Jonathan Sas has worked in senior policy and political roles in government, think tanks, and the labor movement. He is an honorary witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. His writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, National Post, the Tyee, and Maisonneuve.
Some of Eric Hobsbawm’s academic admirers would rather forget about his socialist political commitments. But those commitments formed an essential part of the great historian’s life and work.
In response to the pandemic, some governors are starting to reorganize their health systems to limit destructive competition and coordinate care between private and public hospitals. But we need to think bigger: a fully public, universal hospital system modeled on the UK’s National Health Service.
As the war in Afghanistan slowly grinds to an end, many in the foreign policy establishment want to tell you it was a “good war gone bad.” That’s false. The war in Afghanistan never should have been waged in the first place.
Spain’s comprehensive schools are often considered a social leveler, offering free education and hot meals to kids from all backgrounds. But amid the coronavirus shutdown, the classroom has moved into the family home — and working-class parents have the least time and resources to devote to their children’s education.
In New York City, the Democratic Socialists of America are running a six-candidate socialist slate aiming for state and national office. It will serve as a test run for socialist organizing in the age of coronavirus.
With the death this week of Jack Mundey, Australia has lost a giant of trade unionism. His green-socialist vision put labor militancy and democratic control at the heart of society and pushed back against the rapaciousness of urban development.
While educators across the country struggle to support and teach their students during distance learning, state and federal legislators are preparing to slash public education budgets. Defending public education during the coronavirus will require solidarity across the public sector.
We desperately need a Medicare expansion to provide health care to millions. But instead, Nancy Pelosi’s office is backing a health policy reform that is actually more expensive and will cover less people — all to placate centrist Democrats and insurance executives.
When faced with political setbacks like Bernie Sanders’s loss, it’s easy for socialists to blame our own comrades for our defeats. But those losses are more rooted in the powerful structures we’re up against than our own failures — and while vibrant debate is critical to the Left, intraleft attacks and recriminations just exhaust and dispirit us.
Denis Goldberg was a hero of the fight against South Africa’s apartheid regime, jailed for 22 years for his activism alongside Nelson Mandela. Following Goldberg’s tragic death last month, Jeremy Corbyn, writing in Tribune, pays tribute to a comrade and friend.
The New York Times attack yesterday on socialists who won’t endorse Joe Biden isn’t actually about convincing socialists to vote for him — it’s about performatively denouncing leftists as irresponsible, for the edification of the liberals who are watching.
Joe Biden has named several progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sara Nelson, to newly announced policy “task forces.” This beats him just sneering at leftists — but it’s no great progressive victory that a few good people are on a random list of names for toothless task forces.
Terrorists killed fewer Americans over twenty years than coronavirus has in two months. Yet the Right, which insisted after 9/11 on the need to give up core civil liberties to “save lives,” is now demanding that we accept mass death for the sake of profit.
The Post Office is a national treasure, providing service everywhere from the smallest town to the biggest city and offering a rare example in US society of democratic values prevailing over private profits. We can’t let the Post Office’s opponents use the coronavirus crisis to dismantle this vital universal service.
Coronavirus has had a devastating economic impact in the United States. Yet the richest country in the world has so far passed paltry relief measures.
Longtime social movements scholar Frances Fox Piven on organizing the unemployed under coronavirus, where the Bernie Sanders movement goes from here, and why breaking rules and disrupting business as usual are central to making social change.
Bernie Sanders is the coauthor of the Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act, which would cover anyone who was uninsured when the coronavirus crisis began. The labor movement’s animating maxim is “an injury to one is an injury to all” — unions should keep that phrase in mind and back this bill.
If you’re curious about who both Republicans and Democrats are prioritizing in providing coronavirus relief, look no further than the new legislation proposed by House Democrats that would give away enormous amounts of money to corporate lobbyists and dark money groups under the guise of aiding average workers.
Political organizing is hard — political education shouldn’t have to be. We’re now offering our ABCs of Capitalism series as free ebooks.
Being a socialist won’t stop being hard anytime soon. But if we want to start winning, socialists need to study the recent defeats of Syriza in Greece, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and Bernie Sanders in the US, along with the failures of twentieth-century social democracy and the declining relevance of Leninism.