Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
Hillary Clinton has claimed that Giorgia Meloni becoming Italy’s first woman prime minister will “open doors” for women. Yet Meloni’s far-right agenda closes doors for women who want well-paid jobs, sexual autonomy, and reproductive rights.
Chile’s president Gabriel Boric’s government rose to power on the back of a decade of industrial militancy and popular protest. To achieve its aims, it will need to use these forces as a battering ram against the elite.
Years of austerity, falling real wages, and the experience of the pandemic have workers rethinking their commitment to their jobs. Anyone surprised by this is rich and profoundly out of touch… or a boss.
Housing costs in Lisbon are so high that it’s ranked even more unviable for renters than New York. Attempts to solve the issue through “market efficiency” have made the problem worse.
The question of what to do about the Democrats is a perpetual quandary for leftists. In the 1970s, the New Politics movement tried to move the party in a more progressive direction. Perhaps the movement deserves more credit than many socialists have given it.
Dubbed “the Negro Eugene Debs,” Frank Crosswaith was one of the great socialists of the early to mid-20th century. And his message was unwavering: only a vigorous labor movement and democratic socialist policies can deliver a better life for black workers.
Starbucks has carried out a vicious national union-busting campaign, but Starbucks workers have responded with strikes across the country. We spoke to a Chicago barista about why she and her coworkers have walked off the job.
Today’s polarized politics demand we treat Anthony Fauci like a hero or a villain. But he was something far more banal: a committed public servant who made serious errors of judgment, denting the country’s trust in public health in the process.
Democratic socialist Gabriel Acevero has won reelection to the Maryland General Assembly. “I am an unbought and unbossed voice for the working class,” he says. “That invites a lot of fear in folks who are happy with the status quo, and I welcome that.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s new election cops are locking up the state’s citizens for trying to exercise their most basic political right, the right to vote — all to impress the Extremely Online right.
In 1925, Russian communist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky toured the Midwest, visiting Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, reciting his revolutionary and romantic poetry. His reflections on his visit combine amazement and disgust at industrial modernity.
As Rhode Island treasurer, Seth Magaziner pumped retirement funds into alternative investments on Wall Street. It didn’t produce much for teacher and firefighter retirees — but it was a huge boon for his congressional campaign.
The Right wants it both ways on PPP loans and student loans, insisting it was fine for the government to forgive pandemic loans to businesses but terrible if it does the same with college loans to ordinary people. None of its arguments make any sense.
Since Joe Biden announced the cancellation of $10,000 of student debt per borrower, right-wingers have been frothing at the mouth with outrage. The Right’s desperate response shows exactly why student debt cancellation makes for good politics.
Chipotle workers in Lansing, Michigan, have organized the first-ever union at the company. Could Chipotle be the next Starbucks, with unionization efforts spreading like wildfire?
The stakes are high in Brazil’s upcoming presidential election: four more years of the reactionary, corrupt, right-wing rule of Jair Bolsonaro or a return of the most transformative president Brazil has ever seen, Lula da Silva.
After 1945, Italy had strong left-wing movements and an anti-fascist consensus that stemmed from the wartime resistance. Since the 1990s, however, a corrosive “anti-political” mood has displaced anti-fascism, and the far right has been the main beneficiary.
Fashionable academic theorists have dismissed the Marxist approach to nationalism as outdated and inadequate. But it remains an indispensable guide to national independence movements — urging support for them when they represent a challenge to capitalist rule.
Despite high-profile victories in the 1960s and ’70s, farmworkers in the US have been poorly paid and heavily exploited for generations. They deserve the power of a union.
The Right broke Ontario’s health care system. Now they can’t wait to replace it with a parallel, two-tiered system that benefits the rich.