The Communist Party USA had its share of bureaucrats, morons, sectarians, and incompetents, writes longtime leftist Michael Myerson. But it also included some of the best, most principled, courageous, and heroic fighters for social justice in US history.
The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have shaken many of the European Union’s dogmas. Yet the EU has repeatedly defied predictions of imminent collapse — posing the need for a serious left-wing program to reform it.
American folk songs record a history of oppression and have often fueled the fire of protest. Folk artist Jake Xerxes Fussell’s music endeavors to sustain these working-class musical traditions while reinterpreting them for the modern age.
Apologists for capitalist globalization claim that global value chains spread prosperity around the world. In reality, they allow firms like Apple to maximize labor exploitation while keeping workers chained to poverty.
Despite growing need and out-of-pocket costs, Anthony Albanese's Labor government is halving the number of Medicare-subsidized psychology sessions Australians can access each year. It’s an austerity measure that will harm those who need support the most.
For most of Japan’s postwar era, the Socialists were the second force in the country’s political system and the main challenger to conservative rule. But when they ditched their left-wing, anti-militarist principles in the 1990s, they collapsed into minor-party status.
Political movements are not just driven by theories or even material interests but also their myths. Italian historian Furio Jesi was a socialist who examined the power of mythology — and its centrality to the Right’s cultural influence.
Sholem Schwarzbard was an anarchist Yiddish-language poet from Ukraine. In 1926, he assassinated Ukrainian military commander Symon Petliura in revenge for deadly pogroms carried out by Petliura's armies in the Russian Civil War — and was found not guilty by a jury of his peers.
Scenes of burning cars in Parisian streets have been used to paint France’s Kurds as a riotous minority. Yet their angry protests are fueled by a string of racist killings — and French authorities’ refusal to reveal the full facts of the cases.
Workers nationwide lack a federal guarantee of paid sick leave in the United States. Establishing a federal paid sick leave guarantee would improve the lives of all American workers — railworkers included.
On Christmas Day in 1831, 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in British West Indies history. Their uprising would prove a milestone on the road to emancipation only a few years later.
The conventional understanding of Marxism as doggedly anti-religious is wrong. In fact, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued, Christianity and Marxism have at times inspired in humanity a radical sense of hope to build a more just world.