Resistance Was Ghassan Kanafani’s Only Story
Novelist Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated by Mossad agents this week over 50 years ago. Exiled as a child during the Nakba, he would never return to Palestine — except in his fiction.
18492 Articles by: Ryan Switzer
Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
Jane McAlevey Demanded We Go Beyond Speaking Truth to Power
No protest to simply register discontent, no preaching to the choir, no fool’s errand organizing campaigns: Jane McAlevey was deadly serious about smart, effective strategy for the working class, and she demanded organizers around her be the same.
The Emerging Danger of Surveillance Pricing
The fine-graining of data collection and increasing isolation of consumers is leading to surveillance pricing, a new trend where corporations exploit personal information to set individualized prices for each person.
Jane McAlevey Believed Workers Can Win Everything
The late labor strategist Jane McAlevey’s horizons were never limited to winning particular campaigns or even to revitalizing unions. What she wanted above all, and what she believed was possible if our side got “serious,” was for workers to take power.
What We Get Wrong About White Workers
Deindustrialization has helped create a right-wing turn in many Midwestern towns. Long traditions of labor militancy can explain why it hasn’t in others.
The Political Economy of Olives
The world craves Italy’s Castelvetrano olives. But Italy doesn’t want the workers needed to pick them.
Bring on the Heat
When and where organized labor’s been on the move.
How Socialism in the Villages Went Wrong
Instead of imposing collectivization from above, Julius Nyerere tried to build a rural socialism based on the values of Tanzania’s villages.
Welcome to Utopia, TX
This small town was envisioned as a socialist paradise. Now it’s Trump country.
Out of the Shtetl and Into the Heartland
What happened when assimilated German Jews tried to settle their Eastern European brethren in rural America?
Marxism and the Agrarian Question
The leading thinkers of Marxism stressed how important it was to govern in partnership with the peasantry. When communist states imposed collectivization by force, the results were disastrous.
India’s Failed Agricultural Revolution
Capitalism spread through India’s countryside without developing it.
Lula and the Ranchers
In Brazil, Lula has wagered that concessions to agribusiness elites are necessary to advance his redistributive project. Yet these very elites may undermine his whole program.
Kevin Costner’s Horizon Is as Bad as You’ve Heard
Supposedly the first of four films, Kevin Costner’s dull and messy Western throwback, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, is almost certainly dead on arrival.
This Land Is Your Land
Country, folk, and bluegrass songs that capture the realities of rural labor.
Southern Strategy Soundtracks
Country music became the sound of Richard Nixon’s coalition in the early 1970s — but it has always been too unruly to be fully co-opted by a reactionary agenda.
The Redneck Menace
White Rural Rage is another attempt to blame the Democratic Party’s decline in rural counties on mean and bigoted white Americans.
Hayao Miyazaki’s Red Roots
Studio Ghibli is not the Japanese Disney but the anti-Disney. Dreamed up by animators with roots in the Japanese communist movement, its films celebrate creative labor and human solidarity against capitalism and war.
An Unusable Past
Nicolas Grospierre’s photographs of collective farm buildings in Israel and the Baltic states reveal these communities’ utopian dreams — and their uncomfortable colonial underpinnings.
We Who Plowed the Prairies
Pastoral visions of farmwork don’t square with the reality of what it means to live in rural areas today.