Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
You wouldn’t know it from the belligerent media coverage, but so far, despite his record as a tough-talking anti-Russia hawk, Joe Biden has been taking US policy toward Moscow in a surprisingly reasonable direction.
There can be no successful left project without a rebuilt and revitalized labor movement at its heart. But that doesn’t mean that union militancy serves the interests of the larger working class in every possible context.
The sequel to John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s horror-thriller A Quiet Place can’t deliver the same surprises as the original. But it still works.
Turin was once Italian labor’s most famous heartland, inspiring a young Antonio Gramsci to become a Communist. Today, Gramsci scholar Angelo D’Orsi is bidding to win the mayor’s office — by mobilizing the working-class voters that the neoliberalized center-left abandoned.
The logistics industry is key to the global circulation of goods under capitalism. Workers have immense power within it to grind that circulation to a halt — if they can get organized.
A specter is haunting America — the specter of negligibly higher chicken bowl prices at Chipotle. That’s the latest talking point in the conservative crusade against fair wages and unemployment benefits.
The Russian-born thinker Raya Dunayevskaya was an important and influential figure on the US radical left. At an early stage, she recognized the need to combine struggles against racism and capitalism — two oppressive structures that were intimately linked.
A new report on the state of dynastic wealth in America explodes the myth of the hardworking, meritorious rich. If America ever was a meritocracy, it certainly isn’t now.
States are giving away a handful of college scholarships in a lottery for students who get vaccinated. It’s like something out of dystopian sci-fi: only a lucky few get to avoid crushing student debt, the rest suffer. It doesn’t have to be this way.
On Bloomsday, we’re celebrating James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s one of the greatest novels ever, and it calls forth a world where every named and unnamed minor character gets to be the hero. What could be more socialist?
Police around the world have increasingly been equipped with “nonlethal” weapons. But the myth that these weapons are harmless tools of crowd control normalizes the use of rubber bullets and tear gas against protesters — and fuels police violence that often does kill people.
ProPublica’s bombshell story about the financial malfeasance of the richest Americans has stirred bipartisan outrage in Washington. Unfortunately, it’s mainly outraged against the whistleblower who exposed the story.
The pandemic has exposed gaping holes in Ontario’s workplace compensations system. Sick and injured workers, often employed in frontline industries, have been left out of work without compensation.
Major corporations like Apple want us to believe they care about the planet and are addressing their unsustainable practices. Surprise, surprise — they don’t and they aren’t.
If Democrats had used their huge 2008 congressional majorities to rescue families thrown out of their homes during the financial crisis, we may have averted Donald Trump’s narrow victory in 2016.
Last November, left candidate Edmilson Rodrigues defeated a Bolsonaro ally to become mayor of Belém in the Brazilian Amazon. The Belém experiment could be a chance to push back against a destructive far-right government that grossly mismanaged the pandemic.
Alexa Avilés is a community organizer in South Brooklyn, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and candidate for New York City Council. In an interview, she discusses her history of education organizing, recent billionaire-funded scaremongering attacks against her, and why she’s running for office as part of a citywide socialist slate.
Democratic leaders claim to be powerless against the handful of conservative Democrats blocking progressive reform. Yet when it comes to government surveillance or funding war, those Democrats always know how to force rank-and-file lawmakers to fall in line.
Tasked with carrying out what ought to be state functions, but dependent on private interests, NGOs will never challenge the basic structures of capitalism.
Commonwealth College was a radical experiment in socialist education nestled deep in the Arkansas mountains. It taught and trained over 1,500 worker-activists before becoming an early casualty of American anti-communism.