James Bloodworth is a writer and journalist from London.
Sociologist Chahla Chafiq was a 25-year-old Marxist activist during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Now in exile in France, she looks back on the tensions between socialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism that have roiled Iran’s opposition politics for decades.
Some leftists imagine a postcapitalist society will free everyone from the need to work. But the only realistic and fair way to manage production under socialism is to democratically distribute and share in the burdens of labor.
On Thursday, the Conservative UK government published a new bill that would impose draconian restrictions on rail workers’ right to strike — aiming to punish rail unions for their recent militancy and make future strikes as difficult as possible.
The Biden administration just ratcheted up “strategic competition” with China with a round of export controls aimed at hobbling China’s semiconductor industry. But the move could end up blowing back on the US and its allies.
Raising interest rates won’t just push Britain into a recession and make the cost-of-living crisis worse for working-class people — it will discourage badly needed investments in green energy, undermining the UK’s efforts to address climate change.
Canada’s social democratic New Democratic Party has a poor track record on the issue of Palestinian dispossession. As a result of grassroots organizing and a push from the party’s left, leader Jagmeet Singh is finally signaling support for Palestinian rights.
Outside billionaires have flooded a single school board race in Los Angeles with $10 million. That’s because they know the race is about more than just the swing vote on the LA school board — it’s about the future of public education.
Most of us sense cryptocurrency is a scam. But some boosters claim progressives shouldn’t abandon crypto. Examine those claims closely, however, and you won’t find much — perhaps because there really isn’t an argument for crypto from the Left.
The UK’s former prime minister Liz Truss came to power promising to restore growth to the British economy. During her 45 days at the helm, she crashed it. Calamity is pending, and the country’s political elite are out of ideas.
The BBC marked its centenary this week, but its long-term future is deeply uncertain. We should defend the idea of public-service broadcasting while sharply criticizing the BBC in its current form for its conservativism and deference to the British state.
Liz Truss has accelerated the UK’s decline faster than many thought possible. She’s been swiftly disposed of by her own party, but the long-run meltdown of British politics shows little sign of easing.
The Canadian right has committed to its own brand of angry identity politics, pitting “regular” folks against the depredations of elites. The Left has to fight back with a class politics opposing economic exploitation — not its own version of tribalism.
Compared to similarly educated peers in the workforce, teachers earn 76 cents on the dollar. Bubble baths and mindfulness apps can’t make up for the systematic denial of life-sustaining wages.
Long before Bretton Woods, powerful capitalist nations perfected the art of exploiting other countries without formally colonizing them. They’ve done this through a rigged international economy, governed by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF.
Thanks to Nike CEO Phil Knight’s cash, the ripple effects of the George Floyd protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, and a deepening housing crisis, Oregon is on the brink of electing its first Republican governor since the 1980s.
Effective altruist Peter Singer argues that individuals should do more to alleviate the world’s poverty. But his emphasis on giving to charity disregards the structural causes of inequality, suggesting that nothing fundamental can be changed.
Over the last week, record rains have again caused flooding in Australia, this time impacting Victoria. Although the disaster was easy to predict, the authorities took few preventative measures, and now residents are expected to bear the costs.
Doctors’ unions are rare in the US, and unions comprised of both physicians and other medical providers are even rarer. But in North Carolina, a group of medical providers has successfully organized an interprofessional union.
A new congressional report commissioned by Bernie Sanders finds that the 1 percent now own one-third of all wealth, while the bottom half of Americans hold only 2 percent. It’s another sign of the slide into oligarchy that Sanders has warned about for years.
There’s a disconnect between Western leaders’ increasingly hawkish public discourse and the quiet consensus among their military experts that any armed encounter with Russia would likely end in a nuclear catastrophe.