is as valid as it’s ever been. A future for labor and the left involves building a new party and a broader movement that is independent of the Democrats.

2. Labor, the Left, and the Democratic Party

That tees up the big project I started this year: a series on the Democratic Party and the left and the labor movement’s relationship to it. In the first of these, “Why Do Socialists Run as Democrats?,” I made the point that neither fears of spoiling races nor restrictive ballot-access laws are compelling reasons for running in Democratic primaries. In “The Junior Partner Strategy,” I argued the real reason the left runs in the primaries is twofold: First, it’s a shortcut to elect left-leaning candidates quickly, sidestepping the more difficult work of building a base that is consciously opposed to Democrats’ political agenda. And second, it’s part of an “inside-outside” strategy aimed at winning incremental reforms that will establish socialists’ bona fides as policymakers. In the last article in the series so far, I argued that Bernie’s years as an independent are the “real Bernie model” that the left should be learning from. Nick’s pieces from January “It’s Bad for Socialists to Present Ourselves as Democrats” and from earlier this month “The Left Isn’t Building a Faction Within the Democrats” also develop these arguments further. (Plus, check out a couple critical responses to my series by a comrade in DSA.)

The forces aren’t there to launch an independent Labor Party in 2025 (if only!), but we’ll never build those forces until some part of the left first starts making the case that the time to make that leap is now. Sign me up to be part of the crew that takes on that task. And so, more to come on this topic next year.

3. How to Do Politics

Lastly, I spent part of this year in a more reflective mood about what it takes to do left-wing politics. I’ve been on a kick for a while now trying to convince comrades in DSA to spend more time thinking about the current moment rather than evergreen questions and organizational debates. In a similar vein, I defended the need for a national perspective and strategy, even when the left remains very weak. And inspired by the political development of the Italian communist Rossana Rossanda, I thought more about how people actually join the left (on this question, Nick’s piece from earlier this year about the importance of ideas is also worth checking out).

My most popular piece of the year on this site was “The Politics of the Three Lefts” (Nick and I talked about this and other issues on the podcast Left Reckoning in September). People love taxonomies I guess. I worry a lot about the future of the “democratic left,” the middle way (and the camp I’m proud to be part of) between progressives and what I called hard leftists. Hopefully 2025 can put new wind behind our sails.

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There you have it: a difficult year in US politics, but we hope that our writing has been useful for thinking through our current predicament and what might come next. We’re grateful to everyone who has read and subscribed to our Substack, and especially to those of you who have signed up for paid subscriptions.

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