Liberal pundits argue that Bernie Sanders's policies were too radical for “ordinary Americans.” But primary voters are much richer than the average voter in the general. Among working-class Americans, ideas like Medicare for All are becoming common sense.
Hurricanes, pandemics, and droughts are acts of God. Private markets in housing, health care, and food — and the resulting deaths — are not.
The Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population in just a few years. But the peasants and laborers who survived wielded newfound power over their masters.
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.
The Bernie Sanders campaign advanced left politics in the US by leaps and bounds. But the campaign could have gone further if it had made the kind of organizing that won states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada central to the campaign’s operations throughout the country.
Left governments in Latin America have successfully nationalized much of the mining sector, reclaiming foreign profits for social spending. The next step is to get beyond extraction altogether, taking cues from indigenous movements that have long been fighting for a green future.
Inspired by the George Floyd protests, thousands have demonstrated in France against the brutality and racism of their country’s police — a force shaped by the crime of French colonialism.
Britpop is often dismissed as an embarrassing, retrograde moment in British culture. But at its best, it hinted at what might have happened if the working class had managed to regain its sense of power and pride after the defeats of the 1980s.
We need high-quality, entertaining class-struggle television. The BBC’s period drama The Mill, which was ahead of its time when it debuted in 2013, shows us how it’s done.
Offering a welcome rejoinder to many neoliberal orthodoxies, French economist Thomas Piketty has established himself as a sharp critic of growing inequality. But when he presents these ills just as a result of wrong choices, he ends up erasing the realities of class struggle — leaving him unable to explain how neoliberalism imposes its power.
Thirty years since German reunification, the “new states” from the former East still suffer the effects of mass deindustrialization and emigration. But if reunification hasn't delivered the promises of 1990, socialists should recognize why most East Germans didn't defend the old system — and why welfare and public services aren’t enough to build a viable socialist society.
In the stiflingly reactionary cultural atmosphere of postwar America, most filmmakers didn’t talk much about class. But there was one significant exception: film noir was the most class-conscious genre of motion picture America has ever produced.
Karl Marx celebrated liberalism’s achievements, such as freedom of the press, while excoriating its fidelity to private property rights. We can hold the same tension in our minds — fiercely opposing capitalism while fighting to make liberal rights real through socialist transformation.
Democrats finally pressed Amy Coney Barrett to commit to recuse herself from oil company cases. In response, she is now refusing — and reiterating her absurd assertion that climate science is “controversial.”
Everyone knows the desperate need to stop fossil fuel extraction immediately to avoid climate catastrophe. But that hasn’t stopped a Trump-appointed financial regulator from trying to force banks to continue financing fossil fuel projects.
Cyberpunk once stood out as a vital genre of anti-capitalist fiction. Today, it’s been reduced to a cool retro aesthetic easily appropriated by the world’s second-richest man to market ugly Blade Runner–inspired trucks to nostalgia-driven Gen Xers.
Australian PM Scott Morrison is often compared to Donald Trump. Morrison is certainly a race-baiter who serves the rich, but his brand of reheated “populism” borrows far more from Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and former PM John Howard. Unfortunately, it’s not dead yet.
Arthur Rosenberg was a leading figure in Germany’s Communist movement and a brilliant Marxist historian. Rosenberg’s penetrating analysis of far-right movements, produced in exile after the Nazis seized power, is as relevant as ever today.
After the fall of the USSR, most observers expected Cuba to follow in its wake. But the Cuban system has now lasted for 30 years since the Soviet collapse. To explain its persistence, we need to drop Cold War stereotypes and look at the Cuban experience in its own right.
Cyberpunk once stood out as a vital genre of anti-capitalist fiction. Today, it’s been reduced to a cool retro aesthetic easily appropriated by the world’s second-richest man to market ugly Blade Runner–inspired trucks to nostalgia-drenched Gen Xers.