Opal Lee is a writer.
Pete Buttigieg thinks national service will solve America’s inequality and division. But what we actually need to build solidarity and improve lives are broad social guarantees to decent jobs, health care, and education.
By calling for a ban on for-profit charter schools, Bernie Sanders has gone further than any other candidate to confront the privatization of our schools. But we can’t fully defend public schools if we let nonprofit charters off the hook.
In a desperate effort to tame rebellious workers, Vietnam is now building a collective bargaining regime. But empowering independent trade unions could backfire for the country’s authoritarian government — and allow workers to fight back against multinational capital.
The New York Times recently profiled life on the Amazon shop floor — chaperoned by Amazon management. Perhaps not shockingly, the result was a fawning portrait of work at Amazon that only a boss could love.
Acquiring and administering property should not be housing movements’ only goals — advocacy for affordable housing must be coupled with bottom-up control by residents. The community land trust movement has largely abandoned fighting for and expanding that control.
For years, Democrats have embraced hardline immigration policies in a desperate attempt to win Republican votes. But the only way to deliver justice for immigrants is to defeat the Right — with a progressive, multiracial coalition.
The Pitzer College community voted to suspend a study abroad program with the University of Haifa because of its ongoing policies discriminating against Palestinians. But their president decided to overturn a democratic referendum supporting human rights.
The United States is in the middle of a massive housing crisis. Community land trusts can help address it.
Right now, democratic socialism is on the rise in American society. Revolutionary socialists who have kept the torch of socialism burning during the lean years will now have to merge with democratic-socialist demands of the current moment.
HBO’s Chernobyl isn’t the show this event deserves.
The reproductive rights movement is in crisis, and it’s looking for new tactics to break out of the impasse. That’s why there’s renewed interest in clinic defense — but the tactic deserves scrutiny.
Trump is threatening a trade war if Mexico doesn’t fall in line with his depraved migrant policy. But a trade war might actually hurt the US more than Mexico. AMLO should call Trump’s bluff and refuse to do his bidding.
Dock workers in San Francisco and Durban, South Africa, have huge amounts of strategic leverage in the global economy. Both have long used that power not just to fight for better wages, but also to fight imperialism and racism.
After decades of nurturing a culture of violent, racist abuse, Customs and Border Protection cannot be seen as just another working-class job. Like Hitler’s SS, we must see CBP not as a place where good people do bad things, but where bad people do bad things.
The teachers strike wave is the most important development in working-class politics in years. Combined with the rise of socialism, chances for a major transformation leftward in American politics are better than ever.
Frederick Douglass, 1852: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
1776 began as a petty squabble among odious and powerful elites. In spite of them, it soon became the lodestar of emancipatory movements everywhere.
The Seattle General Strike of 1919 is a forgotten and misunderstood part of American history. But it shows that workers have the power to shut down whole cities — and to run them in our interests.
Florida Republicans just passed a poll tax that disenfranchises many of the same felons who recently won the right to vote. It’s a chilling throwback to previous eras of black voter suppression — and a reminder that we still have to fight for basic democratic rights today.
Bernie Sanders has repeatedly denounced the brutality of Israel’s occupation and stood up for Palestinian rights. He’s the only candidate who has a chance of breaking the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus.