Cristina Groeger is a history professor at Lake Forest College and a member of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America.
Disgraced opioid tycoon Jonathan Sackler died last week, two decades into a nationwide addiction epidemic that he helped create — and from which he pocketed billions. His life of spreading addiction was a monument to the brutal pathologies of capitalism.
As the world’s premier Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm’s intellectual range was unrivaled. Never one to pander to conventional politics, he was often a brave voice of dissent. Today more than ever, Hobsbawm’s work deserves serious examination.
Many of the repressive police tactics and technologies used in the US have been developed in the Middle East to suppress dissent. Ending police violence at home must involve ending America’s wars abroad.
A new study finds that unions don’t just increase wages and benefits for workers on the job — union membership is also linked to diminished racist attitudes among white workers. If we want to defeat racism, building strong, democratic unions is essential.
Nine public housing towers in Melbourne have been put under a police-enforced “hard lockdown” without warning, with isolation effectively policed at gunpoint. It’s a measure reserved for inner-city public housing residents, despite the rising wave of infections throughout the city.
Historian Mike Davis wrote a book fifteen years ago warning of the coming global pandemic. The “monster at our door” has finally stepped through that door in COVID-19, and unfortunately, Davis was proven correct.
James Averhart led a push to track down and punish soldiers who deserted the Vietnam War in an attempt to stop similar desertions in Iraq and oversaw Chelsea Manning’s brutal imprisonment at a Quantico jail. He’s now vying for an Alabama House of Representatives seat — as a Democrat.
In the Jim Crow South, the planter class’s greatest fear was that black sharecroppers and white tenant farmers would rise up against their oppressors. In the 1930s, Socialist and Communist organizers tried to make that a reality.
Jackie Fielder, a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate for California’s State Senate, is refusing to take money from police unions, real-estate interests, and the fossil fuel industry. For her, the connection between capital and police violence is clear: “Our communities face intense repression from the state because it is profitable.”
Harry Britt succeeded Harvey Milk on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and fought to build a queer politics that stood doggedly for workers’ and tenants’ rights. When he died last month, we lost a gay socialist icon.
There is overwhelming evidence a surge of mostly older, Trump-fearing voters decided the Democratic primary — and that Bernie Sanders failed to counter an establishment messaging campaign that Trump would beat him in a general election.
Most of the fighters who joined the partisan struggle in World War II Yugoslavia had never even held a camera, let alone considered themselves photographers. Yet organized efforts to create a “partisan photography” helped carry the image of their struggle to the masses — and showed that artistic production wasn’t just for professionals.
Labour must outline its democratic-socialist vision of an economy that works for people and planet — before the Tories monopolize the narrative.
Jon Stewart’s new political comedy Irresistible wants to be a scathing critique of the media, big money, and Beltway corruption. But as satire, it’s weighed down by the comic’s let’s-all-just-get-along politics.
Three former Bernie Sanders field organizers argue that the campaign’s internal structures and lack of accountability hurt its chances and undermined Bernie’s theory of political change.
The son of a freed slave, William Cuffay played a key role in the struggle for democracy in Britain and abroad. It’s time to honor his sacrifices for the radical cause of justice and equality.
More than 150 years ago, when the corporation as we know it today was still new, Marx saw in it both the essence of capitalism and a prefiguration of socialism: “The abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself.”
This pandemic has the potential to erase much of the progress women have achieved over the past forty years. The solution is simple: labor organizing and struggling for jobs and fair pay.
Here’s an idea: we should redistribute wealth from the largely white 1 percent to the poor and working class of all races — tackling both racial and class inequality simultaneously.
More than a century after the landmark Homestead strike against Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire, workers at four Pittsburgh museums — including three founded by Carnegie — are unionizing with the United Steelworkers. It’s the latest episode in a nationwide wave of museum organizing.