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
Georgii Plekhanov did more than anyone to popularize Marxist ideas in Russia from the late nineteenth century. While he fell out with the Bolsheviks and condemned the October revolution, Plekhanov had a huge influence over the development of Soviet Marxism.
Jennifer Lawrence is a fantastic comic actor. So it’s too bad that No Hard Feelings trades in the raunchy laughs for feel-good sentimental dramedy.
This month, Poland’s liberal opposition mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to protest the ruling party’s attacks on the rule of law. But it’s less clear that it’s winning over the government’s supporters, who remain wedded to its social programs.
The movement against Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform saw shocking scenes of police violence against protesters. Yet far from standing up to abuses, the justice system is turning a blind eye to the government’s attacks on civil liberties.
In Britain, inequality within the top 10% is greater than it is within the bottom 90%. This has created a middle-class politics centered on a fear of downward mobility. The Left must offer its own vision of society, focused on equality rather than competition.
Our society values health care and education in theory, but it constantly undermines them in practice. Public sector workers feel that discrepancy most acutely. They’re striking to force our society to put its money where its mouth is.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t work the land on his Hawaii ranch, but he and other wealthy landowners still benefit from huge agricultural tax breaks. The scheme allows the superrich to hoard wealth at the expense of the general public.
The trend of gamification — applying elements of game play to other areas of life — is the apex of the neoliberal fantasy, rendering both work and our leisure time outside of it into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.
It’s common to credit President Ronald Reagan for ushering in the age of neoliberalism. But doing so suggests that neoliberalism is primarily a right-wing project, obscuring the important role of liberals in subordinating society to free markets.
French socialist leader Jules Guesde established the first working-class party in modern history and popularized the ideas of Karl Marx at a crucial time. It’s impossible to imagine the subsequent history of Marxism and the French left without Guesde.
At the University of Washington, 2,400 postdocs and academic researchers went on strike and won raises. We talked to two workers about walking out, in the face of what they describe as attempts by UW to intimidate and retaliate against strikers.
The newly passed HB 2127 is yet another attempt by the GOP-controlled state legislature to impose minority rule over the state of Texas. It’s the working class that will pay the price — and the working class that must organize to fight back.
The hedge fund Elliott Management, whose owner has lavishly entertained Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, has argued that recent anti-fraud rules from the SEC are unconstitutional — and could try to bring a case before Alito to strike them down.
Workers at the Wabtec locomotive manufacturing plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, have walked off the job. Their demands get to the heart of bigger questions about the nature of work and the role workers can play in fights like climate change.
Depleted uranium has been linked to an explosion of cancers and birth defects in Iraq and is rejected even by US allies. So why is the Biden administration approving its use in Ukraine?
Socialists have a noble history fighting for more and better public parks — not just because everyone loves the park, but because public goods like parks are a challenge to the logic of capitalism.
The deaths aboard the Titan submersible are a tragedy — a tragedy born of the hubris of the ultra-wealthy.
Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring is a gripping account of Europe’s 1848 revolutions. The questions raised by those movements and their ultimate defeat are still vitally important for socialist politics in our own time.
Peter Frankopan’s epic history of humanity and the environment offers sweeping perspectives on anthropogenic climate change, but little hope of resolving it.
Unwilling to disrupt the economic system that created mass inequality, liberals invested schools with magical powers to fix a broken society. When public schools failed to clean up capitalism’s mess, they ended up on the chopping block.