William G. Martin teaches at SUNY-Binghamton and is co-author of After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment (2016) and a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier; he covers local justice matters at www.justtalk.blog
The 1975 “dismissal” of Australian Labor PM Gough Whitlam is often seen as a constitutional crisis initiated by an old British-led establishment. In reality, it was a bloodless analog of other US-orchestrated coups against reforming left governments.
On October 28, Rio de Janeiro’s police besieged the Penha favela for 15 hours, killing at least 121 people in the city’s worst massacre. Brazil’s right is hailing it as an anti-crime victory while overlooking their own links to violent gangs.
The relentless negativity and performative cruelty of American politics is exhausting. Following Zohran Mamdani’s lead, leftists can distinguish ourselves with a concrete political program paired with genuine enthusiasm for ordinary people.
Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa was just welcomed to Donald Trump’s White House. His visit represents Washington’s embrace of a sectarian government with little respect for democracy.
After intense lobbying and major campaign donations, the emergency spending bill intended to end the federal government shutdown is including language abolishing rules designed to prevent food contamination and foodborne illnesses at farms and restaurants.
For Democrats, the main issue in the shutdown wasn’t electoral backlash — it was the filibuster. Leadership feared its removal, viewing it as a safeguard to keep the party’s rising left wing in check.
Catherine Connolly takes office as Ireland’s president today. Her left-wing insurgent campaign took the Irish political establishment by surprise, winning a record number of votes and proving the Left can still triumph even in a bleak political landscape.
Fifty years ago today, Angola gained its independence after centuries of Portuguese domination. But US officials like Henry Kissinger were already working hard to orchestrate a devastating proxy war that snuffed out the hopes of national liberation.
When Angola gained independence in 1975, the Cuban military came to the new government’s defense. The mission had global reverberations, from hastening the fall of South African apartheid to reshaping Cubans’ own identity and worldview.
Donald Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve have been met with ardent defenses of central bank independence. Yet the Fed has always been vulnerable to political pressure, something that the insistence on returning to a pre-Trump status quo elides.
The government shutdown was a test showing where progressive forces are strong and where they’re weak. The results are in after last night’s Democratic capitulation to the GOP: most top union leaders are failing to meet the moment.
A decade ago, Western governments pitched the green transition as a solution to reindustrialization and economic decline. The failure of these policies to produce well-paying jobs has triggered a right-wing backlash in both the UK and the US.
The early-20th-century socialist and New York mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit saw liberalism and democracy as providing a foundation for a transition to socialism. Alongside Eugene Debs, he helped to forge a distinct American socialist tradition.
The US sanctions against Francesca Albanese are testament to her courage speaking up for the Palestinians. If international law lies buried underneath the rubble of Gaza, truth-tellers like Albanese have implacably defended basic universalist principles.
Monuments, museums, and cultural institutions were often created in the image of “militarist realism,” presenting colonialism and enslavement as eternal. Undoing this legacy is not erasing the past but combating a pernicious ideology.
Before socialism even had a name, the poet and painter William Blake saw how the Industrial Revolution’s “dark Satanic mills” harmed humanity. His visionary work condemned the forces of commodification and cold calculation in emergent capitalism.
From The Godfather to Reds to Something’s Gotta Give, Diane Keaton moved between comedy and drama with ease, turning self-doubt and control into the twin engines of her art. Across decades of self-invention, she built a career that was unmistakably her own.
Green politics won’t succeed if they can’t simultaneously speak to questions of affordability. And green affordability will require expanded public ownership.
The Food and Drug Administration, once a powerful regulatory agency, has been compromised by its cozy relationship with Big Pharma. Despite feigned concern for public health, the Trump administration is only worsening the agency’s decline.
The decline of Swedish social democracy is an illuminating case study in why the Left is losing the working class. It also offers clues as to how the Left might win workers back.