Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
The political right is a diverse intellectual tradition and world-making project. But there’s one thing that unites every variant of right-wing ideology: the belief that society will improve if we give up on the dream of a world where people are equal.
Telling the story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome, the 1960 film Spartacus was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in Hollywood and publishing.
From being less likely to graduate from college to experiencing much higher rates of “deaths of despair,” men and boys in the US — especially working-class men and boys — are suffering.
The United Auto Workers’ contract with the Big Three automakers expires tomorrow at midnight. If no agreement is reached, the UAW is ready to strike to recoup concessions made over the past two decades, end tiers, and boost wages.
Brand-new Census data shows child poverty has exploded since the expiration of the child tax credit and other pandemic-era protections.
Elmer Benson became the governor of Minnesota in 1937. His two-year tenure, during which he called the National Guard to defend strikers while other states had police crush them, is proof of the power that a Left capable of controlling the executive can exercise.
The Wisconsin GOP is at it again. With the party’s stranglehold on the State Supreme Court in peril following a judicial election last spring, Republicans are now seeking to impeach the new judge before the court can throw out the state’s rigged election maps.
The opioid crisis in the US is ravaging the country, leaving an enormous human toll in its wake. But rather than dealing with the root causes, the US establishment is using the crisis as a weapon in its conflict with China.
To find low-wage workers for their agricultural investments, billionaires like Bill Gates are using an immigration program linked to labor abuses and human trafficking. The scam is a far cry from the program’s supposed aim: helping struggling family farmers.
The WGA strike is now in its fifth month. We spoke to Alex O’Keefe, former writer on FX’s The Bear, about the exhilarations and anxieties of striking and the fight to turn Hollywood into a place of solidarity and creativity rather than capitalist competition.
Medical debt has ballooned in the US in recent decades. Hospitals and collection agencies are making a killing on it, eroding trust in the health care system and leading countless patients into financial ruin in the process.
Immigration from Ecuador to the US has spiked as political and economic instability shake the country. The culprit: right-wing policies, which have reversed the massive gains made under “pink tide” president Rafael Correa.
Rather than seizing the opportunity to cover one of the most important labor stories of our time, NBC Nightly News’ coverage of the potential United Auto Workers strike has checked off pretty much every anti-labor trope in the book.
By many metrics, the US economy is doing well — but most voters still disapprove of Biden’s handling of it. If they want to win elections, Democrats should run on reviving the temporary COVID welfare state they let expire.
LaKeith Stanfield is great in Apple TV+’s new horror-fantasy series The Changeling, based on the best-selling novel. The show itself, though, is a convoluted mess.
Robert Brenner’s theory of the post-1973 global economy — which depicts a long era of “stagnation” caused by chronic industrial overcapacity — is logically dubious and doesn’t fit the facts. But the theory’s biggest problem is its politics.
The moment that Salvador Allende was violently deposed on September 11, 1973, democratic socialists in the US knew it was a crime. They joined others around the world organizing solidarity efforts and supporting political refugees.
Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman are the founding fathers of neoliberal economics. When Augusto Pinochet overthrew Chile’s elected government, they helped devise his economic agenda and endorsed the brutal repression that was needed to force it through.
Filmmaker Patricio Guzmán and his team documented Chile’s Popular Unity government and the 1973 coup that destroyed it. Smuggled out of the country to be edited in exile, The Battle of Chile is an unforgettable record of an extraordinary historical moment.
Fifty years on, more details on the US role in overthrowing Salvador Allende’s socialist government are being uncovered. Among the latest revelations: Richard Nixon knew that the 1973 coup was going to happen days before it did.