Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, calls to cut police budgets have spread like wildfire. In an interview with Jacobin, two Chicago city council members explain why they’re calling to defund the police and why the city’s mayor Lori Lightfoot can’t credibly call herself a “progressive.”
The police were first created to suppress labor militancy and the Left, before becoming a tool to bludgeon the most marginalized in society, particularly poor black people. We must dismantle this brutal instrument of social control.
Mass protests across the country have beat back police repression and won public support for scaling back police power. The Democrats who built the overpolicing and mass incarceration regime now feel left out and want to channel that energy back into familiar territory: getting them reelected.
Don’t let opponents of the current racial justice protests fool you by citing public opinion polls — such polls often showed the majority of American opposed to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Public opinion is not immovable through protest.
A new study is the latest to undermine widespread claims of electoral fraud by Bolivia’s Evo Morales. It isn’t the first such debunking — yet democracy remains betrayed in Bolivia, and “pro-democracy” voices don’t seem too bothered.
Conservatives are spreading lies about Karl Marx. Not only was Marx a consistent campaigner against slavery, he supported the efforts of all those who organized to fight it.
Many in the newly reborn American socialist movement fervently hope that someday, in the face of numerous structural barriers, they can get a viable new party off the ground. But unfortunately, we can expect unions to be among the last to get on board with such a party.
Even before COVID-19 hit Latin America in earnest last month, one-third of the region’s population was facing food insecurity. Now, as the economy contracts under lockdown and supply chains falter, overhauling the continent’s market-driven food system is more necessary than ever.
In spite of mass unemployment and a public health catastrophe, the stock market has been thriving, thanks to massive intervention by the Federal Reserve. We have to break the doom loop that links the Fed to the interests of financial megafirms.
A coronavirus-era partnership between the United Electrical Workers and Democratic Socialists of America has given birth to what may be the most innovative labor organizing campaign since the ’30s: the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
National support for Black Lives Matter has soared — while President Donald Trump’s approval rating has plunged ten points in a single month. The movement for racial justice is more popular than Trump’s presidency.
Critics of the demand to “defund the police” cite current polling snapshots as supposed proof of protesters’ electoral malpractice. They’re politically shortsighted — and confused about the key role of mass protest movements in dragging such demands from the margins to the mainstream.
Minneapolis bus drivers provided a model of solidarity during the George Floyd protests by refusing to transport police officers. We spoke with the president of the bus driver union’s black caucus about the inspiring action and the need for a labor movement that fights for more than just bread-and-butter economic gains for its members.
The mass protests against police violence have had an impact on even the most culturally conservative element of American sports culture: NASCAR.
Recently revealed emails show that a wide range of public entities were used to police a California graduate workers strike. It’s part of a long tradition of government agencies spying on labor organizers and radicals — but now with cross-agency coordination and ever-expanding budgets.
Defunding the police means cutting bloated local police budgets and diverting the resources to social programs. Politically, it’s right up Bernie’s alley. He should embrace it.
Nearly one in five workers in the United States is currently unemployed. The immediate catalyst for these gargantuan figures is the pandemic, but workers’ rights to “just cause” dismissals had long been eroded by a neoliberal war on labor.
Cops in New York have responded to pressure for reform with a targeted slowdown, while they continue to dish out violence on the streets. We need to be as determined in forcing change upon the police as they are in resisting it.
A new book uncovers the reality of America’s victory in the Cold War — detailing how massacres of leftists in twenty-two countries helped to overcome resistance to capitalism across the world, writes Grace Blakeley.
With thousands of Canadians protesting police violence, Justin Trudeau has offered no plans to combat brutality in Canadian policing — but he did take a knee at an Ottawa protest for the cameras. It’s a tried-and-true Trudeau formula: refuse to take meaningful progressive action, but pose for the press as if he did.