Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
From last year’s Democratic primaries to this year’s Biden agenda, TV news coverage of the health care debate is outrageously skewed against single-payer reform. To understand why, we need look no further than their business model.
Tech workers occupy a contradictory location in the American class structure. On the one hand, many are well paid and identify both as professionals and with management. On the other, the proletarianized aspects of their work can offer opportunities to seize for organizing as workers.
Attempts by companies like McDonald’s to use memes for marketing have flopped, with ad men unable to reproduce memes’ inherent reliance on collective creativity. Memes don’t fit with the logic of private appropriation — and social media sites looking for ad revenue are giving them ever less space.
The Write Stuff, a recent collection of essays from the ALP’s conservative wing, argues that Labor must shift even further to the right to become electorally successful. The book’s authors couldn’t be more wrong — to win, Labor must ditch the neoliberal policies they celebrate.
The military coup against Aung San Suu Kyi marks the end of Burma’s ten-year experiment with democracy. Her government spoke of national reconciliation while denying the military’s atrocities and doing nothing to stop its war on ethnic minorities — an explicit refusal to “take sides” which ensured the armed forces would continue to dominate the country’s politics.
Before Anton Pannekoek, astronomers sought only to interpret the cosmos — his goal was to change it. The renowned Dutch scientist who gave his name to an asteroid and a moon crater was also a Marxist revolutionary who debated with figures like Lenin about the road to power.
The massive farmer protests in India are facing down a Modi government that has no qualms about using repression to push through its neoliberal agenda. The farmers’ resolve has been remarkable — and they’re providing a glimmer of hope that Modi’s far-right government may not be as invincible as it seemed just months ago.
Universal cash assistance programs have provided an indispensable financial lifeline for households and the economy as a whole during the pandemic. But contrary to many advocates of a universal basic income, the past year’s experience offers no model for a left policy agenda in normal times.
By one estimate, Elon Musk owns more than a quarter of all active satellites orbiting Earth. Though his fantasy of becoming emperor of Mars probably won’t materialize, we have to scale back the unchecked power of deranged Bond villain types like Musk before it extends from Earth to the skies.
Yesterday, the Biden administration took two long-overdue steps toward potentially ending the Saudi war on Yemen. But the president has to provide more clarity on what exactly his administration is willing to do to halt Saudi Arabia’s brutality and remove the boot from the neck of Yemenis.
At the end of 2020, Victoria’s parliament passed a motion calling for a Green New Deal. But the plan drawn up by Australian Labor premier Daniel Andrews is market-driven and won’t come close to achieving the kind of large-scale public transformation that we need to avert disaster.
Believe it or not, the data all point to television, not social media, as the most powerful reality-warping medium for most Americans. Unsurprisingly, that is not the impression you’d get from listening to the cable news–driven discourse on the subject.
With Chicago teachers deadlocked in a fight with mayor Lori Lightfoot over reopening schools, a group of public school parents and students staged a “sick-out” from online learning, protesting moves for a quick reopening.
So many of us feel exhausted and inadequate, lacking joy in our work and beating ourselves up over our supposed laziness. But we’re not lazy — we just live under an economic system that wants to wring more and more work out of us.
Jacob Lawrence was one of twentieth-century America’s most celebrated black artists. In Struggle, his series of paintings on the American Revolution, he opened up new territory in American history by venturing beyond the narrow set of topics like Harlem, jazz clubs, and cotton plantations which had become synonymous with black art in mid-century America.
For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists against Bernie Sanders’s left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos’s newspaper’s recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos.
With an election due this autumn, Norway’s once-dominant Labour Party has been out of government for almost a decade. If the Norwegian left can’t recapture the spirit that underpinned its greatest achievements, an impressive legacy of social reform will be under threat.
The coup in Myanmar has exposed the faulty foundation of the country’s democratic transition. We spoke with an organizer in Myanmar’s burgeoning labor movement — which will be central to the fight against authoritarianism in the coming days and months.
In response to the Capitol riot, new legislation proposed by New York Assembly members Ron Kim and socialist Zohran Mamdani would divest public money from firms whose executives bankroll shadowy far-right groups.
A collective wail of anguish went up after news broke that Dolly Parton’s working-class anthem “9 to 5” has been repurposed for a Squarespace ad lauding “working, working, working.” Our grief is justified. But the song’s deformation into a hollow jingle says more about capitalism than Dolly.