When The Battle of Algiers premiered at the Venice Film Festival, 60 years ago this month, the French delegation refused to attend. From the moment of its shooting, in the aftermath of Algeria’s liberation war, Gillo Pontecorvo’s film was deeply political.
The Criterion Channel’s new Jonathan Demme retrospective is a chance to look beyond The Silence of the Lambs and rediscover one of America’s most adventurous, surprising, and charming filmmakers.
Runaway production isn’t just costing Hollywood jobs. It’s severing the intergenerational chains along which film crafts are passed down, replacing an industry town’s living inheritance with a dislocated workforce that must always start from scratch.
Two University of California tech workers explain their unionization process — and how unions can help recapture the original promise of tech being used to better people’s lives rather than make the worst people in the world ever richer.
US police have long recruited military veterans with conditions that make them prone to violence and aggression. The problem is even worse when it comes to ICE, whose leaders valorize brutality and allow officers to kill with impunity.
People sometimes point to individual consumption to argue that the US is better off than Western Europe. But this comparison neglects how much more unequal the US is and how much more money we burn in our irrational private health care system.
The answer to union contracts being voted down is not for organizers to lower workers’ expectations. It’s to seize that vote as an opportunity to organize those expectations into collective power.
Before the votes had even been counted, some were treating last night’s Michigan result as a defeat for the Left. This is hard to square with the fact that well beyond Abdul El-Sayed’s win, progressives and socialists won major races.
The Republican Party’s descent into chaos wasn’t Donald Trump’s doing. After successfully beating back the labor movement, the capitalist class became too disorganized to restrain the monster it created.
We tend to think that markets reflect consumer choice. But the artificial-intelligence boom has been powered by the investment decisions of concentrated capital rather than by consumer demand.
You were born on the wrong continent. Yes, the United States has a greater GDP per capita than Western Europe. But that GDP has not translated into broader prosperity in time and well-being for ordinary workers.
Yanis Varoufakis has called Big Tech’s overweening power to shape the modern economy “technofeudalism.” Writing for Jacobin, he argues that this isn’t a moral critique but one based in the dynamic of capital accumulation today.