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 2003 war against Iraq, a massive 70 percent of the country’s health care infrastructure has been destroyed. As hospitals are besieged by victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, a state enfeebled by two decades of conflict is again at a breaking point.
The people of Kashmir have been left badly exposed to COVID-19 by a state that spends lavishly on tools of repression while neglecting public health services. The Indian government is using the lockdown to extend its regime of surveillance and control.
Pakistani authorities made a bad start to the coronavirus response, using the crisis to push through an IMF agenda of hospital privatization. Faced with protests by health professionals, the government immediately opted for repression — showing that it considers health care for the masses mere unnecessary spending.
With Adam Bandt as leader, the Australian Greens are charting a leftward course and developing the country’s most ambitious policy proposals. The next step is to build a strong movement behind it — and to achieve that, it will need a democratically empowered membership.
Even as governments halt nonessential travel, thousands of workers are being flown from Eastern Europe to pick farm produce in Britain. Housed several workers to a caravan and often paid below minimum wage, their experience shows how “flexible” seasonal hiring allows bosses to flout the most basic workers’ rights.
A year before the coronavirus pandemic, graduate workers at the University of Illinois-Chicago went on strike for three weeks and won. Last month, they built off of the infrastructure created during that strike to demand and win COVID-19 protections.
The feminist movement in Chile is one of the strongest in the world, last month bringing millions of women into the streets for International Women’s Day. Building on the mass protests that erupted in October, their movement is only growing bolder, and articulating meaningful alternatives to the country’s neoliberal order.
The term “post-democracy” refers to the recent process where democratic institutions have been hollowed out and citizens increasingly excluded from decision-making. But a serious response to this problem can’t just denounce its “populist” symptoms — rather, we need to examine the deeper social ills stemming from economic liberalism itself.
By recruiting notorious neoliberal economist Larry Summers to advise him on coronavirus policy, Joe Biden has shown that since 2008, liberal elites have learned nothing and forgotten everything.
There’s only one way to get the political education, organizing skills, and institutional support you need to be an effective socialist: join a socialist organization.
Today, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, and Target are striking and asking customers to stage a one-day solidarity boycott. They’re fighting for what they deserve — and we should have their backs.
The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
This May 1 in New York City, housing activists are organizing “Can’t Pay May,” a citywide rent strike that will dramatize the impossibility of making rent under lockdown — and the need for a radical overhaul of the housing system.
Bucking a liberal establishment that has ignored, downplayed, and dismissed Tara Reade’s accusations of sexual assault against Joe Biden, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has urged his viewers to take it seriously. TV news needs more anchors like him.
Much of our contemporary culture works to deny the existence of class and inequality, at the same time as its structures of nepotism and unpaid internships keep working-class voices marginalized. We need to wrestle back control at the point of cultural production.
In the Jim Crow South, the Alabama Communist Party distinguished itself as a champion of racial and economic justice — fighting for the rights of black defendants, helping organize hyper-exploited sharecroppers, and welcoming black workers into its ranks on completely equal terms.
How do commentators like David Brooks account for the undeniable rise in inequality? Not by analyzing the dynamics of wealth distribution and power that would help us address the problem, but by pointing the finger at the rest of us.
Through decades of marketization, universities have replaced permanent teaching staff with temporary and often low-paid hires. Faced with COVID-19, they’re pulling the purse strings even tighter — as students pay high fees for online seminars with a shrinking band of overworked lecturers.
European leaders won’t consider debt cancellation or abandon the dogma of neoliberal austerity. Coronavirus shows that well-funded public services are essential for our survival — austerity is a matter of life and death. We need an alternative.
In the latest media parlor game, the players try to convince each other that Joe Biden could actually campaign as a progressive. We already know the answer: he can’t, because his record is so abysmal.