
The Problem Isn’t Classism, It’s Class
Under capitalism, prejudice against workers is common. But it only adds insult to a deeper, more profound injury.
Enver Motala is an associate of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg and of the Centre for Integrated Post-School Education and Training at the Nelson Mandela University.
Under capitalism, prejudice against workers is common. But it only adds insult to a deeper, more profound injury.
From Berlin to the Ruhr, the organized working class resisted Hitler’s reactionary appeals.
For most of the news media, the life and struggles of the majority class just aren’t newsworthy.
The culture of British trade union militancy in auto plants like Austin Longbridge wasn’t the “natural” result of a Golden Age of capitalism — it came from organizing.
And those are exactly the people we need to save the planet.
A coalition of industrial workers and small farmers underpinned democratic politics in the twentieth century. Can workers in a precarious service economy fill their shoes today?
With the rise of industrial capitalism and the workers’ movement it created, we created new words to explain a confounding new world.
For decades, the parties of labor have been slowly replaced by the parties of the educated. A Left that doesn’t acknowledge this as a problem has already been defeated.
We can only print the letters without expletives.
The basic functions of investment are too important to be left in the hands of private banks only interested in accruing profits. We need public banks — something the Public Banking Act, introduced by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, would provide.
This spring, 700 New York Times tech workers announced their new union, the Times Tech Guild. We talked with two tech workers involved in the campaign about why they’re organizing at the Gray Lady and why unions are crucial even for well-compensated workers.
During the last century, the Irish state imprisoned a greater share of its population than any other country on Earth: not just for crimes against people or property, but for falling foul of a repressive moral code. The victims are still counting the cost.
Conservatives claim to defend tradition. The truth is, they actually defend domination and illegitimate power over others.
The call to cancel rent won widespread support and helped advance a vision of housing justice we can build off of for years to come.
Centrist pundits and politicians are cheering the new bipartisan infrastructure bill, even though it slashes a range of vital spending programs contained in the original. We don’t need continued fetishization of bipartisanship — we need measures that actually aid the working-class majority.
Exiled from India, anti-colonial activist M. N. Roy charted a revolutionary course that took him everywhere from New York City to Mexico, where he helped found the Mexican Communist Party. His life was the epitome of socialist internationalism.
Today, Poland’s hard-right government uses the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 for generic nationalist pageantry. But the real insurrectionaries against the Nazis were sharply divided between those who worked to restore the old elite and those who sought real social change.
Despite continued proclamations that Joe Biden is a transformative president, his agenda has been much more about placating business interests than shifting power to workers.
Almost every assassin involved in the murder of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was Colombian. That’s no coincidence: if you want mercenaries for hire on the cheap, often trained by the US military, you can find them in spades in Colombia.