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
In the early 1980s, Chief Justice John Roberts, then a young lawyer, worked with the Reagan administration to strip power from a liberal judiciary. Today he has reversed course to shield the Supreme Court’s absolute power.
At a time of personal confusion and pain in my life, Jordan Peterson and the alt right gave me direction and purpose. I eventually realized that purpose was spreading a cruel, antisocial worldview — but not before I inflicted that cruelty on those around me.
In Finland, a new government represents how compatible neoliberal and far-right politics are. The Left must answer the challenge by opposing austerity in addition to racism.
For decades, the Indian state has suppressed the democratic rights of Kashmiris. Narendra Modi’s hard-right government is taking this pattern of repression to new extremes, with the complicity of Indian intellectuals who seek to toxify the cause of Kashmir.
The historical repression of antiwar voices in Canada, often twinned with red-baiting, is resurfacing amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. This resurgence marks a worrying return to stifling dissent and limiting freedom of expression.
We need radical change to address climate change. But degrowth needlessly shackles its vision of a socialist future to a program of aggregate reduction.
Montana’s State Library Commission has exited the American Library Association over the sexuality and leftist politics of the association president, bringing together a toxic stew of hysterical homophobia and classic red-baiting to attack public libraries.
This spring, Amazon delivery drivers unionized with the Teamsters — but the logistics giant refuses to bargain with them. The workers are now setting up picket lines at Amazon warehouses across the country, joined by fellow Teamsters from other employers.
As the climate crisis intensifies, workers are being forced to work amid noxious wildfire smoke and in dangerously high temperatures. But workers at UPS and elsewhere are organizing to demand health and safety precautions from their employers.
As Hitler rose to power, two daughters of Germany’s top general became spies for the Communist Party. A new biography tells the story of how hatred for fascism and its aristocratic collaborators led them to become class traitors.
Like many socialists around the world, G. A. Cohen invested the Soviet Union with his hopes for a more just and equal society. In time, he grew disillusioned with the USSR — but he never stopped fighting for a better world.
FX’s second season of The Bear gives both dignity and drama to the realities of work.
More than a year after the Amazon Labor Union’s landmark victory at a Staten Island warehouse, Amazon still refuses to bargain with the union. Meanwhile, a reform caucus is pushing for the ALU to hold leadership elections.
GOP presidential candidate and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy is proposing that everyone be able to profit from our corrupt campaign fundraising system. It’s an undemocratic vision of campaign financing that insists on making the problem of money in politics worse, not better.
On July 14, 1789, the people of Paris rose up to take history into their own hands. Because of the power of the Jacobin idea, and because enough of them lived on to fight another day, the revolution changed the world. We are all its beneficiaries.
Derided as the world’s worst car, the communist Yugoslavia–made Yugo admittedly had some serious problems. But it also had spirit and a vision to aspire to: a fuel-efficient vehicle that ordinary working-class people could afford.
Last-minute GOP maneuvering sunk a push to ban cluster munitions in Ukraine last night. But its defeat could open the door to long-needed progressive dissent on the war.
In the absence of a powerful workers’ movement, 19th-century reformers blamed alcohol for poverty and despair. Their assumption that moral shortcomings rather than political and economic ones were the root cause unfortunately resonates with our politics today.
Woody Guthrie was born 111 years ago today. At the heart of his music and activism was a commitment to socialism, a condemnation of capitalism, and a belief that our society could help rather than hurt average people.
Today’s French political leaders are more likely to present the Jacobins as bloody authoritarians than forerunners of modern democracy. But redeeming their legacy is key to understanding the Revolution’s unfulfilled promise.