As I covered the Hollywood strike this year, perhaps the best guide was a 1941 novel by a former Communist Party member about the dog-eat-dog scumbaggery of movie executives and the lying and artless bragging that Hollywood runs on.
Eighteen-year-old Israeli Tal Mitnick has just been sent to prison for refusing to enlist in the army and participate in what he calls a “war of revenge” in Gaza. He’s a hero.
Recently genealogists discovered that Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is a distant relative of Antonio Gramsci. Though they share little else, Meloni has engaged in a campaign for control over cultural institutions that Gramsci would understand well.
Historian Arno Mayer, who died this month at age 97, infused his work with a Marxism animated by attention to ideology, passion, and the open-endedness of history.
Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, has issued a decree with over 350 reforms tearing up labor rights and privatizing industries. The “shock therapy” plan marks a dangerous expansion of the president’s powers — but it also faces fierce opposition.
Last week, hundreds of health workers shut down the London HQ of Palantir to protest a tech company profiting off of Israel’s bloody war on Gaza.
The New York Times’s 1619 Project claimed to reveal the unknown history of slavery and racism in the United States. It ended up helping to distort the real history of slavery — and the heroic struggle against it — for a generation.
American federalism is often touted as a source of local democratic engagement, political innovation, and responsive public policy. But in practice, the American states have served not as “laboratories of democracy” but as laboratories of autocracy and inequality.
For years, conservative billionaires have treated Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas to opulent vacations and trips on their private jets. If these were anything other than disinterested gifts, then they’re taxable — and Thomas owes the IRS a huge bill.
Karl Marx started out in a liberal milieu where the primary concern was abolishing religious authoritarianism. In time, he came to believe that abolishing capitalism was necessary for true freedom — and that only the working class could do it.
A publicly owned intercity bus service with dedicated highway lanes could do for travelers what the US Postal Service does for letters and packages: let them criss-cross the country cheaply and quickly at their own convenience.
Christmas wasn’t always an apolitical holiday. During the Gilded Age, working-class Americans organized around a radical vision of Christ — until the Protestant establishment co-opted their energy.