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 Hillside Villa Tenants Association has successfully forced a municipal government to approve the public purchase of a building to preserve affordability. The victory, a historic first in the US, creates a blueprint that can be followed across the nation.
Despite years of employer attacks, unions still have vast resources at their disposal. This moment of worker upsurge is the time to use those assets to fund aggressive organizing.
Platform Socialism is a vital contribution to a left vision for tech, but it fails to fully account for the ways Big Tech is wedded to finance capital. Socializing giant platforms may only be possible in the context of broader political transformations.
A new left-wing coalition is leading polls for June’s French parliamentary elections. Its popularity shows that working-class France wants a government that resists Emmanuel Macron’s destruction of the country’s social welfare provisions.
In 2014, Australian Labor PM Julia Gillard’s Clean Energy Act tried to use market mechanisms to take climate action. Its failure underscores the fact that only public investment in climate action will do.
After participating in 1960s progressive movements, Jon Melrod took his activism to the factory floor, becoming a militant rank-and-file autoworker. Radicals like him made serious contributions to labor struggle at a time when unions were under attack.
Left-wing candidate Gustavo Petro faces a runoff against a far-right populist, Rodolfo Hernández, for Colombia’s presidency. Predictably, the traditional establishment is lining up to support his self-styled “antiestablishment” opponent.
New York’s Democrat-controlled legislature passed a bill this week to funnel an additional $54 billion in public pension funds to high-risk private equity investments. It’s most likely an unwise financial strategy — and only Wall Street will benefit.
Most of the last decade’s left-populist insurgents failed to create lasting alternatives to neoliberalized social democracy. But Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise bucked the trend — and did it through years of work building real, popular roots.
British Columbia’s decriminalization of the possession of small amounts of hard drugs is a good first step in our fight against the opioid crisis. But it does not go far enough — we need universal decriminalization, high possession thresholds, and safe supply.
While rent prices and evictions skyrocket, the Democrat-controlled New York state legislature has concluded its session without passing a good cause eviction bill. The proposed law would have protected 1.6 million people from getting evicted for no reason.
When Joe Biden became president, he ended the contracting of prisons to private corporations — with one glaring exception: ICE. Today, over 70 percent of immigrant detainees are being held in privately owned prisons.
Capitalist society can only ever legalize cannabis in a way that benefits the already wealthy. Why not put the newly legal weed industry in the hands of the public and away from the profit motive?
New legislation in Spain will ensure free, publicly provided abortions and allow menstrual leave from work. The raft of measures shows left-wing party Unidas Podemos’s strong feminist stance — but faces obstruction from the country’s hard-right judiciary.
The hotly anticipated sequel to Top Gun, the 1986 movie that made Tom Cruise a star, is raking in cash, great reviews, and even Oscar buzz. Don’t be fooled — it’s the same glorified military recruitment video that the original was.
Today, Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-serving monarch in British history, will celebrate 70 years as head of state. Throughout its existence, the monarchy has entrenched a culture of deference to authority. It’s incompatible with the values of a democracy.
The Joe Biden administration enacted the highest Medicare premium hikes in history last week. Most of the profits will be funneled to the private insurance companies that funded Biden’s presidential campaign.
Putin’s disastrous gamble in Ukraine has left the West in a strong position to craft a peace that would underscore the futility of Russia’s aggression. But there are worrying signs that the Biden administration might be unwilling to accept peace on any terms.
Climate and labor activists are coming together to hammer out ambitious but realistic plans for massively expanding the clean-energy sector in a way that also creates good union jobs. For both paychecks and the planet, it’s the only path forward.
Texas already bans abortion after six weeks and has a trigger law to ban it entirely if Roe v. Wade is repealed. But Austin City Council members may have found a loophole, modeled after marijuana decriminalization, to protect local abortion access.