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.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has been rightly criticized for letting the New York Police Department run wild with brutality in the recent racial justice protests. But he’s not the only “progressive” in New York bowing to the boys in blue — the city council, supposedly to de Blasio’s left, has long been under the NYPD’s thumb, too.
The Civil War of 1917–21 brought the third wave of pogroms in the former Russian Empire, mostly perpetrated by the counterrevolutionary forces. But even some Red Army units committed antisemitic atrocities — and independent Jewish socialists played a decisive role in forcing the Soviet state to stop them.
US police have used rubber bullets against civilian protesters on a massive scale the past week. These projectiles actually originated in Northern Ireland — and their history is anything but “nonlethal.” There can be no justification for police use of rubber bullets.
It’s fashionable to claim that the “rise of the robots” or the “disappearance of work” have changed everything about labor in the twenty-first century. But when it comes to extracting profit from workers, today’s era of ruthless capitalism is fundamentally the same as those of the past.
The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a fresh round of soul-searching in establishment media outlets about the problems of urban America. Unless we address the root cause of those problems in the structure of our economic system, we’ll never be able to solve them.
Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered in 2016 during a fight against a hydroelectric megaproject. In a Honduras characterized by corruption and impunity after the 2009 US-backed coup, the murder was the grand finale of a campaign of terror and violence against activists like Cáceres.
In cities throughout the United States this weekend, we witnessed a terrifying spectacle: a brutal police riot, waged with frightening savagery, against average citizens whose unforgivable crime was daring to criticize police violence.
America is a country that eagerly hands out get-out-of-jail-free cards to the rich and powerful, and rubber bullets, tear gas, and jail sentences to the rest. The protesters on the street this weekend were trying to change that.
During yesterday’s protests against the police murder of George Floyd, Amazon declared that it “stand[s] in solidarity with the Black community — our employees, customers, and partners — in the fight against systemic racism and injustice.” But the company is no racial justice ally — not least because it has resolutely attempted to smash its workers’ organizing efforts.
Rioting is a rational response to grinding poverty and oppression. And though it’s not always the case, research shows that it can be effective in winning social change.
It’s a myth that young people are inherently left-wing, or that older people are always conservative. Millennials and zoomers are turning to radicalism not because they’re young, but because capitalism has failed them.
Donald Trump has threatened to ban “Antifa” as a terrorist organization. But you can’t ban a set of ideas. As long as we face the threat of a violent, authoritarian right, anti-fascism will remain an essential force.
Anyone who examines privately owned US prisons has to come to the conclusion that they are abhorrent and must be eliminated. But they can also be low-hanging fruit used by opportunistic Democrats to ignore the much larger problem of — and solutions to — mass incarceration.
Unions must play a central role in the fight against police brutality. We spoke with a rank-and-file bus driver in Minneapolis who is organizing his coworkers to refuse to assist police in transporting protesters — because, he says, “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
Whenever mass protests of any kind kick off, defenders of the status quo immediately accuse protesters as being duped by “outside agitators.” Don’t fall for it — the lie of the outside agitator is designed to weaken protests and downplay our widespread anger at injustice.
Coronavirus isn’t only exposing Donald Trump’s incompetence. The crisis is laying bare the consequences of the neoliberal economic agenda corporate Democrats have been pushing for decades.
In the Red Summer of 1919, racist violence hit America as the Spanish flu ravaged the country. With mass protests against police murders sweeping the pandemic-plagued United States, it appears we might be now living in a Red Spring.
Commentators like to point to Wuhan’s “wet markets” as the source of the pandemic, but COVID-19 is the result of a much larger, global phenomenon of environmental degradation. Combatting both means putting the politics of food production and land use at the very heart of our socialist project.
African countries have shown impressive ingenuity in dealing with the coronavirus. But the legacies of colonialism and Western-imposed austerity have left them ill-equipped to attack the deadly virus.
China’s united response to COVID-19 is often painted as a reflection of authoritarian “Asian values.” But the collective mobilization relied on real public support — a temporary social truce that today threatens to fracture.