Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
Struggling for cash in the late 1920s, Harlem Renaissance trailblazer Claude McKay found casual work as a docker in Marseille. Finally published this year, his Romance in Marseille illuminates the city with both personal emotion and a vivid class feeling — testament to the tough fight for solidarity among the migrant proletariat.
Recent reports indicate that Larry Summers is advising Joe Biden’s campaign. This is not good, because Larry Summers is very bad: his entire career has been spent protecting the wealthy few at the expense of the many.
A medical system that charges users $3,210 for remdesivir, a COVID-19 treatment that cost $10 to produce — and that took $70,000,000 in public money to develop — is a medical system that must be abolished.
Adults with underlying health problems are at increased risk of getting seriously ill or dying if they contract the coronavirus. These are also often the very same people who are least likely to have insurance.
In 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court because the business lobby believed he would turn the court into a corporate weapon — and that’s precisely what he has been doing ever since.
More low-income voters backed the Tories than the Labour Party in the 2019 election for the first time ever. Labour’s decision to side with the establishment rather than the voters over Brexit pushed them into the Tories’ arms.
Today, the UK’s National Health Service is celebrated, rhetorically even by the Right. But for a decade, the NHS has been subject to destructive cutbacks, leading to crumbling facilities, outsourcing, privatization, and staff pay freezes. Britons need to demand better.
Left governments in Latin America have successfully nationalized much of the mining sector, reclaiming foreign profits for social spending. The next step is to get beyond extraction altogether, taking cues from indigenous movements that have long been fighting for a green future.
Joe Biden says he plans to deal with the US health care crisis by passing a public health insurance option. But his campaign is being funded by the same health companies that killed it when he was vice president. Something has to give — and it probably won’t be the corporate donors.
Manning Marable was a leading radical thinker whose brilliant writings showed how the struggle for black liberation is bound up with the struggle against capitalism. Though he didn’t live to see the rise of Black Lives Matter, his work has a tremendous amount to offer the movement today.
Today, Russians vote in a constitutional referendum designed to give Vladimir Putin a fresh burst of legitimacy. His feeble response to the coronavirus pandemic has ruined his “strongman” reputation — and it’s feeding a growing mood of popular discontent.
The point of a reading list should be to understand the world in order to change it. Here are ten essential books that can help inform the struggle for racial justice today.
After losing to Sinn Féin in February’s general election, Ireland’s conservative parties have exploited the pandemic to regain their footing and strike a coalition deal with the Greens. The new government won’t deliver the change Irish society needs, but Ireland’s left-wing forces still have a real opening in the coming years.
The Supreme Court’s abortion rights decision yesterday provides a brief respite to women across the South. But we’re still playing defense in the courts. Our offensive should be in the streets.
Newly published research confirms that poverty fell in April and May thanks to federal coronavirus aid. You’d think that would convince policymakers to pursue more such aid, but they aren’t — because America’s approach to welfare is both wrongheaded and cruel.
If federal unemployment benefits are not extended when they expire next month, millions of households will be facing both steep rent and unemployment with no assistance. And that means mass evictions.
Sixty years ago today, Patrice Lumumba marked the independence of the Congo with a blistering indictment of Belgian colonial rule. For the governments of Belgium and the United States, the speech made Lumumba a marked man: within a year, he was dead at the hands of their proxies.
The American public helped pay for the development of remdesivir, a COVID-19 drug. That same American public will now be charged $3,000 for a treatment — a treatment that experts say costs less than $10 to produce.
Seeking to maintain the momentum of the George Floyd protests, activists have launched an occupation outside City Hall in New York to demand a $1 billion cut in the NYPD budget. So far, there’s little sign that the city council or Mayor Bill de Blasio are prepared to give in.
Donald Trump claims he’s ending the “era of endless wars.” But over the course of his first term, he has come closer to starting new wars than ending the wars he inherited.