Ronald Suny has given us the best picture to date of Stalin’s path to the October Revolution. But the story of the future dictator’s early life doesn’t explain the rise of Stalinism. The key developments and choices that produced that system came after the Bolsheviks took power.
Governor Andrew Cuomo offered blanket immunity from prosecution for negligent nursing home executives last year. Now those who lost love ones during the pandemic thanks to those executives' greed have nowhere to turn. Those who put profit over human life — and Cuomo — need to be held responsible.
Since the 1990s, workers in the Basque Country have gone on strike more than twice as often as any other workforce in Europe. The Basque unions insist that we have to fight for our interests — a strike-fund-centered strategy that has won huge victories even in the age of austerity.
For years, Germany has imported thousands of underpaid workers from Eastern Europe, as the EU's richest country seeks to solve its care crisis on the cheap. Now, a Bulgarian care worker and her trade union are taking that model to court — hoping to abolish the sector's notoriously exploitative practices.
Dozens of congresspeople are pressing Vice President Kamala Harris to ignore the Senate parliamentarian and fulfill her $15 minimum wage promise. The Biden administration has no one to blame but themselves for inaction.
At its high point, the Communist Party of Australia united thousands of working-class militants in a struggle to transform the world around them. These everyday communists were brave, flawed, and sometimes heroic.
Under capitalism, automation destroys jobs. In a socialist society, it could free us from work and offer untold leisure to all.
The Russian Revolution enthused anti-colonial movements around the world, fueling hopes that the European empires could be overthrown. But the revolt against empire was also fundamental to Lenin's own strategy, as he worked to unite workers’ revolts in the metropoles with national struggles to end colonial exploitation.
Joe Biden’s statement yesterday about the Amazon union drive in Alabama hit pro-labor notes. But he’ll have to back up his rhetoric with concrete action: Biden must fight to pass the PRO Act.
In a country that is already home to some of the worst restrictions on women’s rights, the Honduran Congress voted last month to lock in its bans on abortion and gay marriage, making them almost impossible to overturn. It’s a reminder that, as the feminist green tide washes over much of Latin America, there is still much work to be done.
President Biden’s immigration reform proposal at least rhetorically acknowledges the pain inflicted by existing US policy. But it continues to paint immigrants as criminals, instead of workers responding to labor demands and looking for a better life. We should fight for something better.
The Civil War and Reconstruction–era Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens understood far better than most of his contemporaries that fully uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights — first the right of some human beings to own others, but also beyond it.