James Bloodworth is a writer and journalist from London.
French historian Maxime Rodinson transformed our understanding of the Muslim world with books like Muhammad and Islam and Capitalism. Rodinson’s pathbreaking work, based on the creative use of Marxist ideas, is still an invaluable guide to the politics of the Middle East today.
The Second International’s history is usually seen through the prism of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, a mass party in an industrial power. But militants in the Balkans had to adapt its lessons to their own local realities — and in the decades before World War I, they were the first socialists to confront the looming dangers of the national question.
The Reddit-led GameStop short squeeze wasn’t a threat to capitalism, but it did reveal to a huge number of people that the system is rigged. That’s popular education socialists should be grateful for.
The arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has sparked mass protests against Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism. Navalny’s journalism has highlighted the cronyism of Russia’s elites — but his chameleon-like shifts between liberalism and anti-immigrant nationalism show he’s no champion of working-class Russians.
Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese could be facing a leadership contest. Albanese’s record has been unimpressive, but changing leaders won’t be enough to turn the party’s fortunes around. Real party democracy and a break with neoliberal dogma are the only remedies for Labor’s malaise.
In one of his last acts as president, Donald Trump gave US recognition for Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara in exchange for Moroccan recognition of Israel. It’s unclear if Joe Biden will reverse the move — but the Saharawi population has now risen up against the occupation, refusing to let foreign powers dictate its future.
In all the celebrations of Martin Luther King’s life, we tend to forget something very important about our country’s greatest civil rights leader: when he was alive, institutions of the US state, especially the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, constantly harassed, surveilled, and attempted to destroy King.
When tech platforms, regulatory agencies, and social media companies conspire to swat down share purchases that get in Wall Street’s way, they’re doing us all a favor: they’re showing us the ruthlessly hierarchical reality of neoliberalism behind the friendly mask.
Last June, France’s second city voted for the “Marseille Spring,” a left-wing coalition that put an end to two decades of conservative rule. But difficult pandemic conditions — and now the abrupt exit of mayor Michèle Rubirola — have raised questions over its ability to put ordinary citizens in charge of city hall.
After the fall of the USSR, most observers expected Cuba to follow in its wake. But the Cuban system has now lasted for 30 years since the Soviet collapse. To explain its persistence, we need to drop Cold War stereotypes and look at the Cuban experience in its own right.
In conservative Florida, where Trump edged out Biden last year by 51 percent to 48 percent, a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 passed with nearly 61 percent of the vote. By appealing to Floridians’ material interests across lines of race and geography, the campaign shows how left economic policies can win even in right-wing contexts.
Watch Doug Henwood talk with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah about GameStop, the lies companies like Robinhood tell about their “democratic” empowerment of small investors, and why the absurdities and inefficiencies of Wall Street are a “racket.”
Convinced his state capitol was set to be attacked by violent, far-right extremists, a Florida man called for armed resistance on social media and was promptly jailed. The episode is a case study of how easily a domestic “war on terror” will be turned on the Left.
Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are producing a new TV series about female Kurdish fighters. We can expect a sanitized production that somehow fails to mention that YPJ forces in Rojava are leftists who oppose everything the Clintons represent.
BlackRock is being depicted as an environmental hero for its recent commitment to fight climate change — at the same time the Wall Street firm undermines climate action and helps companies hide dark money political spending.
Now that hedge funds are losing billions to Redditors buying stocks like GameStop, Wall Street wants heavy-handed intervention into the market, and brokerages have clamped down on the upstarts. It’s a reminder that there’s no such thing as “people’s capitalism” or “shareholder democracy” — the capitalist economy is structured to do what’s best for the business elite.
A hundred years years ago, Italy’s Communist Party was founded in Livorno. The Tuscan port city had a long history of defying authority — and in the 1920s, its working-class neighborhoods were heartlands of the resistance against rising Fascism.
Inmates at New Zealand’s Waikeria Prison staged a six-day protest against abusive conditions and collective punishment. Despite her campaign promises to reform a dysfunctional justice system, Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern is ignoring their demands.
California’s post-Reagan drift into the welcome arms of the corporate-friendly Democratic Party has meant a politics that looks like an elite lifestyle brand. It’s a state where social liberalism reigns, but so does staggering poverty and inequality. The Democratic Party has failed California and unless things change, it will continue to fail our nation.
Not long after his inauguration, where he assured Americans that they “can overcome this deadly virus,” Joe Biden announced that as many as hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths are unavoidable in the coming months. But there’s only one reason for that — Biden preemptively ruled out pursuing a national stay-at-home order two months ago.