Silicon Valley capitalist Marc Andreessen has released a manifesto that decries efforts to restrain the genius of tech billionaires. Drawing heavily from Nietzsche and Hayek, it’s the same old right-wing elitism in new packaging.
Workers in the US were deeply split in the 1930s, not least by race and ethnicity. To organize greater swaths of the working class, the Congress of Industrial Organizations had to turn division into solidarity.
In the 1930s, unions grabbed headlines and won major battles with sit-down strikes, where striking workers occupied their workplaces. The fiery tactic put the Congress of Industrial Organizations on the map and struck fear in the hearts of business elites.
Workers in the Great Depression were beaten down but desperate for change. When a militant new labor federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, raised their sense of political possibility, they seized the opportunity and unionized en masse.
Weeks before the door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight over Portland, Oregon, on January 5, grounding more than 150 Boeing aircraft, workers at the part’s reported manufacturer had been warning of safety concerns — but management ignored them.
Former university presidents Elizabeth Magill and Claudine Gay were no friends of Palestine. In fact, they suppressed free speech and equated solidarity efforts with antisemitism.
Emmanuel Macron has appointed 34-year-old Gabriel Attal as France’s new prime minister. The bid to give his government a new progressive face suffers one big problem: French people haven’t forgotten its deeply anti-social record.
From HIV/AIDS to COVID-19, the pharmaceutical industry has made obscene profits by exploiting public research and denying lifesaving medication to poor countries. Building a fairer system of medicine production means breaking Big Pharma’s power.
Austerity policies originated with efforts by economic elites to crush working-class power and redistribute income upward after World War I. That history demonstrates the need for democratic control over economic policy to defend workers’ interests.
At his funeral last week, former European Union chief Jacques Delors was hailed as a left-wing architect of the EU. But far from realizing the Left’s hopes for a “social Europe,” in the 1990s Delors built a new European order in thrall to free-market dogmas.
Elon Musk is trying to export Tesla’s anti-union model to Sweden, and workers across Scandinavia are launching solidarity actions to thwart him. We should be embracing the Nordic countries’ model of strong worker rights, not Tesla’s elitist union busting.
The United Auto Workers’ strike last fall saw the union renew its militancy and win big victories on behalf of worker control. The historic walkout suggests the possibility of a broader revival of class struggle and the ideal of economic democracy.
Last year’s catastrophic East Palestine train derailment has spurred calls from a rank-and-file labor group for public ownership of rail infrastructure. We spoke to an expert about what that could look like in the US, which is dominated by for-profit rail.
In 1871, elite British writers were horrified by the threat to the bourgeois social order that the Paris Commune represented. But their working-class counterparts expressed profound sympathy for the Communards and their revolutionary aspirations.
In Canada’s New Gilded Age, CEOs are enjoying record pay, earning a worker’s average yearly salary by the morning of January 2. It doesn’t have to be this way.
After the French Revolution, the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée produced wildly ambitious building designs that were never realized. His ideas influenced both the Right and the Left — and raised the question of whether a revolutionary architecture is possible.
In the early days of Airbnb, many predicted that the company and other sharing economy platforms would “disrupt” capitalism as usual, finally making it work for all stakeholders. But that’s not what happened. Instead, it got us all hooked and then got worse.
Fresh off a historic strike, the UAW became one of the largest unions in the US to support a cease-fire in Gaza. In remarks last month, republished here, President Shawn Fain explains that labor must fight for “peace and social justice for all of humanity.”
US officials suggested that Israel would have to shift to a “lower-intensity” campaign in Gaza from the new year. But Joe Biden is still unwilling to apply any serious pressure, even if his support for Israel’s war threatens to hand victory to Donald Trump.
As Israel continues to raze Gaza, Biden has set two aims for his administration: to provide unconditional support to Israel and prevent a regional war. It will be hard for the US to achieve both aims.