Socialists and populists have found plenty to disagree about over the years, from private property to trust-busting. But their shared commitment to fighting corporate power often brought them together — and it should today, too.
A $1,000 a month check won’t cut it, but there’s a real democratic socialist response to automation that could make us all happier and give everyone more leisure time.
Solving the ecological crisis requires a mass movement to take on hugely powerful industries. Yet environmentalism’s base in the professional-managerial class and focus on consumption has little chance of attracting working-class support.
In the United States, the Populist tradition has always defined left-wing and egalitarian politics, unfairly maligned by bosses and intellectuals alike.
The grassroots group Momentum was an instrumental campaigning force for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party during the 2017 election. Now the group is bigger and stronger, and preparing for victory next month.
This year marks a century since the First Red Scare, which decimated the ranks of the US left. One of the worst episodes was the Centralia incident — where a reactionary mob tortured and killed a group of IWW members to drive them out of the Washington town.
The British Labour Party botched its response to false allegations of rampant antisemitism among the party membership. Left-wing movements in other countries can’t make the same mistake.
Coronavirus has emphasized a truth we knew before the pandemic: capitalist food systems are irrational and don’t serve human needs. Socialists have to demand a food system based on social and ecological needs — one that can provide food for all.
A few weeks ago, we had a democratic-socialist presidential campaign with several million donors and over a thousand-person staff. Today, we have no mass organization to carry on the struggle. We can change that — but only with Bernie’s help.
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.