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
The official head of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington was socialist A. Philip Randolph. In his speech, reprinted here, he called for restructuring society so the “sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality.”
Today is the 59th anniversary of the March on Washington, so get ready for plenty of whitewashed history. Here’s the truth: the Civil Rights Movement was a radical struggle against Jim Crow tyranny whose early foot soldiers were Communists and labor militants.
The March on Washington was 59 years ago today. It’s popularly remembered as a moderate demonstration where MLK “had a dream” — but in fact, it was the decades-long culmination of a mass, working-class movement against racial and economic injustice.
With a solid premise about working-class vampire hunters, Day Shift had real potential — but there’s no escaping the Netflix curse.
Student debt forgiveness is about to become official US policy by a stroke of Joe Biden’s pen. It’s a good time to remember that, just a few years ago, the idea was denounced as hopelessly utopian, a left-wing pipe dream — and that was the liberals talking.
The French author Michel Houellebecq is one of the most virulent, petulant critics of the 20th century’s legacy. His affinities with the Right are clear, but as a novelist, he nonetheless demands to be read.
The Inflation Reduction Act was a compromise from the outset, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema made its tax provisions even worse. But the legislation will still raise billions in revenue by creating a fairer tax burden for corporations.
No one was ever brought to justice for Mexico’s brutal “dirty war,” sparked by a police massacre of students in 1968. Now Andrés Manuel López Obrador has launched the first truth commission to address the government’s crimes.
Critics like to paint a picture of debtors as overeducated elites demanding a handout while idly snacking on $15 avocado toasts. But I’ve worked hard and lived modestly, and my debt is still haunting me — even after the White House’s partial cancellation.
The sell-off of the Port of Haifa looks like a takeover by corporate interests. Yet the acquisition was led by a close ally of Indian premier Narendra Modi — showing its ties to Israel’s strategy of finding autocratic allies abroad.
Amid rising tensions in the Southeast Asian Sea, both the US and China are courting the Philippines. Most Filipinos would prefer a nonaligned foreign policy — but Manila’s elites keep lining up with the US, further threatening regional peace and stability.
Over 115,000 British postal workers are out on strike today. Why? They’re tired of austerity.
Past congressional efforts to rein in drug pricing have been undone by Big Pharma’s lobbying of the executive branch. But Democrats seem to have written their recent drug pricing legislation to prevent this possibility.
Right-wingers love to insist that members of Adolf Hitler’s party were socialists. But Nazism’s real economic policies upheld hypercapitalist principles rooted in social Darwinist ideas about the value of human life. They weren’t socialists at all.
Last week, 15,000 nurses at seven Twin Cities hospitals voted to authorize a strike. Their demand is simple: put patients before profits.
A new edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s writings, most of which have never appeared in English before, gives us a unique perspective on her thought. Luxemburg believed that a socialist revolution would have to be democratic or else it would be doomed to failure.
In activist and academic circles, privileged people are expected to automatically defer to marginalized people on issues of oppression. Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argues that this norm kills solidarity and replaces effective politics with endless navel-gazing.
A diplomatic settlement to bring the war in Ukraine to a close won’t be easy. But it’s not impossible.
During the height of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, workers began to take over their factories and assert their right to live free of those who had oppressed them for generations.
In exchange for his support of the Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Manchin demanded major giveaways to the oil industry. He got them, making his big donors in fossil fuel companies quite happy.