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 negotiations over a European Union bailout were riven with splits on whether “frugal” Northern states should have to assist their coronavirus-hit Southern partners. But while the eventual €750 billion deal was widely hailed as a victory for European solidarity, its details show that it will aggravate the EU’s inequalities even further.
At the Spotless Laundry in Melbourne’s southeast, employers demanded that work continue despite escalating numbers of COVID-19 cases. The workers refused to allow the company’s profit to be placed above their safety — and won.
David Graeber’s intellectual legacy is enormous and wide-ranging, but his recent writings on antisemitism deeply moved me. He knew that antisemitism was far from dead — and he also knew that only a democratic left could stop it.
For four decades Sen. Ed Markey was a run-of-the-mill liberal Democrat. But when he found himself threatened by a potentially career-ending defeat, he turned toward young voters and the Left — and it worked. Could Biden do the same? Maybe. But he probably won’t even try.
Radical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox argued that racial antagonism was an essential tool for maintaining capitalist power. Cox’s understanding of race and class can help us forge a broad, multiracial movement against oppression today.
The day after the Bolivian election, the Organization of American States suggested the result was fraudulent — then took months to provide any proof. Last month, it finally released its data — and researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found a basic coding error that destroys the OAS’s case against Morales.
In the face of climate crisis and police killings, thinking about American federalism can seem terribly boring. But the fragmentation of the US state and the dilution of popular power are at the root of many of our most pressing problems — and we desperately need fundamental changes to the country’s constitutional order.
In AMC’s comedic drama series Lodge 49, webs of debt and despair, disappointed dreams, and displaced lives tie the characters together at first. But it’s solidarity that makes the bonds last.
Since the start of the pandemic it’s become common to suggest that education will have to adapt to a “new normal,” with increased use of online platforms. But private tech firms risk having an oversized say in what the “new normal” is — ignoring the needs expressed by teachers and learners themselves.
Despite Trump’s posturing, crime is nowhere near top of mind for most of the American electorate. So why is Joe Biden running on a triangulating law-and-order message?
In Georgia, Republicans have leaned on voter suppression to push their reactionary agenda for years — and now they’re withholding unemployment benefits for pandemic-wracked workers. The only way to stop their pillaging is for poor and working-class Georgians to unite across racial lines, to finally win the economic and social rights they deserve.
The Right wants you to believe that a coddled, overly sensitive left is propping up cancel culture. But punitive, hyper-surveillant ways of interacting online are built into the structure of privately owned social media companies, and they’re practiced across the political spectrum. The Left must insist on a better way.
Socialist leader Salvador Allende became Chile’s president fifty years ago today. Allende’s election inaugurated a unique experiment in radical democracy that was cut short by Augusto Pinochet’s brutal US-backed coup.
Extinction Rebellion leaders have dismissed the idea that protests for climate action have anything to do with “socialist ideology.” But refusing to take political positions — and to relate green politics to the interests of the social majority — will reduce environmentalism to an ineffective moral protest.
We need high-quality, entertaining class-struggle television. The BBC’s period drama The Mill, which was ahead of its time when it debuted in 2013, shows us how it’s done.
Henry Wallace was an ambitious left-winger in Roosevelt’s Democratic Party who, as secretary of agriculture and then as vice president, helped make radical the New Deal of the 1930s. His ultimate defeat by the right of his own party shows the obstacles the insurgent left has always faced within the Democratic Party.
From suffragette jingoism in 1914 to the liberal support for the war in Afghanistan, a long tradition of feminists has made excuses for Western imperialism. But women’s liberation demands that we break up established power structures — and start by focusing on the women who most suffer the effects of imperial violence.
The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was a watershed moment in 1960s student organizing. Through unprecedented mobilization, rejecting the expansion of McCarthyist-inspired rules to strangle political activities on campus, and a refusal to allow the administration’s efforts to split the movement, students won their basic rights to free speech on campus.
The Post Office has been a central force for democracy in American society. We can’t let the Right destroy it now.
By throwing out landmark antitrust regulation, Hollywood just opened the floodgates toward even greater media concentration — all at the public’s expense.