Frances Abele CM is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy Emerita at Carleton University. She is a research fellow at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and the Broadbent Institute. Much of her work focuses on indigenous-Canada relations.
At Epic Systems, a Wisconsin-based software company, workers had complaints that will be familiar to many workers across the United States: an oppressive culture of surveillance and control, executives pushing to end their pandemic-induced working from home. Now, Epic’s workers are organizing.
American workers are sharing their stories of life on unemployment benefits. The horrors of our collective surrender to the market are on full display.
Rep. Karen Bass is no socialist, but she’s hung around a few of us in the past. Because of this, as her name was floated for Biden’s vice presidency, she’s been subjected to McCarthyist-style smears. We on the Left have to clearly and loudly stand against these attacks — they’re designed to make socialism politically beyond the pale.
New York Democratic legislators are trying to tax stock trades, capital gains, and carried interest. Wall Street, of course, is horrified by such a development — but luckily, their millions in campaign contributions have helped create a solid friendship with Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Dividing up the “good refugees” from the “bad migrants” is a false distinction rooted in inhumanity. Whether people are fleeing their home countries because of violence or poverty, they should be welcomed with open arms.
From 1933 to 1942, FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps put more than 3 million jobless young people to work on nature restoration projects all across the country. It was possibly the most popular of all the New Deal programs and a spectacular conservation success — one that a Green New Deal can replicate.
It might be surprising to find a movie on Netflix that presents Cuban agents as self-sacrificing idealists and Miami exiles as right-wing terrorists. But Wasp Network offers a sober portrayal of how Cubans resisted the Miami opposition’s violent campaign of attacks in the 1990s.
Perry Anderson’s essays on the history of Marxism show his dazzling erudition and breadth of historical vision. But the British Marxist’s work has also been deeply shaped by his changing political outlook, as his 1960s hopes in socialist revolution have given way to a more sober reading of capitalism’s crises.
Lebanon has been subject to an unending series of disasters, of which last week’s ammonium nitrate explosion is only the most recent. But neither its own corrupt elites or European neoliberals like Emmanuel Macron can be trusted to actually end them.
Movies about class and inequality have made it into the global mainstream recently and are picking up major prizes. The genre-busting, edge-of-your-seat Brazilian film Bacurau is the latest. You’ve gotta see it.
As the financial crisis worsens, public-sector employment is coming under heavy fire — for black people in particular. Fighting budget cuts and layoffs in public-sector jobs like the post office and public transit must be an essential piece of the fight for black lives.
The combination of rising property values and billowing police budgets have transformed New York City since the 1970s. Now, movements to defund the police are coalescing with calls to cancel rent.
A Green New Deal can’t just move us towards ecological sustainability — it also has to democratize the entire economy by expanding worker ownership.
Faced with the Left’s lead in the polls, coup-installed president Jeanine Áñez has suspended Bolivia’s election for the third time. The COB trade union federation has responded with a general strike and road blockades around Bolivia — showing that the country’s mighty social movements will not allow an illegitimate regime to continue clinging to power.
The United Electrical Workers was once one of America’s mightiest unions. But because many leaders were leftists who challenged corporate power, UE was decimated by McCarthyism. The union managed to survive, though, and UE’s model of militant, democratic unionism is exactly what we need to revive labor in the 21st century.
The media is full of anti-Trump pundits pining for the leadership of George W. Bush. Yet virtually every aspect of Donald Trump’s presidency was built on the hard-right, authoritarian legacy of his Republican predecessor.
The fact that the United States is recusing itself from pretty much all global cooperation in the search for a coronavirus vaccine does not bode well for equitable distribution of a cure.
When workers at Minneapolis’s Tattersall Distilling tried to secure safe working conditions during the pandemic, their bosses blew them off. So now they’re fighting to unionize. We spoke with a Tattersall worker about the organizing drive — and why racial justice has been central to their unionization push.
Bernie Sanders lost in large part because we lacked the strong working-class and leftist institutions needed to defeat the establishment. Key to rebuilding those institutions is waging more class-struggle electoral campaigns and ramping up rank-and-file labor organizing.
Conservatives have predictably tried to turn face masks into a pseudo-populist culture war issue. But the people aren’t buying it: new polling shows a solid majority of Americans support enforcing tough mask mandates — once again exposing the Right’s waning popular appeal.