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
If handled correctly, British Columbia’s new Housing Supply Act can ease municipal roadblocks to adequate housing. In tandem with an increase in nonmarket housing, such legislation has the potential to help stave off the housing crisis.
Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago 1,234 miles off coast, has become a site of climate change–fueled conflicts around immigration and workers’ rights. Right-wingers have used the crisis to advance their own agenda — offering a cautionary tale for the Left.
Riots like the ones France is seeing after the police killing of a teenager don’t happen as a result of petty criminality. They only happen as a result of widespread anger at murderous policing, racial inequality, and social deprivation.
Sure, it can be a good thing if the Right is fractured and fighting among itself. But the Left can’t win simply by letting reactionaries fight among themselves — we need to fight for a vision of greater freedoms through improving the welfare of all.
A government willing to confront the housing crisis head-on, rather than focusing on fostering owner occupation and the numbers game of maximizing private house-building, would do better to invest in quality public housing.
In the UK, university staff are engaged in a grading and assessment boycott as part of a long-running dispute over pay, pensions, and precarity. But university administrations are refusing to listen, leaving many students unable to graduate as normal.
In 1997, the central slogan of the Teamsters’ UPS strike was “Part-Time America Won’t Work.” Today, as the Teamsters weigh another UPS strike, part-time workers at the company say their pay and working conditions are still unbearable.
Almost 50 years ago, metalworker and economist Harry Braverman published Labor and Monopoly Capitalism. It showed how bosses use technology to disempower workers — but that by taking control of the labor process, workers can free themselves from drudgery.
The poverty of industrial England was the backdrop of H. G Wells’s childhood. This experience instilled in him a clear-eyed realism with which he rejected both utopianism and progressive notions that socialism could be won without class struggle.
The French Marxist thinker Daniel Bensaïd grappled with the history of socialist defeats to supply us with a road map for the present. The result was a brilliant reformulation of Marxism that can guide today’s left-wing movements in their struggles.
The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, a victim of Stalin’s terror, has often been viewed as a martyr. It’s a critical reception that has veiled Mandelstam’s literary greatness, which was evident long before Stalin came to power.
In colonial regimes, dominant conceptions of private property developed alongside racial hierarchies.
An unbroken blanket of coniferous trees occupies the North American coast from California to the Alaskan islands. A wonder of the natural world, these temperate rainforests are essential to the continent’s health — and they must be protected.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot discontinue India’s popular rural job guarantee, the country’s most significant antipoverty program. He’s taken to underfunding and “appifying” it instead.
Despite both right-wing hysterics about “woke capital” and the optimistic claims of Wall Street, ESG has done very little to steer investment in more socially responsible directions. Aggressive state action is needed to rapidly green the economy.
The police killing of a 17-year-old in a Paris suburb has sparked a revolt against state violence across France. But powerful police unions have closed ranks behind the killer, in a backlash that shows French cops’ refusal to accept even basic accountability.
It’s the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations, and all the Australian Labor Party wants to offer are measures that are so inadequate, they’re tantamount to smoke and mirrors. That’s why Labor is rapidly losing ground to the Left.
It’s hard to imagine any other government getting away with the crimes that Saudi Arabia’s monarchy has. And yet the Saudi-backed LIV Golf’s merger with the PGA Tour shows the Gulf nation continues to be treated as anything but a pariah in the United States.
Asteroid City dials up the “Wes Anderson” to 11, leaving an emotional void in its wake.
France’s left has often failed to speak up for marginalized minorities. But after the backlash over the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel, left-wing parties have taken a clear stance, refusing to condemn rioters and insisting their anger is justified.