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
George W. Bush’s war on Iraq is central to understanding our world today. Yet the war has largely been flushed down the memory hole. Remembering how we came to start the war and who sold us it is critical to stopping us from being dragged into similar bloody conflicts in the future.
Doctors for Bernie formed during Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign to unite physicians and other health care workers supporting the movement. The campaign may be over, but they’re not going anywhere until we win Medicare for All.
The “cancel culture” debate is stale. But there are real threats to civil liberties in society today. The Left must claim the mantle of free speech, broaden its scope, and bring in the dimension of class.
Journalism on national conflicts from Belfast to the Balkans often speaks of ancient hatreds and ancestral sectarianism. But a closer look at the Irish conflict shows that questions of nationhood and identity are very modern phenomena — and have to be integrated into any serious analysis of class.
Thirty-three years ago this month, South African apartheid police murdered 20-year-old activist Ashley Kriel. But his resistance legend has not been forgotten: Kriel’s commitment and fierce oratory still inspire movements for justice in South Africa today.
The Labor Party in Australia speaks a progressive language on climate change that it rarely enacts in policy. Now, under cover of the health crisis, the Victorian branch is expanding deforestation projects and onshore gas exploration.
Proclamations of a New Cold War between China and the US herald a clash between authoritarianism and liberal democracy. But what we’re seeing in the growing rivalry between the two countries isn’t based on ideological difference but on inter-capitalist competition.
During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration was a key New Deal agency that put millions of unemployed workers back to work on public infrastructure projects. We need a new WPA for the 21st century.
Zeev Sternhell was a historian of nationalism who demolished the myth of French “immunity” to fascism. His focus on the history of ideas allowed him to trace the genealogy of France’s home-grown far right — yet proved less able to understand the social forces that powered fascist movements across the continent.
Landlord abolition was once central to Labour Party policy. But today, Labour’s radical housing past has slipped into the mists of time, as some party leaders soften Labour’s stance on landlords.
Throughout the 1860 election, the Wide Awakes, a novel paramilitary-style organization, held mass rallies, marches, and demonstrations to combat slave power. These “young working-men for Lincoln” successfully combined new media and unrepentant partisanship to mobilize hundreds of thousands against the Southern planter class.
The Bath Iron Works strike of over 4,300 shipbuilding workers in Bath, Maine — by far the largest strike in the United States right now — is approaching its third week. Management has cut off health insurance, laid off over 200 members of a sister union local, ramped up subcontracting, and called in strikebreakers.
Nikil Saval went from being an editor at the leftist literary magazine n+1, to a volunteer for Bernie Sanders, to a successful democratic-socialist primary candidate in for Pennsylvania State Senate. In an interview with Jacobin, he talks about the race and his plans for governing as a leftist in the state capitol.
The great composer Ennio Morricone’s melodic writing was among the most distinctive in cinematic history. But beyond his movie musical classics, the “Maestro” was also committed to the radical democratization of music.
According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.
When Steven Pinker insists that the world is getting better and better, much of his case is based on claims about declining global poverty. But a new report from the UN’s top poverty expert dismantles that argument, showing that global poverty has gone nearly unchanged over the last forty years.
It is incredibly important to protect free speech and, by extension, the internet as a space to cultivate and share ideas and viewpoints that may fall outside the mainstream. That means curbing the power of billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s eighty years today since the notorious Vichy regime took power in France under Nazi domination. Vichy-style fascism wasn’t simply a German plant on French soil — it drew on powerful reactionary currents in French politics and society.
In the summer of 1990, Nelson Mandela toured the United States to raise money for the South African anti-apartheid struggle. His trip highlighted the historic links between the struggle for freedom in South Africa with the Civil Rights Movement in the US — a spirit of international solidarity that the US left must rekindle.
Should Yale, bearing a slave trader’s name, be renamed? Yes. Since Ivy League schools are engines of class inequality, we should first nationalize all the Ivies. Then Yale University can become UConn New Haven.