Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
In his inauguration speech yesterday, Joe Biden rightly identified a crisis of ignored truth and unending lies in American politics. Donald Trump enflamed that crisis, but the political class, the media industry, and Biden himself helped create it.
Founded 100 years ago today, the Italian Communist Party immediately faced a violent wave of repression, killing hundreds of militants. As policemen, business elites, and even liberal politicians swung behind Benito Mussolini, no party resisted the Fascist threat more than the Communists.
Inspired by the hardships faced by peasants in his native Abruzzo, Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara was one of the great anti-fascist novels of the twentieth century. But his own political journey was deeply conflicted, as he left behind his Bolshevik past to become a strident anti-communist.
The Italian Communist Party was founded 100 years ago today. One of its most remarkable early militants was Francesco Misiano — a keen internationalist who fought gun in hand in the German Revolution before becoming a leading light of Soviet cinema.
Founded 100 years ago today, the Italian Communist Party fought its most famous battles in the country’s Northern industrial heartlands. But in the Southern city of Naples, it had to tailor its activity to a more complex reality — a city whose large informal economy reflected the deep inequalities on which the Italian state was founded.
Joe Biden has issued a raft of executive orders that are surprisingly progressive. But we know who to thank: the organized left, which has helped transform US politics.
The United Auto Workers has fallen far from its postwar glory as the most important union in America. Flagrant leadership corruption has made things worse. But a recent settlement with the Justice Department opens up the possibility of democratizing the union, writes labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein.
In the end, Donald Trump didn’t destroy the American political system. He showed the world how corrupt, undemocratic, and reactionary it already was.
Today, on Inauguration Day, we shouldn’t forget that the business class has long stoked fears of democracy — and bankrolled the conservative movement that gave us the events of January 6.
Donald Trump won the presidency claiming he was a radical opponent of the political establishment. That was always a lie — and his four years in the White House revealed he was just another reactionary, capitalist billionaire.
Joe Biden will likely govern to the left of Barack Obama. But his willingness to spend has everything to do with capital’s relaxation of deficit worries — and where capital says “no,” no one should expect Biden to say “yes.”
President Joe Biden now has a choice: make friends with congressional Republicans or actually make progress on the multiple overlapping crises facing the United States. He can’t do both.
The departure of Donald Trump from the White House is cause for celebration. Our task now is to build a democratic socialist alternative to Joe Biden — and to oppose the Democratic establishment’s neoliberal agenda.
The “1776 Commission” report released by Donald Trump just before his exit from the presidency is so staggeringly awful, trotting out every moldy reactionary trope about the history of the United States it can, that it has to be read to be believed.
More than a thousand workers at Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx are striking for a dollar-an-hour raise. They risked their health to feed New York City throughout the pandemic — they deserve the city’s solidarity.
Instead of pushing a promised public health care option or expanding Medicare or any of the other health reforms the United States desperately needs, Joe Biden’s health care reform draws from proposals from for-profit health insurance companies.
California nurses fought for over a decade to win safe-staffing legislation, a crucial set of rules protecting both nurses’ rights on the job and the well-being of hospital patients. So far, no other state has followed suit — but nurses nationwide are struggling to change that.
From the UFC to Hollywood, MMA and other ultra-brutal martial arts have gone mainstream — hand in hand with the rise of the far right.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the media coverage of the Capitol Hill rally was how little of it focused on the visible presence of QAnon. What’s behind the Q cult, and how can we confront it?
For both Democratic and Republican politicians, blaming social gatherings for coronavirus’s spread is convenient. But they’ve ignored or denied the central role workplace transmission plays in driving up infections. We need to treat coronavirus as the occupational disease it is — and that means restricting the power of business owners.