Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
For two years, the GKN auto parts plant in Florence, Italy, has been occupied by laid-off workers. It’s the longest factory occupation in Italian history — and its retooling for green production shows how workers can reorganize the economy while saving jobs.
The US housing system is organized around subsidized private homeownership and underfunded public housing. But during the New Deal, leftists had a different vision: beautiful social housing for all but the rich.
Last September, California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have imposed rules and transparency on the state’s largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry. The move came after the crypto industry spent more than $400,000 on lobbying Newsom.
After stripping out mismeasured housing prices, core inflation had its biggest 12-month drop since the massive disinflation of the early 1980s. Larry Summers continues to be wrong about inflation.
Because the Biden administration refuses to make a public case for keeping alive the pandemic emergency declaration that led to a huge expansion of desperately needed programs like Medicaid, millions are about to lose their health insurance.
After a spell in a Marxist youth movement, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s constantly inventive music came to soundtrack the consumerist mania of the 1980s Japanese boom. But in his most recent work, the late composer turned back to experimentation and activism.
Run-ins with regulators, financial troubles, and a highly publicized penchant for dangerous risk was what Silicon Valley Bank was best known for in the decades before its collapse this year. So why was it allowed to grow so big, and so unregulated?
The Irish critic Seamus Deane grew up in Derry as a second-class citizen of a sectarian state. Taking inspiration from writers like Edward Said, Deane’s critical work exposed the legacies of colonialism and the failings of capitalist modernity in Ireland.
In 1970, Angela Davis was arrested on suspicion of murder. She was already the victim of red-baiting witch hunts led by conservatives, but the trial — and her eventual victory — proved to everyone that the justice system was corrupt.
Decades of rule by establishment politicians opened the door for right-wing populists like Donald Trump to cynically claim to represent the marginalized. They rose on the back of crises that are here with us to stay.
A viral tweet decrying the idea of work became a TikTok meme celebrating individualist influencer culture and the lives of the idle rich. But real freedom from the drudgery of labor requires collective action — and building a world beyond capitalism.
It’s fashionable to say that black veterans got no real benefits from the GI Bill. In truth, for many, the GI Bill was a rare positive experience with government that contrasted sharply with the indignities of Jim Crow.
If you’re a Palestinian in the US speaking out for Palestinian rights, you can expect to be censored and slandered. This isn’t just an affront to free speech — it’s often a manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism.
Steven Knight’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations adds drug addiction, the slave trade and even sadomasochistic sex. But lurid flourishes alone can’t save this adaptation.
Helen Keller forged her political ideas in the golden age of American socialism and was patronizingly dismissed by conservative commentators who had previously celebrated her. Keller’s passionate radicalism should be remembered and reclaimed by the Left today.
Elite international universities have announced plans to open campuses in India. Yet Narendra Modi’s government has made it clear these won’t be oases of academic freedom — rather, they’ll help Hindu nationalists impose censorship even outside India’s borders.
In her budget proposal this year, New York governor Kathy Hochul is proposing to raise the limit on the number of charter schools in the state. It would worsen the disaster for public education that the charter movement has already caused.
When asked about America’s gun violence and mass shooting epidemic after the recent horror in Nashville, Republican congressman Tim Burchett said the most honest thing a Republican has said in years: “We’re not going to fix it.”
Donald Trump deserves to be indicted and prosecuted. But his legal troubles may not end his political career, much less stop the rise of the broader Trump-inflected right. We’ll only defeat Trumpism by building an attractive political alternative.
Despite the ravages of deindustrialization, the United Auto Workers remain the US’s most important industrial union. Members recently elected a new leadership promising democracy, militancy, and an end to corruption. But change isn’t coming easy to the UAW.