
What Black Life Actually Looks Like
For too long, the Left has organized based on caricatures of black political life. If it wants to win, it needs to start recognizing the role of class in black America.
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
For too long, the Left has organized based on caricatures of black political life. If it wants to win, it needs to start recognizing the role of class in black America.
Britain’s hapless Independent Group, the centrist party spearheaded by anti-Corbyn rebels, shows that politics without purpose leads straight to disaster.
Today, on Workers Memorial Day, we should remember that thousands die on the job every year — deaths made all the more tragic because they could have been prevented by bosses who valued workers’ lives.
Disputes over Spain’s national borders have dominated the campaign for today’s election. But Podemos’s radical environmental program against the billionaire class can save the entire planet.
Polling for today’s general election forecasts heavy losses for Podemos. With Spanish politics polarized around the threat from the far right, Pablo Iglesias’s anti-austerity agenda is struggling to make itself heard.
In today’s general election, Spain’s far right Vox party is set to enter Congress for the first time. And it’s already building alliances with the mainstream center-right.
If we want to fight capitalism, the US left has to figure out how to confront US empire. Generations of internationalist struggles in Latin America can help us do just that.
As Bernie Sanders’s campaign gets underway, questions of how socialists should relate to voters and the state have become more pressing. Few historical figures provide more insight on this front than democratic socialist Salvador Allende’s government in Chile.
Amid the devastation of war, Pol Pot’s genocidal regime came to power and led to the death of over a million Cambodians. Its roots didn’t lie in its “utopianism,” but in imperialist war and authoritarianism.
Even under right-wing governments, local leftist leaders can have a massive impact. Daniel Jadue describes the “people’s pharmacy,” cheap eye-care and glasses, public housing, left approaches to community safety, and much more instituted during his time as the Communist mayor of Recoleta, one of the thirty-seven municipalities that make up Greater Santiago, Chile.
Justin Trudeau’s shiny image is losing its luster amid a devastating corruption scandal. With movements pushing their own version of a Green New Deal, it might just be enough to take him down.
An internationalist, anti-imperialist vision has been all but abandoned by the Left. We need to rebuild that vision.
Red State Revolt is a brilliant, exhaustive look at the teacher strike wave. Every organizer should read it.
We should remember the Civil War and Reconstruction for what they were: periods of liberation that were snuffed out by white elites.
On April 25, 1974, a mutiny in the Portuguese army put an end to five decades of dictatorship. The revolution that followed showed how working people can take a modern economy into their own hands.
Joe Biden just announced his candidacy for president. Of all the terrible candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, he is the worst.
If workers refuse to work, the bosses can’t produce anything. If soldiers refuse to fight, the generals can’t wage wars. That’s the power of a strike.
In Sunday’s election Ukrainian voters dealt a decisive rebuttal to the post-Maidan establishment. Yet well-organized nationalist forces represent a time bomb under the new president-elect.
The United States is spending $750 billion on its war machine. That money should be going to food, education, health care, and shelter for working people.
Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez styles himself as the main barrier to Spain’s rising far right. Yet his record as prime minister shows how little he is doing to stop it.