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 1970, US postal workers won collective bargaining rights with an illegal strike. If lawsuits to stop Trump’s attacks on the federal workforce fail, that kind of militancy may be the only way for federal workers to retain their own union rights.
Behind the seeming chaos of Trump’s tariff policy, there’s a coherent plan to reboot what Peter Gowan dubbed the “Dollar–Wall Street Regime.” The goal is to strengthen US power around high-tech digital oligarchs, and it might yet succeed on its own terms.
Thanks to its stances on issues ranging from deportations to trade policy, the Trump administration is undermining US influence across Latin America, increasing political polarization in the region, and strengthening the hand of progressive forces there.
A former garment worker reflects on rank-and-file agitation in the US garment industry just before the industry fled the country.
The United Auto Workers’ Brandon Mancilla explains why his union has continued to oppose the genocide in Gaza, why slaughter abroad is tied to workers’ decline in living standards at home, and the union’s pushback to Donald Trump’s war on higher education.
Carnivals in Germany have long satirized the powerful. Calls to keep politics out of the festivities are now being used to silence dissent.
Great powers often decline through self-inflicted blows. By starting a trade war he was unable to follow through on, Donald Trump may have just dealt a severe one to the United States.
The NDP helped build Canada’s welfare state. Now, under pressure from Donald Trump’s tariffs and a shifting political terrain, the party risks electoral annihilation as voters split between technocratic centrism and right-wing populism.
Rutger Bregman’s book Moral Ambition calls for successful people to use their talents to “make a difference.” But he’s suspicious of systemic change, making his call for personal morality into a shallow exercise in self-help.
There are no guarantees that any approaches, new or old, to reversing the labor movement’s decline will succeed. But Eric Blanc makes a case for why we should wager on worker-to-worker unionism.
On April 25, Italians celebrate liberation from Fascism. One leading partisan was Ilio Barontini, a Communist who helped lead Ethiopia’s resistance against Benito Mussolini’s colonial occupation.
Amid all the confusing signals, China is clearly the prime target for Trump’s trade agenda. China’s best response to tariffs would be to rely more on domestic consumption than exports, but executing that turn presents a huge challenge for its leaders.
After the bloody repression of the Indonesian left in the 1960s, Suharto’s regime wrote it out of the history books. Indonesian communists played a crucial role in developing national consciousness among workers and peasants against Dutch colonial rule.
You’ve been saving for retirement. But Wall Street has been using your savings to erode union strength, inflate asset prices, and consolidate its control over the economy.
As American unions denounce Donald Trump’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego García to El Salvador, it’s worth recalling when US labor used its collective power to resist repression in that country in the 1980s.
Ryan Coogler’s vampires ’n’ blues thriller Sinners is everything Hollywood tells us the masses don’t want: Set a hundred years in the past, it’s not a sequel, reboot, or adaptation of anything. And yet it’s a smash hit with moviegoers.
Tax cuts for the rich have been the glue holding the American right together for decades. But as Republican voters’ skepticism of this strategy grows, some GOP lawmakers are considering the unthinkable: proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy.
Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the global trade regime are chaotic and uncoordinated. As economist Ha-Joon Chang tells Jacobin, Trump has failed to see that the cause of the US’s relative decline is its own domestic capitalist class.
Zohran Mamdani’s unexpectedly popular campaign is raising the question of what a socialist might accomplish as mayor of NYC. To answer it, it’s worth looking back on the successful mayoralty of ambitious New Dealer Fiorello La Guardia.
Novelist Nadine Gordimer crossed South Africa’s color line to become a staunch opponent of apartheid and supporter of the ANC. Her fiction tackled the savage inequalities of South African society that have continued beyond the end of minority rule.