Abigail Torre grew up in Chile and now lives in Berkeley, California where she is cochair of the East Bay chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.
Under capitalism, housing is a commodity, which means it principally exists to make rich people richer rather than meet human needs. That gap between making money and making profit distorts a whole range of life outcomes for average people — and real estate agents play a critical role in that process.
If we’re going to reverse the ravages of neoliberalism, we’ll need to rebuild a global labor movement that knows how to strike and win. A recent international “Strike School,” led by labor organizer Jane McAlevey, brought 3,000 trade unionists and activists from seventy countries to try to do just that.
America’s experiment with public housing was far less successful than Europe’s — but this hasn’t made it any less influential.
In the United States today, as in 1990s Russia, for a lot of intellectuals, total nihilism seems more plausible than hope for even modest reform.
Haunted by the specter of democracy, the Constitution’s framers blundered into a historic miscalculation. We’re still living with the consequences.
A slice of life from a country in crisis.
In 2002, the Pentagon staged a $250 million war game known as the “Millennium Challenge.” It was supposed to be a fixed fight — until a retired Marine lieutenant general, playing the role of a Middle Eastern country, brought the US military to its knees.
In the United States of 2020, millions are desperate for help, and they’re forced to compete for scraps from Twitter philanthropists.
The United States today isn’t on the verge of a Soviet-style disintegration — but neither is there any force at the top willing and able to reform our political system.
Effective states can enforce discipline on elites. The United States is not one of them.
In an increasingly unstable country, what if a “deep police state” threatens to undermine our electoral gains?
It is not enough to question the decisions, the justices, or even the structure of the current court — we need to challenge, as Abraham Lincoln did, the foundation of its power to determine the law.
The first generation of the GOP tried — and failed — to build a modern republic. Socialists today won’t get very far unless we finish their work.
And our decades to come.
We know the US rail network is no match for trains in France or Japan. But Barack Obama’s plan for high-speed rail couldn’t even match that of Morocco or Uzbekistan.
A new book shows how the fragmented American state arrests democracy. What we need is nothing short of a reconstruction.
A Very British Coup embraced the intrigues of class war, but its sequel falls prey to the mundanities of culture war.
How the neoliberal project’s very own fifty-state strategy left poverty and low wages in its wake.
Within ten days of giving birth, a quarter of us are forced to return to work. If liberals truly want to support parents’ choices, they need to back the subsidies and employment legislation that are vital to child-rearing.
Real left strategy isn’t found in socialist magazines. It’s found in the stars.