James Bloodworth is a writer and journalist from London.
With the rise of polarization, the hard-core ideological right and left have become more visible to normie voters than ever before. In 2022, American voters made it clear which side’s ultras it finds more unacceptable: the weirdos of the Trumpian right.
The Communist Party USA had its share of bureaucrats, morons, sectarians, and incompetents, writes longtime leftist Michael Myerson. But it also included some of the best, most principled, courageous, and heroic fighters for social justice in US history.
The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have shaken many of the European Union’s dogmas. Yet the EU has repeatedly defied predictions of imminent collapse — posing the need for a serious left-wing program to reform it.
American folk songs record a history of oppression and have often fueled the fire of protest. Folk artist Jake Xerxes Fussell’s music endeavors to sustain these working-class musical traditions while reinterpreting them for the modern age.
Apologists for capitalist globalization claim that global value chains spread prosperity around the world. In reality, they allow firms like Apple to maximize labor exploitation while keeping workers chained to poverty.
Despite growing need and out-of-pocket costs, Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is halving the number of Medicare-subsidized psychology sessions Australians can access each year. It’s an austerity measure that will harm those who need support the most.
For most of Japan’s postwar era, the Socialists were the second force in the country’s political system and the main challenger to conservative rule. But when they ditched their left-wing, anti-militarist principles in the 1990s, they collapsed into minor-party status.
Political movements are not just driven by theories or even material interests but also their myths. Italian historian Furio Jesi was a socialist who examined the power of mythology — and its centrality to the Right’s cultural influence.
Sholem Schwarzbard was an anarchist Yiddish-language poet from Ukraine. In 1926, he assassinated Ukrainian military commander Symon Petliura in revenge for deadly pogroms carried out by Petliura’s armies in the Russian Civil War — and was found not guilty by a jury of his peers.
Scenes of burning cars in Parisian streets have been used to paint France’s Kurds as a riotous minority. Yet their angry protests are fueled by a string of racist killings — and French authorities’ refusal to reveal the full facts of the cases.
Workers nationwide lack a federal guarantee of paid sick leave in the United States. Establishing a federal paid sick leave guarantee would improve the lives of all American workers — railworkers included.
On Christmas Day in 1831, 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in British West Indies history. Their uprising would prove a milestone on the road to emancipation only a few years later.
The conventional understanding of Marxism as doggedly anti-religious is wrong. In fact, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued, Christianity and Marxism have at times inspired in humanity a radical sense of hope to build a more just world.
Logistics workers in rail, trucking, and warehouses labor hard to bring us our packages year-round. But their employers subject them to ruthless harassment, surveillance, and union busting. Their organizing efforts need our solidarity this Christmas.
The 1995 Christmas rom-com While You Were Sleeping stars Sandra Bullock as a union transit worker in Chicago. Over 25 years later, it’s still a delightful working-class holiday watch.
Throughout the 20th century, religious leaders and anti-capitalists of all persuasions have attempted to question the legitimacy of Santa Claus. It has rarely ended well.
Our Christmas present to you: a long-lost Eugene V. Debs article on the famed 1914 Christmas truce, in which German and British soldiers dropped their weapons for a day and played football together — displaying humanity in the face of barbarity.
A movement led by Amílcar Cabral fought against Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau and won independence against seemingly overwhelming odds. It also contributed to the end of white-settler rule in Southern Africa and the democratic revolution in Portugal itself.
The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are withdrawing money from markets in the name of fighting inflation. But the move is aggravating the pressures of debt on the Global South — and pushing states toward ruinous austerity measures.
In the 1920s, Taiwan had a radical anti-colonial movement similar to those in other parts of the colonized world — and central to it was a powerful organized labor movement. Today, with a weak and divided left, that memory needs to be recovered.