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
Berlin’s film festival ended with an award for a movie on the West Bank and an Instagram hack damning Israel’s war. German cultural figures rushed to distance themselves from pro-Palestinian statements, in a craven display of conformism to state power.
Norway’s recent divestment from Israel Bonds is the latest piece of bad news for an Israeli economy that has nosedived during the war on Gaza — creating a huge opening for other divestment campaigns to hit Israel where it hurts and bring the war to an end.
David Riazanov was a brilliant scholar who pioneered the study of Marxism while playing an active part in Russia’s revolutionary movement. But Ryazanov and the Marx-Engels Institute he founded both fell victim to Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.
AI has been billed as a new frontier: an expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of wealth and human flourishing. Yet, time and again, its big-tech owners have used the frontiersman billing to declare themselves accountable to no one and no law.
Opponents of the academic boycott of Israel claim that its universities are havens of free inquiry. In fact, they supply vital support to Israel’s system of apartheid rule and are complicit in the violent suppression of Palestinian scholarship.
Saddled with legal burdens, Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is relocating to Texas to seek refuge in the state’s new business court system — which is controlled by his longtime ally, Republican governor Greg Abbott.
Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls is a delightfully raucous lesbian road comedy. Don’t listen to the wet-blanket critics — this film is good news in dull times for American movies.
The US and more than a dozen other countries cut off aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, worsening the humanitarian crisis in Gaza based on charges US intelligence has “low confidence” in. It’s as cruel and absurd as this entire war.
In Julian Assange’s ongoing extradition battle in the UK, the United States is asserting its right to track down any journalist anywhere in the world, seize them, haul them to the US, and throw them into a US prison.
The horrific death of Aaron Bushnell by self-immolation was a stand against the grinding misery in Gaza inflicted by Israel and backed by Bushnell’s own government.
Given its powerful oil oligarchs, it’s easy to assume Russia is the quintessential climate denier. Yet the rise of corporate ESG policies in the country suggests Russian capital wants to greenwash just as much as its Western peers.
Ultrarich private universities are fighting hard against government efforts to tax their multibillion-dollar endowments. That revenue could be used to help provide low-cost public higher education for all.
When Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff walked off the job over a year ago, they had been working without a contract since 2017 and hadn’t gotten an across-the-board raise in 16 years. Sixteen months later, they’re still on strike.
North American workers are gearing up for pivotal labor actions. With a tight labor market and the tailwind of significant union wins, the coming months promise a royal rumble between labor and capital.
Union democracy shouldn’t be seen as an abstract good separate from more important strategic considerations about rebuilding labor. Without democratizing labor, we can’t rebuild labor.
A lifelong fan of J. R. R. Tolkien, Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was first in line for last year’s exhibition on him in Rome. Like others before her, Meloni has appropriated Tolkien’s fantasies to refashion fascism for the 21st century.
Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel explained long waves as a key factor in capitalism’s development. Mandel’s theory is one of the most sophisticated attempts to show why capitalism goes through extended periods of expansion and stagnation.
Nonprofit MAPS promised to bring therapeutic MDMA to market on the back of philanthropic donations. But then it morphed into a for-profit concern — and with FDA approval looming, Big Pharma is trying to get in on the act.
Daniel Bensaïd rejected the idea of historical inevitability, seeing history as a series of crossroads, not a single path. For Bensaïd, class struggle will remain central as long as capitalism exists, but the outcome is always unpredictable.
The US has built up an elaborate machinery for waging economic warfare on its rivals with little or no public debate. This sanctions-industrial complex is a disguised form of imperialism and a dangerous source of global instability.