Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
In the UK, university staff are engaged in a grading and assessment boycott as part of a long-running dispute over pay, pensions, and precarity. But university administrations are refusing to listen, leaving many students unable to graduate as normal.
In 1997, the central slogan of the Teamsters’ UPS strike was “Part-Time America Won’t Work.” Today, as the Teamsters weigh another UPS strike, part-time workers at the company say their pay and working conditions are still unbearable.
Almost 50 years ago, metalworker and economist Harry Braverman published Labor and Monopoly Capital. It showed how bosses use technology to disempower workers — but that by taking control of the labor process, workers can free themselves from drudgery.
The poverty of industrial England was the backdrop of H. G Wells’s childhood. This experience instilled in him a clear-eyed realism with which he rejected both utopianism and progressive notions that socialism could be won without class struggle.
The French Marxist thinker Daniel Bensaïd grappled with the history of socialist defeats to supply us with a road map for the present. The result was a brilliant reformulation of Marxism that can guide today’s left-wing movements in their struggles.
The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, a victim of Stalin’s terror, has often been viewed as a martyr. It’s a critical reception that has veiled Mandelstam’s literary greatness, which was evident long before Stalin came to power.
In colonial regimes, dominant conceptions of private property developed alongside racial hierarchies.
An unbroken blanket of coniferous trees occupies the North American coast from California to the Alaskan islands. A wonder of the natural world, these temperate rainforests are essential to the continent’s health — and they must be protected.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot discontinue India’s popular rural job guarantee, the country’s most significant antipoverty program. He’s taken to underfunding and “appifying” it instead.
Despite both right-wing hysterics about “woke capital” and the optimistic claims of Wall Street, ESG has done very little to steer investment in more socially responsible directions. Aggressive state action is needed to rapidly green the economy.
The police killing of a 17-year-old in a Paris suburb has sparked a revolt against state violence across France. But powerful police unions have closed ranks behind the killer, in a backlash that shows French cops’ refusal to accept even basic accountability.
It’s the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations, and all the Australian Labor Party wants to offer are measures that are so inadequate, they’re tantamount to smoke and mirrors. That’s why Labor is rapidly losing ground to the Left.
It’s hard to imagine any other government getting away with the crimes that Saudi Arabia’s monarchy has. And yet the Saudi-backed LIV Golf’s merger with the PGA Tour shows the Gulf nation continues to be treated as anything but a pariah in the United States.
Asteroid City dials up the “Wes Anderson” to 11, leaving an emotional void in its wake.
France’s left has often failed to speak up for marginalized minorities. But after the backlash over the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel, left-wing parties have taken a clear stance, refusing to condemn rioters and insisting their anger is justified.
President Biden said he won’t expand the Supreme Court because doing so would “politicize” the court in an unhealthy way. But it’s a political institution by its nature — and a disturbingly undemocratic one.
For centuries, US capitalism has let a minority profit while leaving millions of others destitute. The moralistic idea that we’re all partly to blame ignores the systemic causes of poverty and offers no hope of building solidarity.
Eugene “Gus” Newport, Berkeley’s socialist mayor from 1979 to 1986, used local office to support and materially aid left-wing revolutionaries from South Africa to Central America and the Caribbean. Newport proved that city hall could have a global reach.
This Pride Month, amid a wave of protests targeting LGBTQ-friendly brands, Starbucks workers say they’ve been asked to take down Pride decorations. Workers say it’s part of a larger trend of undermining and demoralizing baristas, who are unionizing nationwide.
Under the banner of “Auditions Are Work,” a group of SAG-AFTRA members are organizing to enforce a little-known provision of their contract that guarantees pay for auditions. With many actors spending hours each week auditioning, there’s a lot to gain.