Working-class militancy is on the rise across the US. Workers are engaged in organising battles at Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, and beyond. A wave of academic workers’ strikes is sweeping the country, with 48,000 teaching staff in the University of California (UC) system walking off the job, while on the other side of the country, part-time faculty shut down classes at The New School in New York City.
Bourgeois elections offer an incomplete but illuminating snapshot of society’s mood at a given moment. In the context of growing instability and polarisation, we should expect competing crosscurrents of consciousness to be expressed at the ballot box.
The midterms used to be a banal affair that received little attention and voter turnout, in which the opposition party would typically retake control of Congress without much uproar. But the traditional dynamics of US bourgeois politics have been entirely upended in the last period, as the systematic crisis of world capitalism wreaks havoc on political stability across the globe. This year’s midterms will provide a partial snapshot of the political mood in American society at the halfway point of Biden’s presidential term.
