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
Nine public housing towers in Melbourne have been put under a police-enforced “hard lockdown” without warning, with isolation effectively policed at gunpoint. It’s a measure reserved for inner-city public housing residents, despite the rising wave of infections throughout the city.
Historian Mike Davis wrote a book fifteen years ago warning of the coming global pandemic. The “monster at our door” has finally stepped through that door in COVID-19, and unfortunately, Davis was proven correct.
James Averhart led a push to track down and punish soldiers who deserted the Vietnam War in an attempt to stop similar desertions in Iraq and oversaw Chelsea Manning’s brutal imprisonment at a Quantico jail. He’s now vying for an Alabama House of Representatives seat — as a Democrat.
In the Jim Crow South, the planter class’s greatest fear was that black sharecroppers and white tenant farmers would rise up against their oppressors. In the 1930s, Socialist and Communist organizers tried to make that a reality.
Jackie Fielder, a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate for California’s State Senate, is refusing to take money from police unions, real-estate interests, and the fossil fuel industry. For her, the connection between capital and police violence is clear: “Our communities face intense repression from the state because it is profitable.”
Harry Britt succeeded Harvey Milk on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and fought to build a queer politics that stood doggedly for workers’ and tenants’ rights. When he died last month, we lost a gay socialist icon.
There is overwhelming evidence a surge of mostly older, Trump-fearing voters decided the Democratic primary — and that Bernie Sanders failed to counter an establishment messaging campaign that Trump would beat him in a general election.
Most of the fighters who joined the partisan struggle in World War II Yugoslavia had never even held a camera, let alone considered themselves photographers. Yet organized efforts to create a “partisan photography” helped carry the image of their struggle to the masses — and showed that artistic production wasn’t just for professionals.
Labour must outline its democratic-socialist vision of an economy that works for people and planet — before the Tories monopolize the narrative.
Jon Stewart’s new political comedy Irresistible wants to be a scathing critique of the media, big money, and Beltway corruption. But as satire, it’s weighed down by the comic’s let’s-all-just-get-along politics.
Three former Bernie Sanders field organizers argue that the campaign’s internal structures and lack of accountability hurt its chances and undermined Bernie’s theory of political change.
The son of a freed slave, William Cuffay played a key role in the struggle for democracy in Britain and abroad. It’s time to honor his sacrifices for the radical cause of justice and equality.
More than 150 years ago, when the corporation as we know it today was still new, Marx saw in it both the essence of capitalism and a prefiguration of socialism: “The abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself.”
This pandemic has the potential to erase much of the progress women have achieved over the past forty years. The solution is simple: labor organizing and struggling for jobs and fair pay.
Here’s an idea: we should redistribute wealth from the largely white 1 percent to the poor and working class of all races — tackling both racial and class inequality simultaneously.
More than a century after the landmark Homestead strike against Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire, workers at four Pittsburgh museums — including three founded by Carnegie — are unionizing with the United Steelworkers. It’s the latest episode in a nationwide wave of museum organizing.
In response to radical demands to defund and disband the police, liberal reformers are pushing the “Camden model.” Don’t fall for it. Camden relies on mass surveillance to pacify its population — all to benefit business interests.
Police unions, prison guard unions, district attorney associations, and others in the law enforcement lobby have long wielded their power to nix any reforms that attack the carceral state. To defund the police, we’ll have to challenge their power head-on.
The new national security laws that Beijing has imposed on Hong Kong criminalize dissent — and they could make it harder for workers in mainland China to organize, too.
Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with a caste of superrich lording over a mass of urban and rural poor barely surviving. Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s transfer programs have gone some way toward distributing wealth, but much more needs to be done.