Yi San is a freelance writer based in New York.
When former Spanish Communist Party leader Julio Anguita was buried last week, crowds in his native Córdoba broke quarantine to sing the Internationale next to his coffin. The “Red Caliph” saved his party from the doldrums of the 1980s — and helped lay the basis for today’s Unidas Podemos.
Australia’s compulsory superannuation system has made us all shareholders in a vast financial investment industry worth almost $3 trillion. These collective funds are enormously powerful, yet when it comes to retirement, lower-income earners are left with all too little in their hands.
The news broke this week that Jane Roe, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, was paid by the anti-abortion right to publicly switch sides later in life. But while the news is shocking, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that no single person was responsible for the partial victory of Roe — it takes collective action to win social change.
Thirty years ago today, Yemen united as one country in a mood of optimism about the future. Those hopes were to be cruelly disappointed, thanks to the destructive, self-serving record and rivalry of Yemen’s political elites.
Domestic workers have always been among the hardest hit by recessions. Fear of contagion may make the coronavirus crisis the worst yet — a catastrophe for millions of the most economically vulnerable workers.
Jeff Bezos is reportedly on pace to be the world’s first trillionaire. That’s a grotesque indictment of our society — and the only way to change it is to organize Amazon workers to wrest back the extraordinary power and wealth that Bezos is hoarding.
Mainstream accounts of republicanism in Northern Ireland tend to focus exclusively on the armed campaign that produced one of the most devastating conflicts in postwar Europe. Left out, however, is the radical, grassroots movement for civil rights that was a driving force for popular republicanism from the late 1960s.
Since the turn of the millennium, Argentina has been hobbling from debt crisis to debt crisis. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, the country is set to default for the third time in twenty years — an event that would plunge the country into chaos.
Rutger Bregman made a name for himself by dressing down Tucker Carlson and calling out the ultrarich at Davos. But his new book is closer to a hopeful self-help guide than a manifesto for radical political change.
In the years immediately following World War II, the movement for black equality, rooted in the militancy of black workers, was making massive strides. The McCarthyist anticommunist campaign of the late 1940s dealt a hammer blow to that project, attacking its unions and scattering its activists, ultimately narrowing the ambitions of the black freedom movement.
Criticisms of capitalism’s failures have more power if we can actually imagine an alternative. Here’s what a viable socialist society could look like.
The number of infections and deaths that have swept through US nursing homes is staggering. Organized nursing home workers are crucial to ending this devastation.
Faced with the mounting economic crisis, European leaders have promised aid to the hardest-hit member states. But there’s always strings attached. For France Insoumise MEP Manuel Bompard, the proposals for loans and grants ignore the real scale of the crisis — because they all put debt repayment above the needs of average Europeans.
Communist Party members are often stereotyped as mindless zombies that blindly took orders from Moscow. But for many in the CPUSA, the party allowed them to recognize their own capacity to change the world.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, is enforcing one of the strictest social distancing orders in the world, subjecting thousands to arrest and expanding an already ravenous and bloated prison system. With millions facing destitution and abuse, coronavirus is laying bare the instability that has always been at the core of neoliberalism in countries like El Salvador.
After 2008, Lebanon’s oligarchic elites engineered a financialized boom that fueled inequality and lined the pockets of bankers. Now its economy has imploded, leaving the country’s working class to foot the bill.
House Democrats’ latest stimulus bill, the HEROES Act, is designed to lay out the party’s basic principles for coronavirus recovery. Unfortunately, those principles include Democrats being very happy to shore up corporations’ and billionaires’ profits and political control of Washington.
Mrs. America, the new miniseries about Phyllis Schlafly, doesn’t want us to come away with a harsh view of its subject. But we should: Schlafly’s right-wing views were consistently monstrous, doing untold damage to the country.
Arundhati Roy has a tendency to rile India’s media and political elites like no one else on the subcontinent. Perhaps that’s because no writer today, in India or anywhere in the world, writes with the kind of beautiful, piercing prose in defense of the wretched of the earth that Roy does.
The tycoons of Big Tech are following in the footsteps of their Gilded Age predecessors, using a facade of social concern to cover over their depredations. We need to depose the new Robber Barons.