In the first 24 hours of the Joe Biden administration, Teamsters are on strike in the Bronx, Chicago teachers are preparing to stop work, and even the staff of the New Yorker are engaged in a work stoppage.
In his inauguration speech yesterday, Joe Biden rightly identified a crisis of ignored truth and unending lies in American politics. Donald Trump enflamed that crisis, but the political class, the media industry, and Biden himself helped create it.
Founded 100 years ago today, the Italian Communist Party immediately faced a violent wave of repression, killing hundreds of militants. As policemen, business elites, and even liberal politicians swung behind Benito Mussolini, no party resisted the Fascist threat more than the Communists.
Inspired by the hardships faced by peasants in his native Abruzzo, Ignazio Silone's Fontamara was one of the great anti-fascist novels of the twentieth century. But his own political journey was deeply conflicted, as he left behind his Bolshevik past to become a strident anti-communist.
The Italian Communist Party was founded 100 years ago today. One of its most remarkable early militants was Francesco Misiano — a keen internationalist who fought gun in hand in the German Revolution before becoming a leading light of Soviet cinema.
Founded 100 years ago today, the Italian Communist Party fought its most famous battles in the country's Northern industrial heartlands. But in the Southern city of Naples, it had to tailor its activity to a more complex reality — a city whose large informal economy reflected the deep inequalities on which the Italian state was founded.
Joe Biden has issued a raft of executive orders that are surprisingly progressive. But we know who to thank: the organized left, which has helped transform US politics.
The United Auto Workers has fallen far from its postwar glory as the most important union in America. Flagrant leadership corruption has made things worse. But a recent settlement with the Justice Department opens up the possibility of democratizing the union, writes labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein.
In the end, Donald Trump didn't destroy the American political system. He showed the world how corrupt, undemocratic, and reactionary it already was.
Today, on Inauguration Day, we shouldn’t forget that the business class has long stoked fears of democracy — and bankrolled the conservative movement that gave us the events of January 6.
Donald Trump won the presidency claiming he was a radical opponent of the political establishment. That was always a lie — and his four years in the White House revealed he was just another reactionary, capitalist billionaire.
Joe Biden will likely govern to the left of Barack Obama. But his willingness to spend has everything to do with capital’s relaxation of deficit worries — and where capital says “no,” no one should expect Biden to say “yes.”