Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
Ronald Suny has given us the best picture to date of Stalin’s path to the October Revolution. But the story of the future dictator’s early life doesn’t explain the rise of Stalinism. The key developments and choices that produced that system came after the Bolsheviks took power.
Governor Andrew Cuomo offered blanket immunity from prosecution for negligent nursing home executives last year. Now those who lost love ones during the pandemic thanks to those executives’ greed have nowhere to turn. Those who put profit over human life — and Cuomo — need to be held responsible.
Since the 1990s, workers in the Basque Country have gone on strike more than twice as often as any other workforce in Europe. The Basque unions insist that we have to fight for our interests — a strike-fund-centered strategy that has won huge victories even in the age of austerity.
For years, Germany has imported thousands of underpaid workers from Eastern Europe, as the EU’s richest country seeks to solve its care crisis on the cheap. Now, a Bulgarian care worker and her trade union are taking that model to court — hoping to abolish the sector’s notoriously exploitative practices.
Dozens of congresspeople are pressing Vice President Kamala Harris to ignore the Senate parliamentarian and fulfill her $15 minimum wage promise. The Biden administration has no one to blame but themselves for inaction.
At its high point, the Communist Party of Australia united thousands of working-class militants in a struggle to transform the world around them. These everyday communists were brave, flawed, and sometimes heroic.
Under capitalism, automation destroys jobs. In a socialist society, it could free us from work and offer untold leisure to all.
The Russian Revolution enthused anti-colonial movements around the world, fueling hopes that the European empires could be overthrown. But the revolt against empire was also fundamental to Lenin’s own strategy, as he worked to unite workers’ revolts in the metropoles with national struggles to end colonial exploitation.
Joe Biden’s statement yesterday about the Amazon union drive in Alabama hit pro-labor notes. But he’ll have to back up his rhetoric with concrete action: Biden must fight to pass the PRO Act.
In a country that is already home to some of the worst restrictions on women’s rights, the Honduran Congress voted last month to lock in its bans on abortion and gay marriage, making them almost impossible to overturn. It’s a reminder that, as the feminist green tide washes over much of Latin America, there is still much work to be done.
President Biden’s immigration reform proposal at least rhetorically acknowledges the pain inflicted by existing US policy. But it continues to paint immigrants as criminals, instead of workers responding to labor demands and looking for a better life. We should fight for something better.
The Civil War and Reconstruction–era Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens understood far better than most of his contemporaries that fully uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights — first the right of some human beings to own others, but also beyond it.
From its radical roots in the 1970s, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has gradually been captured by conservative, pro-corporate interests. The festival should be more than a corporate street party: it needs to recover its original spirit by empowering Mardi Gras members.
In South Africa, as in so many other capitalist countries, the education system is seen as a means of molding children into future workers. But education should be about building democratic citizens, not producing compliant workers for employers.
The Biden administration has made some encouraging noises on immigration policy. But activists are tired of talk — they want to see action.
The Saudi regime is responsible for one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises through its war in Yemen. The Biden administration has now frozen arms sales to the Saudis, but Justin Trudeau’s government seems happy to step into the breach as their gunrunner of choice.
In recent years, Marine Le Pen has sought to detoxify her party’s brand and distance herself from her father Jean-Marie’s crankish outbursts. But his latest volume of memoir is a reminder that her so-called populist right is rooted in fascism and a National Front that united Vichyites and antisemites with radicalized conservatives.
A team of leading Finnish researchers had a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine ready last May, which could have allowed countries all over the world to inoculate their populations without paying top dollar. Yet rather than help the initiative, Finland’s government sided with Big Pharma — showing how a patent-based funding model puts profit over public health.
Jack Lang enjoys a reputation as Australia’s most radical Labor leader. Lang didn’t start off on the party’s left, but he refused to impose austerity measures as New South Wales premier during the Great Depression, leading to a bitter confrontation and Lang’s dismissal from office.
Leo Panitch saw no other option than to act as if socialism and a world free of exploitation could be won in the here and now, his longtime collaborator Sam Gindin writes. Despite knowing that socialism was unlikely to emerge in his lifetime, Panitch devoted himself fully to a project that could liberate generations of people to come.