James Bloodworth is a writer and journalist from London.
After the January 6 violence at the Capitol, Americans got a bigger national security state. What they didn’t get was solutions to any of the underlying forces that helped bolster right-wing extremism.
After spending most of 2021 on the picket line, nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, are returning to work. Their strike holds two lessons: health care corporations will erode standards infinitely for profit, and worker solidarity is the only way to stop them.
A record number of American workers quit their jobs in November, another sign that worker leverage in the labor market is stronger than it has been in years. But without organizing, today’s gains for workers will vanish as soon as the labor market slackens.
An OSHA emergency rule rolls out the red carpet for employers, shunting responsibility for workplace safety onto workers rather than bosses. It’s a far cry from the strong workplace pandemic protections Joe Biden promised in his presidency’s early days.
Has anyone ever seen Jeff Bezos and Superman supervillain Lex Luthor in the same room?
Unions fight for more pay for workers. But workers also need to have time for themselves and their friends and families. Overtime pay and raises can’t replace what we need more than anything else: our time back.
In 1926, 14.5 million Germans voted in a referendum to expropriate the toppled royal dynasties’ estates. The campaign brought rare unity on the German left — but also met with a reactionary backlash highlighting the dangers to Weimar democracy.
French president Emmanuel Macron has renewed calls for the creation of a joint EU army. The proposal smacks of a desperate attempt to reverse the old European powers’ declining influence in global politics.
A conference this month aims to unite European far-right leaders like Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán in a continentwide alliance. What would once have been a fringe grouping can now rely on the support of several EU governments.
The “Just Say No” campaign is remembered today for the huge quantity of kitsch media it produced, like McGruff the Crime Dog. But the campaign was based on the psychological warfare techniques of the Cold War.
Meatpackers are colluding with each other to generate superprofits at the expense of everyone else. Nationalizing one of them isn’t particularly radical — it’s a commonsense policy solution.
The pharmaceutical industry wants Americans to continue paying far more for medicines than people in any other country, to protect their tremendous profits. And one of Joe Biden’s top campaign consulting firms is helping them.
Over the past year, the US public has been subjected to an avalanche of propaganda attempting to stoke future war with Russia and China. What’s stunning is how few Americans are buying it.
The new Nightmare Alley is wilder than the brilliant 1947 original. But director Guillermo del Toro trades its original expansive sense of human tragedy for a simple, bleak pessimism.
The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter believed that the triumph of socialism was inevitable, but he rejected the Marxist view of how capitalism works. His ideas are a stimulating challenge for those seeking an alternative to capitalism today.
The “post-politics” era of the 1990s and 2000s is over — people are engaged with politics everywhere you look. But strangely, our ability to do anything about those politics is still missing.
Winston Churchill has become all but deified in modern Britain. But in his own lifetime, Churchill was often recognized for who he really was: an unrepentant imperialist and racist, a foe of trade unions and women’s rights, and a defender of elite privilege.
French author Édouard Louis is famous for his works portraying the daily humiliations of working-class life. In an interview, he explains how our rulers avoid responsibility for their decisions — while blaming the rest of us for how we cope with the consequences.
The scariest thing about Don’t Look Up is that as absurd as it is, it barely exaggerates. Much of our political elite are just as greedy and foolish, our media just as vapid, and our response to impending disaster exactly as mind-bogglingly irrational as in the movie.
Last year saw setbacks for the Left in much of the world, but recent victories in Latin America are a reminder that socialist politics continue to offer an alternative to a system in crisis.