Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
Looking beyond Joe Biden’s unexpectedly modest victory, the 2020 election was a historic failure for the Democratic Party. On the other hand, despite some painful hitches coming out of this campaign season, the Left has reason to be hopeful.
In last week’s election, the Democrats performed terribly, despite running during a period of unprecedented crisis against a uniquely unpopular president. Donald Trump’s four years of demagoguery and corporate giveaways should have been easy to run against — but the Democratic Party is unwilling and unable to pose an alternative.
According to centrists, the “blue wave” didn’t materialize because of the Left. That’s nonsense — and in at least one crucial swing state, Joe Biden rode to victory because of the organizing of progressives and leftists.
Labour Party MP Rebecca Long-Bailey argues that while the COVID-19 pandemic, a deep recession, and a worsening climate crisis are troubling clouds on the horizon, a Green New Deal for the United Kingdom offers a future worth fighting for.
World War I wasn’t a war for democracy — it was a catastrophic, barbaric conflict that left tens of millions of people dead and set the stage for anti-democratic rollbacks for years to come. Anti-war socialists were right to oppose it.
Chuck Schumer knows how to hold a press conference and he knows how to raise money from Wall Street. Those skills got him reelected to Senate leadership today. But when it comes to the take-no-prisoners, polarized politics of the twenty-first century, he’s completely out of his depth.
Mexico’s former secretary of national defense was arrested last month for alleged drug trafficking and money laundering. His trial will be important, but justice for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the war on drugs means not only prosecuting involved Mexican officials, but also American officials who were complicit all along.
In November 1780, Túpac Amaru led an indigenous uprising against Spanish control of Peru. Centuries on, he and his wife and co-organizer Micaela Bastidas are still potent symbols of liberation in the Andes.
Al Jazeera’s Cyprus Papers have exposed a corrupt trade that sells citizenship on the Mediterranean island. But Cyprus is no rogue state: its “golden passport” scheme is firmly rooted in the logic of global capitalism, which makes everything — including citizenship — a commodity.
After waging war on behalf of coal billionaires, Labor Right MP Joel Fitzgibbon has resigned from the party front bench. If the Labor Left wants to undo the damage he did, they need to start fighting for jobs and the environment as tenaciously as Fitzgibbon did for the coal lobby.
Even with Trump’s defeat, state and local government are facing brutal cuts to vital public services like education and health care. We can’t let the Biden years be four more years of austerity.
The entrepreneurial reality show Shark Tank is saturated with the absurdity of twenty-first-century capitalism. But watching it, you can’t help but think about how its basic premise — helping ordinary people with extraordinary ideas implement them on a wide scale — could be carried out under socialism.
Under capitalism, housing is a commodity, which means it principally exists to make rich people richer rather than meet human needs. That gap between making money and making profit distorts a whole range of life outcomes for average people — and real estate agents play a critical role in that process.
If we’re going to reverse the ravages of neoliberalism, we’ll need to rebuild a global labor movement that knows how to strike and win. A recent international “Strike School,” led by labor organizer Jane McAlevey, brought 3,000 trade unionists and activists from seventy countries to try to do just that.
America’s experiment with public housing was far less successful than Europe’s — but this hasn’t made it any less influential.
In the United States today, as in 1990s Russia, for a lot of intellectuals, total nihilism seems more plausible than hope for even modest reform.
Haunted by the specter of democracy, the Constitution’s framers blundered into a historic miscalculation. We’re still living with the consequences.
A slice of life from a country in crisis.
In 2002, the Pentagon staged a $250 million war game known as the “Millennium Challenge.” It was supposed to be a fixed fight — until a retired Marine lieutenant general, playing the role of a Middle Eastern country, brought the US military to its knees.
In the United States of 2020, millions are desperate for help, and they’re forced to compete for scraps from Twitter philanthropists.