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
Trump’s First Step Act has been lauded by everyone from criminal justice reform organizations to Van Jones as an important blow against the carceral state. It’s not — and it does far more harm for the incarcerated than good.
Argentina’s mass movement for abortion rights has produced an insurgent, class-based feminism that intends to grow alongside the emancipation of the whole working class.
On March 8, 2018, millions of women across Spain struck for International Women’s Day. The nationwide shutdown showed how we can turn our personal hardships into a powerful collective resistance.
On this day in 1917, Russian women struck to end Tsarism. Today, women around the world are following in their footsteps.
Fascists keep vandalizing Marx’s grave because they’re still afraid of his legacy, and the power of his ideas.
Contrary to the myth that socialists have always ignored gender oppression, women’s suffrage was first won by socialist feminists — and working-class revolt.
The rush to condemn Ilhan Omar says more about the vacuousness of our political discourse than the supposed bigotry of her comments.
The filibuster has been a tool of reaction since its inception. We should abolish it.
The Green New Deal won’t get far if it’s left hostage to the whims of private finance. We need to set up public banks and democratize the Federal Reserve.
A slew of recent histories would suggest that the major divide in American society is “red states” vs. “blue states.” In fact, it is class that’s the real fault line.
The FBI has historically served as a political police force, tasked not just with monitoring dissent but actively destroying it. Nowhere is that clearer than in their infiltration of the Left in the 1960s and ’70s.
Some scholars and writers are trying to rehabilitate John Locke. They shouldn’t — he was an apologist for slavery, not a champion of freedom.
Parts of the business press have painted the Italian Democrats’ new leader as a local Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. They’re being too kind.
Socialists can’t wave away concerns about the feasibility of a future socialist society — we need to offer people credible answers.
Before there was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there was New York’s Socialist congressman Meyer London. His experience in Washington is full of lessons for us today.
In the years before the Nazi takeover, Berlin was a pulsing metropolis. Hit series Babylon Berlin immerses us in a recognizable era of transformation — and despair.
As if New York’s failed attempt to bribe Amazon wasn’t embarrassing enough, the city’s political and labor elite is now begging Jeff Bezos to change his mind. Let’s hope they fail again.
Though educators did not achieve all their demands, Oakland’s teachers strike transformed the city, won important gains, and empowered educators to take on the billionaire education privatizers.
In his new book, historian Greg Grandin shows why an expanding American empire has required an increasingly militarized border. And why America’s founding frontier myth is finally coming to an end.
Bernie’s a Russian sympathizer… If only John McCain were still around. Hillary Clinton seems determined to prove that she’s living in a fantasy world of her own creation.