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
Frederick Douglass, 1852: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
1776 began as a petty squabble among odious and powerful elites. In spite of them, it soon became the lodestar of emancipatory movements everywhere.
The Seattle General Strike of 1919 is a forgotten and misunderstood part of American history. But it shows that workers have the power to shut down whole cities — and to run them in our interests.
Florida Republicans just passed a poll tax that disenfranchises many of the same felons who recently won the right to vote. It’s a chilling throwback to previous eras of black voter suppression — and a reminder that we still have to fight for basic democratic rights today.
Bernie Sanders has repeatedly denounced the brutality of Israel’s occupation and stood up for Palestinian rights. He’s the only candidate who has a chance of breaking the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus.
An Italian court has overruled the arrest of migrant-solidarity activist Carola Rackete. But as the far right in government criminalizes efforts to save lives at sea, the Left must offer unconditional solidarity to all those crossing the Mediterranean.
The United States Postal Service is a crucial institution for black workers in America. That’s why Bernie Sanders’s strong support for defending and expanding the USPS is a key racial justice issue.
Anyone who says they’re worried about people losing their health insurance because of Medicare for All is being disingenuous: every year, under our current system, 50 million lack insurance at some point. The only solution to that insecurity is Medicare for All.
Elizabeth Warren finally took a strong stand on Medicare for All on the campaign trail. It’s a welcome shift. Here’s how she can fight for it.
One of the great Italian novelists of the last century, Natalia Ginzburg was long overlooked in the United States. Yet as Italy turns back toward the far right, this leading voice of the antifascist generation is again calling out to the present.
Last week, a group of Democrats in the House of Representatives who are part of the bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus” helped pass additional funding for Donald Trump’s immigrant concentration camps. All of them should be primaried in 2020.
Big surprise: the New York Times reporter covering Bernie Sanders has a long record of unfairly attacking Sanders — while neglecting to mention that the sources she quotes are corporate lobbyists.
The Democratic Party should be hosting thematic debates with viable presidential candidates on poverty, housing, foreign policy, immigrant rights, the climate crisis, and more. Instead, they are collaborating with the mainstream media to host empty entertainment spectacles.
It’s not enough to just be “progressive.” To tackle the many problems we face today, we need to name the system that’s behind all of them, capitalism — and fight for the only viable alternative, socialism.
In the years before Hitler seized power, a Cameroonian communist was an icon of the Berlin left. Joseph Ekwe Bilé linked the fight against race hate in Germany to the vision of a world free of imperialism.
The New York Times recently attacked Bernie Sanders for opposing US intervention in Latin America in the 1980s. We should set the record straight on what the US was doing in Central America — and why Sanders was right to oppose it.
Jeremy Corbyn faces increasing calls to turn Labour into the “party of Remain.” But thwarting Brexit would embolden the EU and its neoliberal dogmas — with disastrous consequences for the Left across Europe.
For black meatpacking workers, multiracial class politics was the path to economic and social advancement.
The revolutionary socialist vision is a vital one. Today’s rising socialist movement shouldn’t discard it.
The New Deal solidified capitalist democracy in the United States. The country has swung between hints of social democracy and free market absolutism ever since.