Opal Lee is a writer.
From its Hawaiian origins to the postwar surf craze, surfing has been a defiant challenge to the Calvinist work ethic and the commercial pressures of capitalism. But those malign social forces may now finally succeed in extinguishing the spirit of surfing.
The US Supreme Court is on the rampage, rolling back progressive gains from abortion rights to climate action. To stop conservative judges, we need to recognize that the law is a product of social struggle and shift the balance of forces outside the courts.
Momentum was created to organize Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters into a socialist force in the Labour Party. But faced with Keir Starmer’s moves to expel the Left, Momentum has retreated from the central political battle in favor of NGO-style campaigning.
French media is ever more prey to billionaire owners and the far-right pundits they promote. Public service broadcasters offer a more balanced alternative — but now Emmanuel Macron’s government is threatening their future existence.
For months, the Democratic Party leadership knew the Supreme Court was preparing to gut Roe v. Wade. When it happened, they sprang into action and immediately did nothing.
The war in Ukraine is now in its fourth month and there is no end in sight. In this wide-ranging discussion, Silvia Federici, Michael Löwy, and Étienne Balibar discuss the war and what it might take to bring it to an end.
Reinvigorating class-based politics in the US depends on more than inspiring candidates like Bernie Sanders: it requires durable working-class political organization. Here’s what one group learned about organizing working people around bread-and-butter issues.
Mass shootings are only the latest horrific chapter in the US’s long history of gun violence, which stretches from prerevolutionary slave patrols to our ongoing trade in military technology. Confronting this bloodlust will require more than just gun control.
New government data show that after the Biden administration terminated pandemic relief programs, millions more Americans began struggling to survive.
It’s not just supply chain issues and energy costs that are making everyone’s lives miserable — it’s the fact that we live in a system that takes from the working majority in order to enrich the plutocratic few.
In the wake of Roe v. Wade’s reversal, Marco Rubio has announced a set of welfare proposals that are supposed to help mothers and families. The Right is yet again proposing a “pro-worker conservatism” with no pro-worker substance.
This month marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of Mad Men. The show isn’t just compelling narratively and aesthetically — it also features a little remarked upon consideration of left ideas.
The Institute for Christian Socialism is trying to build left-wing solidarity within religious communities. In their eyes, an awareness of and commitment to socialism is inherent to the Gospel.
It’s summer, which means it’s time for a foray into service journalism: here are the beach reading recommendations of our staff and contributors.
The task of socialists in 2022 is the same as it’s always been, says sociologist Vivek Chibber: to build working-class organization. That requires clarity about the central political role of the working class.
Miami-area janitors, the lowest paid of any major US metropolitan area, have won a collective bargaining agreement with the city’s cleaning contractors — but one holdout company, Coastal Building Maintenance, still refuses to sign.
The Citadel CEO spent $179 million trying to make Illinois a conservative hellscape. Now he’s taking his talents to South Beach.
In the mid-20th century, theorists affiliated with the Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean argued for an international division between the world’s “center” and the “periphery” — terms taken up by Latin Americans to explain and fight exploitation.
In Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel set in a faux-medieval village, random acts of violence and cruelty are the law of the land. Her refusal to explain the social causes of this misery makes her depiction of the world shallow and superficial.
Amazon is posing as a friend to veterans who need jobs when they return home from military service — while mistreating those veterans just as brutally as any other Amazon worker.