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
Joe Biden’s rise has been a clarifying moment for the Left, showing its relative powerlessness within the Democratic Party. But the Left’s ideas are popular in the country at large. The priority now must be advancing those ideas outside the framework of Democratic Party politics.
If ever there were a time to suspend global patent rules to ensure widespread distribution of a vaccine, right now is it. Yet pharma giant Pfizer is currently opposing a proposal at the World Trade Organization to expand vaccine access to poor countries, hoping to hoard distribution — and profits — rather than save lives.
Leo Panitch, who died on Saturday, defended working-class politics even in times when many of his colleagues succumbed to neoliberal triumphalism. His work had a political, not just academic, purpose — and its message will survive among the generation of socialists whose thinking he shaped.
On Christmas Eve in 1913, a pitched battle between organized labor and the mining barons of northern Michigan climaxed in the gruesome deaths of over 70 union supporters and their children. The 1913 Massacre struck a debilitating blow to the region’s labor movement and changed the Upper Peninsula forever. But it’s been largely forgotten in popular consciousness.
As anti-corruption protests pile pressure on Bulgarian premier Boyko Borissov, EU leaders have begun to distance themselves from his government. Yet throughout the last two decades, Borissov was actively sponsored by the German right — a dismal example of how foundations in Berlin created postcommunist Eastern Europe’s new elites.
Vice president–elect Kamala Harris made headlines earlier this year pushing $2,000 checks for all American. But suddenly, despite being desperately needed right now, she’s nowhere to be found on the issue.
The anti-vaxx movement is a menace, but it feeds off public distrust nurtured by the appalling record of Big Pharma. We need an alternative model that strips out the profit motive and works for the public good — Canada’s Connaught Laboratories show how that model could work.
Edward Snowden performed an immense act of public service to the American people by blowing the whistle on the National Security Agency’s vast, clandestine surveillance programs. President Donald Trump should pardon him.
Cyberpunk once stood out as a vital genre of anti-capitalist fiction. Today, it’s been reduced to a cool retro aesthetic easily appropriated by the world’s second-richest man to market ugly Blade Runner–inspired trucks to nostalgia-driven Gen Xers.
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden need to do everything in their power to call Donald Trump’s bluff and force a vote to increase the proposed $600 relief checks to $2,000. The fact that they don’t seem to be says a lot about what’s wrong with the Democratic Party.
Leo Panitch will live on in the democratic socialism he espoused and the lives he touched.
We spoke to a Chipotle employee forced to work amid rodent infestations so extreme that he and several colleagues were bitten by rats. All this while COVID devastates their ranks. No one should have to risk their health for the sake of corporate profits.
We’re in the middle of a brutal pandemic during which millions are suffering. Yet according to the New York Times, Joe Biden actually moved to undercut progressives demanding greater economic aid in the stimulus negotiations, giving “Democrats confidence to pull back on their demands” — and surrender to Mitch McConnell.
The jaw-dropping speed of COVID-19 vaccine development is a glorious marvel of science, cooperation, and economic planning — a glimpse of how much more an egalitarian world could produce and achieve. But the lifeboat ethics of vaccine rollout is a horrifying display of the inefficiency and cruelty of capitalism.
New York must immediately reinstate a complete eviction moratorium, incoming New York state legislators and socialists Jabari Brisport and Marcela Mitaynes argue. You can’t stay at home to prevent the spread of COVID-19 if you’re forced out of your home.
Should left-wing House members try to force action on Medicare for All by threatening to withhold their votes for Nancy Pelosi as House speaker? The idea has sparked controversy, but it’s nothing new. In the decades before the Civil War, it was a key tactic for antislavery radicals as they struggled to keep the slavery issue on the national agenda.
The global left has suffered an irreparable loss with the passing of Leo Panitch this weekend. He was incredibly warm, inviting, and generous to others. And he remained committed to the end to the cause of socialism and human emancipation.
The Federal Reserve could provide low-interest loans to small businesses and governments struggling under the pandemic as part of the stimulus. But the Fed providing those loans would mean Wall Street wouldn’t get that business, at much higher rates — something Republican Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey decided on Thursday could not happen.
In the 1930s, working-class radicals in the New South Wales branch of the Australian Labor Party established Socialization Units, mass organizations parallel to the party. Their goal was to prepare for the democratic takeover of industry, and to build “socialism in our time.”
The documentary One Long Shift in the Weeds captures the devastation of Pittsburgh’s culinary industry since the pandemic began. But it also shows the life-changing effect of enhanced unemployment benefits, which offered millions a temporary respite from life on the edge of financial ruin.