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
Since the election, Democratic centrists have harshly criticized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Left for their own poor electoral showing. But AOC has bravely hit back — standing up for left-wing politics and refusing to be cowed by the centrist attacks.
Medicare for All backers won in safe Democratic districts and Trump country alike this year, while its opponents lost in both. Yet centrists are now leading a campaign to blame M4A for the party’s devastating down-ballot losses this year. They’re wrong.
Right-wing forces have denied the existence of climate change for decades, but we are beginning to see a shift away from crude denial toward a terrifying eco-fascism. We have to oppose any attempt to use the climate crisis to justify racist, reactionary, and authoritarian policies.
Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party is a travesty of justice — denying him the right to speak the truth about the media smears he has endured. Now, members who speak up in Corbyn’s defense are themselves being suspended, as Blairite officials attempt to silence the socialist left.
An open letter to President-elect Joe Biden from Chicago city council member Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez: Rahm Emanuel was disastrous for Chicago. He would be just as disastrous in a Biden administration.
Palestinians aren’t just kept in misery and degradation by the Israeli occupation — they’re also silenced, at home and abroad. Palestinian activists and their supporters are trying to change that.
Despite his authoritarian tendencies, Donald Trump never came close to dragging us into fascism. But he did drag us further toward a xenophobic, anti–working-class, right-wing-populist abyss. Those forces will continue to destroy American and global politics — if we don’t take them on and defeat them.
From Calgary to Los Angeles, everyone knows that sports arenas are a bad deal for cities. But the problem isn’t just the use of public subsidies for private profit: the whole multibillion-dollar sports venue industry is built on the backs of poorly treated, underpaid workers.
The fall of state socialism in Bulgaria in 1989 brought neither the promised prosperity nor a flowering of popular democratic politics. Three decades on, elites still blame Bulgaria’s woes on a supposedly incomplete transition to capitalism — the excuse for an unending series of measures to run down public services and strip workers of their rights.
Workers in the United States have lost control of perhaps the most important aspect of their lives: their time. Getting that time back is crucial — for workers’ well-being, for democracy, and for weakening the tyrannical power of the boss.
Card check helps workers claim their rights by making union certification straightforward. British Columbia’s newly elected NDP majority government must bring card-check certification back to the province and help rebuild the power of workers.
With US hegemony in decline, China and the European Union are each vying to impose their own leadership over the next wave of digitalization. Donald Trump’s talk of “America First” expressed this rivalry in especially crude terms — but even after his departure, the contest among the main world powers is only intensifying.
For more than 40 years, Kim Stanley Robinson has written radical science fiction that offers readers not an easy vision of utopia, but a hopeful alternative that still confronts the ecological devastation wrought by capitalism.
Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party is shameful, not least because he is one of the party’s most steadfast longtime anti-racist activists. We should know: we fought by his side to end apartheid in South Africa.
With Italy’s tourist sector sunk by the pandemic, authorities are now hiring cruise ships as floating jails for refugees. The migrant prisons show capitalism’s ability to restructure in times of crisis — but also the potential resistance to it.
Anthony Albanese may be the first federal leader of the Australian Labor Party to hail from the Socialist Left. However, his track record in New South Wales shows that he rose to his current position by collaborating with the party’s right wing to crush genuine ALP socialists.
Throughout the Cold War, Moscow-backed bodies like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and the Tashkent Film Festival brought writers and filmmakers from across the Third World to the USSR. Their exchanges with their Eastern Bloc counterparts reflected the ambitions and limits of Soviet internationalism.
Joe Biden says he’ll be a pro-labor president. But his funding from anti-union corporate executives, his Obama administration record, and his flirtation with Silicon Valley all point to a gap between rhetoric and reality.
Triumphalist celebrations of Joe Biden’s hollow win over Donald Trump are a master class in ideological hubris. Canada’s New Democratic Party absolutely should not take the wrong lessons from his feeble victory.
Nancy Pelosi is a barrier to transformative change. Socialists and progressives should oppose her reelection as House speaker.