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
The teachers’ strike wave that has swept the nation since last year hasn’t just reinvigorated working-class militancy — it’s also produced some excellent picket line music and dancing. On the occasion of the teachers’ strike in Chicago, we rounded up the best of them.
Striking educators in Chicago are showing the country how union power can confront and turn back the abhorrent conditions of the neoliberal era.
After launching the longest strike in decades, General Motors workers are voting on a tentative deal. But the agreement meets neither of the strikers’ most important demands: ending plant closings and scrapping the rotten system of tiered pay and benefits.
Anti-mafia authors, police investigators, and far-right militants in Italy have a new obsession — organized crime by Nigerian citizens. But sensationalism about Nigerians importing “black magic” and “bloodthirsty violence” from afar fails to grasp the root of the problem — the criminal forms of organization that pervade Italian capitalism as a whole.
Haneen Zoabi is a Palestinian politician in Israel. In an interview, she explains why Palestinian citizens in Israel must connect their struggles to ending the Israeli occupation and the siege of Gaza, and fighting for the right of return and a state for all of the country’s citizens.
Americans are aging, and millions will be unable to afford long-term care. The only way to avert social catastrophe is to implement a Medicare-for-All system with comprehensive long-term care benefits.
Chile is the original home of neoliberalism, first begun after the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973. If you listen closely to mass protests on the streets today, you can hear Allende’s last words: “The people must defend themselves.”
Canada’s New Democratic Party performed worse than expected in yesterday’s elections. But the party can’t take those results as a sign to water down their message — the NDP must continue to offer a left-wing program of taxing the rich and combating climate change.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised to end business as usual in Chicago. Instead, she’s antagonizing teachers, refusing to fully fund public schools, and giving the rich whatever they want. That agenda didn’t end well for Rahm Emanuel. It won’t for Lightfoot, either.
The campaign for Spain’s general election on November 10 has been electrified by massive protests against the jailing of Catalan leaders. For the first time, the pro-independence left has given up its abstentionist stance — and it’s set to bring Catalonia’s revolt into the Spanish Congress itself.
Chile’s most marginalized workers are leading a revolt that threatens the country’s entire political order. Now is the time for an escalation of the struggle into a national strike that can build a real economic and political democracy in its wake.
Despite overwhelming evidence that former Brazilian president Lula da Silva was the victim of a right-wing campaign to keep him out of another presidential term by jailing him, Bernie Sanders is the only Democratic candidate who has called for his release. The rest of the party’s presidential candidates should demand that Lula be freed, too.
The heads of mining and fossil-fuel companies are meeting this month in Melbourne to exchange tips on how to best extract wealth from the planet. We must greet them with mass protest.
In Chile, a transit fare hike turned into a nationwide mass protest against austerity. Now the country’s right-wing president and military are responding with repression unseen since the Pinochet dictatorship.
Short-sighted union leaders who oppose Medicare for All — like James Hoffa of the Teamsters — think they can strengthen their own individual unions by using private health insurance as an organizing tool. But they’re sacrificing their members’ wages in the process.
Samantha Power has staked her career on fighting for human rights. But her liberal interventionism undermines those very aims by propping up the world’s most powerful military.
Justin Trudeau may be decisively rejected in today’s Canadian election. The race has been shaken up by a surge in support for Jagmeet Singh and his social-democratic NDP, whose left-wing program is what many Canadians thought they were getting when they voted for Trudeau four years ago.
Will the work ethic decline under socialism? No — socialism empowers ordinary people to be active participants in shaping the economy. And that’s a lot more motivating than fear of losing your job.
Victims of decades of racist pogroms, state violence, and military occupation, the Tamil minority has long fought for liberation in Sri Lanka. We should not ignore their struggle.
Only one presidential candidate has consistently challenged the establishment and fought for the working class. Nina Turner explains why there’s no substitute for Bernie.