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 task of socialists in 2022 is the same as it’s always been, says sociologist Vivek Chibber: to build working-class organization. That requires clarity about the central political role of the working class.
Miami-area janitors, the lowest paid of any major US metropolitan area, have won a collective bargaining agreement with the city’s cleaning contractors — but one holdout company, Coastal Building Maintenance, still refuses to sign.
The Citadel CEO spent $179 million trying to make Illinois a conservative hellscape. Now he’s taking his talents to South Beach.
In the mid-20th century, theorists affiliated with the Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean argued for an international division between the world’s “center” and the “periphery” — terms taken up by Latin Americans to explain and fight exploitation.
In Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel set in a faux-medieval village, random acts of violence and cruelty are the law of the land. Her refusal to explain the social causes of this misery makes her depiction of the world shallow and superficial.
Amazon is posing as a friend to veterans who need jobs when they return home from military service — while mistreating those veterans just as brutally as any other Amazon worker.
Just like American workers, Canadian workers have carried out a recent labor upsurge of their own. As the economy slows, unions might be tempted to make concessions. They shouldn’t.
In recent years, Chileans have struggled to overturn their undemocratic political system and write a new constitution. Americans should take Chile’s lead and fight for a new constitution too.
Chief Justice John Roberts is spearheading the Right’s judicial coup — and Democrats’ worship of norms and institutions is allowing it to continue.
The Scottish government says it wants a new independence referendum in 2023. But there’s every chance that politicians in London will refuse, leaving the Scottish National Party with a choice between helpless submission and risky defiance.
Emmanuel Macron has lost his majority in parliament and looks increasingly set to make deals with conservative and far-right parties. The demonization of the Left and indulgence of Le Pen show the hollowness of his establishment liberalism.
In its short existence, the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union has already achieved big wins. As conditions continue to decline for Australian workers, RAFFWU is a model of how to stand up to the bosses.
Canada’s highly precarious housing market has long been perched on the edge of disaster. As the country’s central bank pushes up interest rates to fight inflation, that perch is looking more dangerous than ever.
The Democratic National Committee is running ads in several states suggesting that the GOP is trying to overturn Roe v. Wade and pass a national abortion ban — bafflingly ignoring that Roe has already been reversed and many states already have abortion bans.
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president promising to “end welfare as we know it.” This rightward turn was part of a broader attempt by the Democrats to craft a “progressive neoliberalism” — whose “progressivism” included abandoning its working-class base.
Emma Chambers tried to unionize her Los Angeles Starbucks store. As a result, she was fired and lost stable housing and health care. But she says that if she knew all that going in, she’d still have stood up for herself, her coworkers, and the working class.
Neoliberal president Emmanuel Macron has lost his majority in the French parliament. The mass of newly elected left-wing MPs can disrupt his attacks on France’s welfare model — but it also needs to help rebuild resistance in wider society.
Prices are rising — but a large portion of those markups is pure profit for corporations. One thing the Biden administration could do is investigate whether corporations are using inflation as a cover to illegally drive up prices.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Facebook has started censoring posts about mailing abortion pills. It’s a reminder that even if you support the idea of tech censorship now, sooner or later your views will be targeted.
The news of at least 53 deaths of migrants in San Antonio is heartbreaking — particularly because it is the inevitable result of the monstrous immigration policies that Joe Biden has done little to change.