Nearly fifty years of outright class war against America’s working and middle classes have brought the country to the brink of social and political collapse. According to some sources, 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Since 1975, $80 trillion have been transferred from the bottom 90 percent of earners to the top 1 percent. Meanwhile, little action is being taken to mitigate global warming and ecological destruction, while military budgets, used in part to wage disastrous wars and genocides, climb annually.

There isn't much hope for the United States, or indeed for civilization, unless we can forge an international left that prioritizes class struggle above all else. It is time to fight back, by any means necessary, against a ruling class interested in nothing but profits and power. In this book, a historian of the U.S. labor movement attempts to advance this agenda through a series of essays on everything from right-wing libertarianism to the inadequacies of identity politics, from the career of Jimmy Hoffa to the catastrophic consequences of American imperialism. Victory in a war for the future of humanity is far from assured, but we’re lucky enough to be living in a time when there’s still some hope. It is our duty to act on this hope.

Here's the Table of Contents:

Preface

PART ONE: VALUES
The Value of the Humanities
Communism and Human Nature
The Necessity of a Moral Revolution
Capitalism, Socialism, and Existential Despair
Thoughts on Overcoming Despair
The Revolutionary Beethoven
Classical Music vs. Mediocrity
In Kitsch We Trust
Free Speech, Hassan Nasrallah, and Other Victims of Internet Censorship
The Value of Noam Chomsky

PART TWO: HISTORY
The Founding Fathers: “Neoliberals” Avant le Mot
The Government vs. the Population
Our Passive Society
The Radicalism of Working-Class Americans
The Life and Times of Jimmy Hoffa
Capitalism vs. Freedom
Capitalism and Colonialism
The Rise of Right-wing Libertarianism Since the 1950s
Organized Labor and the Crisis of Democracy

PART THREE: QUESTIONING DOGMAS
On the Use and Abuse of Rage for Life
The Significance and Shortcomings of Karl Marx
Eleven Theses on Socialist Revolution
It’s Time to Embrace Nuclear Energy
Renewable Energy Is Not the Answer; Nuclear Is
The Second Cold War Is More Dangerous Than the First
The Left and the Ukraine War
What “Security Threat” Does China Pose?
NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War

PART FOUR: IDENTITY POLITICS
Defending Materialism Against Postmodernism
“Race Reductionism” Threatens to Doom the Left
The Stupefying Mediocrity of Barack Obama
Political Correctness Is Getting Out of Hand
The Righteous Outrage of Norman Finkelstein
The Origins of Patriarchy
Postliberalism: A Dangerous “New” Conservatism
How to Rebuild the Left