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
House Republicans and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell represent voters who are disproportionately struggling — yet they’re blocking $2,000 survival checks. It’s American politics in a nutshell.
As New York City prepares for another historic wave of austerity, Ray McGuire has become a favorite of the city’s business and media establishments. A former Citigroup vice chairman and man-about–Wall Street is exactly the kind of figure who puts them at ease.
Community activists battling plans for a hideous Chicago shrine to Barack Obama have been dealt a series of blows in recent months. Perhaps most notable was a rebuff from none other than Amy Coney Barrett, whose decision in favor of Obama bore all the hallmarks of ruling class solidarity.
Australian PM Scott Morrison is often compared to Donald Trump. Morrison is certainly a race-baiter who serves the rich, but his brand of reheated “populism” borrows far more from Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and former PM John Howard. Unfortunately, it’s not dead yet.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promised Africa a “Green Revolution” to fight hunger and poverty. It hasn’t worked — but it has upped corporate agriculture’s profits. Local farmers are being left empty-handed, and hunger is rising.
The United States distinguishes itself as one of the few wealthy countries in the world that does not have a robust public childcare program. But there’s no reason we can’t have one that’s wildly popular and provides high-quality care — in fact, during World War II, we did.
The French Communist Party, founded 100 years ago, claimed inspiration from the sailors who refused to fight Soviet Russia. Their Black Sea mutiny showed French workers’ enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution — and their unwillingness to serve as cannon fodder for their own ruling class.
Public defender and racial justice organizer Erika Ballou won a Las Vegas judgeship with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America. Next month, she’ll take the bench with the aim of upending the criminal justice status quo.
With Trump’s defeat and other setbacks for the Right around the world, some commentators have proclaimed the death of right-populism. But the structural factors that gave rise to it remain in place, and only a recharged left-wing movement can address them.
The novelist Albert Camus is omnipresent in French cultural life, from TV shows to comic books, magazine covers and one-man shows. Camus-mania isn’t just a literary phenomenon: it draws on a deep well of political revisionism and colonial nostalgia.
The NHL’s superrich owners tried to shift the burden of their pandemic-related losses onto players. But the hockey players’ union has successfully faced down their demands, setting an example that should ring out beyond the sports arenas.
The philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary militant Frantz Fanon was a key figure in the struggle against European colonialism. Fanon’s innovative thinking on racism and its relationship to class oppression still speaks vividly to the present.
Amazon doesn’t have a website for the Czech Republic, but it has created a distribution hub in that country in order to process orders for German customers. The site was set up amidst protests by German logistics workers — and today, their Czech colleagues are earning just half the wages.
For the Left, the historic contribution of Christian socialism was its ability to relate the values of modern socialism to the time-honored themes of traditional religious teaching. The Left would do well to recover those lessons today.
Rev. Angela Cowser, a cofounder of the Institute for Christian Socialism, argues that a society rooted in the dictates of the Gospel would look radically different from the one we have now. There is a name for what that change should look like: socialism.
In December 1914, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs sent a Christmas letter to a man in a Michigan prison. We reprint the message here in full.
There’s plenty of reason for despair these days. But this Christmas, we can look to radical Christians past and present like Nina Turner and Eugene V. Debs to rekindle our hope for a better world — and rededicate ourselves to building it.
Donald Trump didn’t get the figure of $2,000 from nowhere. Since the start of the pandemic, monthly direct payments worth that amount have been a core demand of democratic-socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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.