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
Late last month, 500 grocery workers went on strike in Brainerd Lakes, Minnesota. The strike exemplified the growing militancy in the United Food and Commercial Workers, who mounted successful strike threats against employers across the state last year.
Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign was a humiliating failure from start to finish. He deserved nothing less.
In the 1960s, artists in Britain and Yugoslavia imagined that the art of socialism might be made with — or even by — computers.
A nonprofit backed by the fossil fuel industry has wormed its way into Illinois public schools to convince students to pursue careers in oil and gas.
Why millennials don’t grow up.
Emmanuel Macron has sparked protests after appointing an education minister who sent her own children to private school. France’s school system has never delivered real equality — but as the rich flock to the private sector, it’s only getting worse.
The UAW has plans to organize more than 150,000 autoworkers in 2024.
For 19th-century Americans, robots were practical Christians, potential spouses, and a serious threat to labor power.
Germany is Israel’s ride-or-die.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was one of the world’s 10 wealthiest countries by per capita income. As of 2021, it’s 86th. What happened?
Automation is booming in rural China, the strongholds of the US auto industry, and the world’s oldest countries.
Hollywood AI boosters claim that “democratized” movies based on personal choice await us, if only we can get rid of those pesky human beings.
When chatbots take over the world, might they do it as members of a vanguard party?
As automation ravaged Detroit, black musicians created a new sound that merged human and machine. With it came a vision for working-class self-organization in the Motor City.
The English science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard claimed to believe in nothing. Yet his prophetic dystopias reveal a deep awareness of the brutality of class rule and imperialism.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek talking to each other — forever.
Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has a dream: a futuristic desert city stretching to the clouds. But down in the sand, it’s a cyberpunk dystopia.
How to speak machine overlord.
AI might take some administrative jobs and cheapen cultural production. What it won’t do is help us care for each other in an age of demographic change and institutionalized neglect.