ABSTRACT
Americans who identify themselves as "the Left"—independent progressives, radical feminists, democratic socialists, Marxists, and others—have never lived in a more depressing, challenging, and potentially liberating moment. In Mexico, the Democratic Party of the Revolution of Mexico has won millions of adherents and is now poised to challenge the government's pro-corporate policies. The Workers Party of Brazil is the largest democratic, popular force in Latin America's largest nation. The immediate task for American socialists is to support and build strong workers' movements and to defend the rights of trade unions. A new American socialism must make a clear and unambiguous distinction between our politics, values, and vision, and those of American liberalism. Socialism is only meaningful to African-Americans and other oppressed people of color when it explains how capitalism perpetuates the unequal conditions and when it gives some tools to empower people against an unfair, unjust system.
