Adrien Beauduin is currently researching a PhD on Polish and Czech politics at the Central European University’s department of gender studies.
Venice’s International Film Festival is awarding Roberto Benigni this year’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. Announcing the award, the festival called Benigni a model of transgressive filmmaking. In fact, for decades, the Life Is Beautiful star has symbolized how onetime radicals turn into purveyors of conformist schmaltz.
While Mike Gravel never earned the respect of the political establishment, he passed from this Earth with his conscience untormented by the ghosts of screaming civilians whose lives those in Washington regularly snuff out with their afternoon coffee.
The pandemic was and remains brutal for average people. But not for the rich: central bank policies created 5 million new millionaires during the pandemic. It’s the latest sign that our economy is rigged for the wealthy.
The Economic Development Corporation manages New York City land in the service of private profit. The city needs a new approach that doesn’t give away massive amounts of public money to the wealthy.
Henry Reynolds has demolished the apologetic arguments of conservative intellectuals, showing that the British colonization of Australia was a crime even by the standards of its time. Reynolds makes a powerful argument for recognizing Aboriginal sovereignty.
A flood of evictions is about to slam the United States. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The federal government can stave off the crisis and fix the underlying injustices causing it. Here’s how.
Amazon’s buyout of MGM is the latest example of the culture industry’s transformation into a Big Tech monopoly. Artists, workers, and the film-watching public suffer the consequences.
The pandemic has been brutal for graduate workers, but some have organized despite COVID. Case in point: graduate workers at Colorado State University, who, with help from the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, demanded decent pay and treatment.
For decades, Europe 1 has been one of France’s most respected radio networks — but under pressure from its new billionaire owners, it’s being merged into the Fox-style CNEWS. Last week, journalists took strike action, trying to stop a French broadcasting icon from becoming yet another far-right echo chamber.
In 1907, Eugene Debs waxed poetic about the red flag, calling it “a sign of terror to every tyrant” and “the flag of Universal Freedom.” We reprint his article here in full.
Australian conservatives claim that “woke” students and left-wing lecturers pose a threat to free speech on university campuses. But the real “cancel culture” is coming from the Right.
Canadian thinker C. B. Macpherson insisted that capitalism’s “possessive individualism” constrained human flourishing. In its place, he wanted a democratic socialist society where people could build meaningful relationships and express the kaleidoscope of human individuality.
The United States is deeply hostile to renters, especially in states like Indiana that are staring down an enormous flood of evictions. We need action immediately to avoid a humanitarian disaster of millions being kicked out of their homes this summer.
I love Nora Ephron. The world needs more Nora Ephrons. There are potential Noras all around us — they, and we, deserve a society that supports and nourishes and encourages them.
In the 1980s, British musicians like Billy Bragg and Paul Weller tried to mobilize Labour support through the group Red Wedge. The rise and fall of Red Wedge tells us a lot about how culture might be used to advance socialist politics.
In the pandemic’s first year, poor countries’ debt rose to astonishing heights, plunging such countries into even worse austerity than before. These attacks are directed at workers in the Global South, but the fallout isn’t contained within national borders — the struggle against debt servitude belongs to workers everywhere.
In his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos offers a novel — and profoundly disturbing — conception of value creation: a handful of visionaries are the sole source of all “real value.” This aristocracy mercifully blesses customers, clients, and even Amazon workers with social goods.
Exhausted and alienated Chinese students and white-collar workers are “lying flat” to register discontent with the status quo. For their protest to produce change, they’ll need to transform individual passivity into collective activity.
Passing HR 1, the For the People Act, is a key step toward building a multiracial democracy where the working-class majority actually sees its priorities reflected in government policy. We can’t accept the kind of compromises centrists like Joe Manchin are pushing.
The health insurer UnitedHealthcare recently sparked outrage by saying it may retroactively deny patients’ emergency room claims. But documents suggest the company has been denying such claims for years.