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 unfreedom workers suffer on the job has been an abiding critique of capitalism, and for good reason. A society that allows for the full development of human freedom must allow people to collectively determine the conditions under which they work.
Neocons are taking advantage of the neo-McCarthyism Donald Trump has stoked against pro-Palestinian activists on the left to go after more antiwar voices on the right in his own administration. Such witch hunts never stop at their original targets.
Under the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security has launched a $200 million ad campaign calling on immigrants to self-deport. These moves have already torn apart communities and rallied far-right extremists.
As well as being one of the most creative postwar Marxist thinkers, Sebastiano Timpanaro was also a dedicated activist. His life on the left spanned the entire postwar history of Italian socialism, from the Liberation to the end of the Cold War.
In Australia, outdoor dance parties — known colloquially as “doofs” — are billed as progressive events that value peace, love, unity, and respect. So why do organizers keep booking artists who celebrate Israel’s genocide in Gaza?
A government committee in charge of federal judiciary rules wants to make Supreme Court lobbyists disclose who is funding them. Some of the most powerful corporate and conservative forces in DC are trying to keep that information secret.
Smart Communications has made a killing from charging prison inmates for emails and phone calls. A messy legal struggle for control of the prison-tech empire is exposing the big business of profiting off mass incarceration.
For centuries, Cuba was one of the world’s great sugar producers, with a long history of enslavement and exploitation of those who worked on the plantations. But sugar workers learned how to organize and were vital for the success of the 1959 revolution.
Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is a cut-and-dry free speech issue that makes two things clear. First, the Right was always disingenuous when it claimed to care about free speech. Second, the Left should never have ceded the issue.
Bulgaria is set to become the latest member of the European single currency. The move is painted as an almost natural march of progress — with little to no public debate on what it really means for Bulgarians’ living standards.
Mahmoud Khalil is a law-abiding permanent resident of the US. The Trump administration is attempting to deport him for his political opinions using the Immigration and Nationality Act, a Red Scare–era law that was originally aimed at Communists.
Individual Democrats have made strong statements against the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. The bulk of the party and its leadership has offered silence or mealymouthed equivocation.
Last week, in a particularly flagrant act of union busting, Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security canceled the union contract for the Transportation Security Administration’s 47,000 employees.
US political discourse is characterized by deep resignation about the high costs and mixed outcomes of our health, housing, education, and childcare systems. But these issues aren’t unfixable — in fact, many other countries have already fixed them.
Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to Parasite is another darkly comic satire of our capitalist hellscape. But even with Robert Pattinson and sharp lefty themes, Mickey 17’s comedy is cringe and its pace glacial.
Canada’s economic and military dependence on the United States has long led its elites to believe that they could never be the victims of American aggression. Donald Trump’s tariffs have disproved this received wisdom.
In the late 1970s, nationalist vigilantes tried to destroy Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Today the painting itself is safe — but the museum in which it is housed has again become the focus of right-wing polemics.
At the dawn of a second Trump era, American Hindu supremacists are increasingly aligning themselves with the MAGA far right.
Mark Carney, Canada’s incoming prime minister, is a former banker with no political experience. His technocratic centrism is ill-suited for an era of populism and political upheaval, making a Liberal victory in the looming election far from certain.
Noam Chomsky’s best-known political contribution is his powerful, long-running critique of US foreign policy. But Chomsky has also used his global platform to sound the alarm about the climate crisis and chart a path away from disaster.