Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
Unionized graduate students at Temple University are on strike. The school’s administration has responded with unabashedly brutal retaliation, cutting off their health care and tuition remission, in an attempt to crush them.
Capitalism’s apologists are throwing around economic concepts like inflation, recession, labor shortages, and supply chain shortages to justify ripping off consumers, raising rents, and depressing wages. Don’t ask them to define their terms.
The exploitation of workers is central to the functioning of capitalism. The socialist argument is simple: we can live in a world without such exploitation.
A third Trader Joe’s store location has just voted to unionize, this one in the notoriously anti-union South. “If a Trader Joe’s in Louisville, Kentucky, can do this,” says an organizer, “any Trader Joe’s across the country can do this.”
Whether the Ukraine war brings on a global catastrophe will hinge in large part on whether Washington decides to back a Ukrainian effort to retake the Crimean peninsula.
Once a major national force, today’s French Socialist Party finds itself outcompeted by both the radical left and neoliberal president Emmanuel Macron. But last month’s congress shows many leaders would rather kill the party than sign up for radical policies.
Social theorists identify automation as both the main cause of unemployment and the future launchpad for a high-tech post-scarcity world. But, Aaron Benanav argues, the problem is the stagnation of global capitalism and its inability to generate enough jobs.
“Let them eat price gouging” appears to be grocery giant Loblaws’ response to the rising number of food-insecure Canadians. The company blames supply chain issues and inflation for soaring grocery costs — yet is posting stratospheric profits.
Israel routinely refuses to extradite its own citizens — including people who’ve flown there purely to escape justice. Its Law of Return rewards criminals who can claim a vague connection to Israel, even as it denies innocent Palestinians their homeland.
Achieving a fully socialist society is going to take a long time, and there’s no guarantee of victory. But we should never lose sight of the goal, because every step we take in that direction makes life better for working-class people and deepens democracy.
For years, rail companies have resisted federal safety regulations to cut costs. The major train derailment in Ohio last weekend, which resulted in the emergency evacuation of residents nearby, is the fruit of such profit maximization.
Since he first ran for president, Donald Trump has not only become the dominant figure in Republican politics — he’s embedded his own priorities and personal style deep in the GOP base. They’ll accept no substitutes for the real thing at this point.
Mass protests on Tuesday showed the strength of popular anger at Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise the pension age. But the coalition of left-wing parties, NUPES, has fallen into infighting — which risks wasting the progress it has made since last spring.
Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 shocked the newly independent India. Seventy-five years later, the assassin’s associates are now in power and dismantling secular democracy.
Workers at a soft drink maker owned by private equity megafirm KKR say the company is stalling in contract negotiations and denying workers more than six weekends off per year. Ironically, KKR’s union busting is funded in part by union pension investments.
The idea that judges are objective interpreters of the law is a polite fiction. With their ability to carry out a far-right agenda through democratic means declining, the GOP is embracing judicial partisanship.
Joe Biden actually showed signs of life in his State of the Union. And Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response reflected a GOP determined to stay weird and unhinged. But whatever his rhetorical innovations, Bidenism in practice remains grounded in Beltway orthodoxy.
An early peace deal could have ended the bloody war in Ukraine. But NATO opposition and revelations about the Russian massacre of civilians at Bucha, along with US media that all but ignored potential routes to peace, dashed those hopes.
The capitalist work ethic insists that we keep our heads down and work endlessly, even if our job is degrading. Democratic socialists want to free workers from drudgery so we can develop our full human potential and simply enjoy the one life we have.
Britain’s short-lived Tory prime minister Liz Truss has finally emerged from hiding to tell the story of her less than two months at 10 Downing Street, and she’s already rewriting history.