After yesterday’s ruling declaring former Brazilian president Lula da Silva eligible to run in next year’s election, Brazil’s ruling class is panicking. But for Brazilian workers struggling with economic hardship and the COVID-19 pandemic, Lula’s return means there is finally some hope for change.
Legendary actor and longtime progressive activist Danny Glover was recently in Bessemer, Alabama, supporting workers’ efforts to organize a union there. In an interview, Glover talks about what brought him to Bessemer, his own labor history, and why the Amazon workers’ “struggle has significance for all of us.”
New research shows why inequality is even worse than it looks on paper. Thanks to weak leverage, the same workers who earn the lowest wages also suffer the worst violations of labor rights at the hands of employers.
There are moments when even the most committed of democrats find themselves despairing of political democracy. But the system has proven again and again to be the last best hope of ordinary people in defending their pursuit of happiness against tyrants of all stripes — both public and private.
The current guest worker system prioritizes agricultural growers’ profits over immigrants’ and workers’ rights. Joe Biden should seek a different way: building an immigration system based on family reunification, community stability, and immigrant workers’ rights to decent wages, health, and housing.
The early German socialist movement was a largely male affair, with widespread sexist attitudes compounding a state ban on women taking part in politics. But by the 1900s, a proletarian women's movement had forced working-class women's demands onto the agenda — insisting that they didn't need fathers and husbands, or bourgeois ladies, to speak on their behalf.
Watching Meghan Markle and Prince Harry talk to Oprah about the depraved monarchy last night, I couldn't help but wonder why I live in a country where the Queen is the head of state. Canada needs to dump the British monarchy and never look back.
Fifty years ago today, a group of New Left activists executed a daring burglary of an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, exposing the bureau’s COINTELPRO operations against the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war activists, and socialists. We should remember these activists today as heroes.
On International Women's Day, the good news is that the new COVID-19 relief bill will include a kind-of, sort-of universal child benefit — a policy that feminists have long called for. But the overly complicated, burdensome way the policy is implemented means that on this issue, the Left still has its work cut out for it.
Thousands of home care workers in New York are forced to work twenty-four-hour shifts while being paid for only half the time. That’s outrageous — and on International Women’s Day, we should heed their call in taking up the struggle for control over our time.
The bodies that govern international sport are riddled with corruption and in need of drastic change. We need an alternative socialist vision for how sports should be run that gives priority to social well-being and international cooperation over nationalism and private profit.
Lelio Basso was a major figure of the postwar Italian left who urged its parties to follow through on their revolutionary programs and avoid subordinating themselves to the ruling Christian Democrats. Italy’s Socialists and Communists should have heeded his advice.