On June 16, 1918, Eugene Debs gave the anti-war speech that would soon send him to prison. His arrest sparked a nationwide movement to secure his release — and forced the government to finally recognize the free speech rights of wartime dissenters.
Before being sent to prison for speaking out against World War I, Eugene Debs delivered a defiant speech to the court that decried the ills of capitalism, held out the democratic promise of socialism, and declared, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” We reprint it here in full.
This summer, military recruiters continue focusing their efforts on twenty-three American cities with large numbers of black and Latino young people. As coronavirus drives thousands into unemployment, the Pentagon is developing bizarre neighborhood profiles and trolling social media to boost their enlistment numbers.
Trump just changed the rules to let Wall Street’s most predatory industry get its hands on hundreds of billions of dollars of ordinary workers’ retirement savings. Now his friends in private equity are celebrating.
Despite the obvious parallels with coronavirus shutdowns, states still show little determination to put in place the measures we’ll need to deal with the climate emergency. For Andreas Malm, we need to stop seeing climate change as a problem for the future — and use state power now to impose a drastic reordering of our economies.
Before smartphones, police violence went mostly unseen — but far more violent interactions are never captured on film. The problem of racist policing won’t be solved by more visibility.
A new book with fresh details about Jeffrey Epstein — his life, death, and relationship with Bill Clinton — reminds us that Epstein’s crimes couldn’t have happened without a system that allowed him to hoard unlimited wealth.
With millions of people ordering basic necessities direct to their homes, the pandemic has massively strengthened big distributors like FedEx and Amazon. But while official discourse celebrates delivery drivers as “heroes,” the logistics firms themselves have used the crisis to undermine workers’ most basic rights.
How much do black lives matter to America’s leading corporations? Not enough to put any real money on the table for their workers.
For centuries, politics on the rock of Gibraltar has been dominated by the imperialist rivalry between Britain and Spain. But faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, communities built solidarity across the disputed border — insisting that the demands of public healthcare stood above the battle for flags and territory.
Mutual aid networks cropped up all over the United States at the start of the lockdown, helping communities organize themselves in the absence of adequate state support. Those projects have a deep history in the US, especially within early organized labor.
Today is International Children’s Day. To celebrate, we spoke to beloved children’s singer Raffi about nurturing the creativity and sense of play of children, his support for Bernie Sanders, organizing against climate change and for racial justice, and how we can create a society in which we “admire and respect the young child as a whole person.”