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.
After a speaker at France Insoumise’s summer school invoked the “right to be Islamophobic,” the French left is again at war over secularism. But the real problem is a failure to take sides with the victims of racism — and defend Muslims against attempts to stigmatize them.
We asked longtime climate advocates which candidate has the best and boldest plan to halt climate change. The answer was nearly unanimous: Bernie Sanders.
For years, the liberal establishment has advocated a “pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants. That’s not enough. We need unconditional amnesty for all.
With Leon Wofsy’s death last month, we lost a scientist and organizer who spent his near-century on earth fighting against racism and war and for free speech — and embarrassing Ronald Reagan to his face at the height of his attacks on student activism in California.
Last month’s primary elections in Argentina destroyed the basis for conservative president Mauricio Macri’s legitimacy. They also provoked a vicious backlash from financial markets, showing capital’s hostility to popular democracy.
UBI advocates have a habit of mistaking politics for arithmetic. Proving that a policy is mathematically possible isn’t enough — and it can distract from more compelling left priorities.
Swedish social democracy is often thought of as somehow eternal — the fruit of a solidaristic national culture, or even its historic homogeneity. But Sweden used to be just as unequal as other European countries — and making social democracy “normal” took a fight against what was once considered traditional.
Few workers hold as much potential power as dockworkers. Studying the history of those workers, both in the San Francisco Bay Area and Durban, South Africa, shows how such workers can continue building that power into the twenty-first century.
British companies grant shares to their executives all the time. But now that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is planning to require them to grant shares to ordinary workers, the Financial Times is warning of disaster.
Class shapes our social world — not just through the economy, but through our personal networks. Whether it’s Kamala Harris’s corporate lawyer husband or Elizabeth Warren’s McKinsey alum daughter, it’s legitimate to ask how a politician’s class connections might influence the decisions they make in office.
United Auto Workers members recently voted to strike against the Big Three automakers. But as a rank-and-file General Motors worker explains, the ongoing corruption cases within the union make it hard to prepare to walk off the job.
To understand the rank-and-file strategy for socialists in the labor movement, you have to understand the role and interests of the trade union bureaucracy.
Bernie Sanders’s embrace of the New Deal legacy is an opportunity to dispel some pernicious historical myths about the New Deal’s relationship with socialism and its attitude toward the struggle for racial equality.
A class-based theory of homelessness helps explain both why anti-homeless laws exist and how homeless people are mistreated by charities and state welfare.
Capital’s share is more than enough money to finance a universal basic income.
Anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-immigrant — the Liberal Democrats’ new recruits are anything but liberal.
Electing progressive leadership is nowhere near enough to transform the labor movement — drifting away from union democracy and militancy is too easy. Good left labor leadership must be rooted in the rank and file.
In the emerging neoliberalism of the 1970s, Michel Foucault saw the promise of a new social order, more open to individual autonomy and experimental ways of living. That’s not how things turned out.
Conservatives in the United States know they can’t win on a level playing field — so they’ve started rigging the electoral rules in their favor, democracy be damned.
Joe Biden can’t stop lying. He lies for popularity, he lies to protect billionaires’ profits, and he lies to cover his own misdeeds. If he were to quit lying, Biden would be exposed for who he actually is: a happy stooge of industry trying to squash the rising demand for a better world.