Agathe Dorra is a PhD researcher in political aesthetics at King’s College London
The long-running Netflix reality show Selling Sunset often veers into the territory of Real Housewives–style drama. But it also provides a close-up look at the investor-fueled irrationalities of the luxury real estate market.
In declining to cancel its annual conference at Southern California hotels where workers are on strike, the American Political Science Association is refusing to sacrifice for workers whose cause is just. There’s a word for that: “cowardice.”
Through Angela Merkel’s reign, neoliberal European integration provided the scaffolding for Germany’s export-led growth. But war on the continent and a series of crises have tested this model’s limits, producing splits within Olaf Scholz’s government.
The “major questions doctrine,” cited to invalidate student loan forgiveness, empowers the conservative Supreme Court to veto any executive action with broad social impact. Its goal is to undermine the government’s ability function and aid average people.
New York City has seen increasing chaos and immiseration under Mayor Eric Adams. It’s time for the city’s leftists and progressives to unite behind a challenger who can win.
Like many corporations, Amazon has used subcontractors to avoid responsibility for working conditions and pay. A group of Palmdale, California, subcontracted workers wants to force Amazon to change that.
On July 26, a coup deposed Niger’s democratically elected president, the seventh in the region in three years. The ongoing conflict threatens to divide the region between pro- and anti-Western factions, spreading the new cold war to Africa.
Across Europe, the Right has taken a pronatalist turn. Despite claiming to support mothers, its initiatives — largely ineffectual, according to many studies — serve to reinforce patriarchal gender roles and protect the interests of employers.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was one of the great Marxist thinkers of her age. One of Wood’s most important contributions was to show how the coercive pressure of markets is specific to capitalism and point us toward the necessary socialist alternative.
Germany’s Die Linke is set to split, as former leading light Sahra Wagenknecht threatens to start her own party. The two sides have rival ideas on how to market themselves to voters — but neither has a strategy for building a working-class movement.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is an evocative exploration of the contrasting dimensions of modernity. The film probes the potential horrors cast by advancing technology alongside the exhilarating heights of human achievement.
The structure of democratic firms within a socialist framework might clash with broader goals such as balanced growth and equitable income. We will need a model that can harmonize firm-level democracy with macroeconomic expansion and a solidaristic wage.
Space policy is already a site of class struggle, and the mining and militarization haven’t even begun. It’s left-wing space policy or barbarism.
Meta’s blocking of Canadian news is a direct response to Canada’s Online News Act, which mandates major tech firms pay local news organizations for using their media links. But the “link tax” furor underscores a deeper issue: media ownership and control.
Livio Maitan belonged to a lost world of professional revolutionaries whose struggles and sacrifices left a deep mark on twentieth-century history. Historian Enzo Traverso pays tribute to one of the Italian left’s most creative activist-intellectuals.
In February, a train derailment exposed the town of East Palestine, Ohio, to toxic vinyl chloride. Since then, the company that made the chemicals has spent millions to stop railway legislation that could help prevent another disaster.
UPS Teamsters used a strike threat to win big wage increases in their tentative agreement. Amazon workers are looking at the pay gains as proof they can do the same.
The typical Canadian worker, whether earning minimum wage or an average income, cannot afford housing in any of the country’s major urban centers — which happen to be where most jobs are located.
Philosopher Henry David Thoreau has developed a reputation as an advocate for self-help in the form of withdrawal from work. But in his writing, he advanced a thoroughgoing critique of work under capitalism and defended the emancipatory potential of labor.
Even if we were to free ourselves from the capitalist work ethic and provide everyone with a universal basic income, our society would still require some amount of socially necessary labor. Socialists should strive to reimagine work, not eliminate it.