The elite media loves to obsess about the Ivy Leagues. But great public colleges like the City University of New York, once dubbed the Harvard of the proletariat, are far more relevant to most people — and infinitely better at serving the working class.
The Teamsters’ refusal to endorse Kamala Harris underlines the need for the labor movement to develop a coherent political appeal to win its members over, on terms that are relevant to the vast majority of the working class.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain explains his union’s position on tariffs and argues that we need a political movement that puts working-class people first to address the current political crisis in the US.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Karl Marx analyzes revolution and reaction in mid-19th-century France to blistering effect. His appraisals offer enduring lessons on revolution, class dynamics, and the perpetual tussle with the bonds of history.
Marxist historians in Britain — like E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm — sparked a revolution in understanding the role of working people in making history. Their work is still fresh and vibrant today.
Rebuilding the Left will require drawing on socialist-feminist traditions.
Joan C. Williams argues that progressives and leftists aren’t doomed to keep losing working-class voters — if they can stop dismissing the cultural principles that grant average Americans’ lives dignity.
The European far right has cynically appropriated left-wing and pro-worker talking points for its own purposes.
The socialist project is about more than just winning a nicer version of capitalism.
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the American working class faced a paradox: workers were told they were “essential” and touted as “heroes,” yet they were often treated as sacrificial lambs.
By calling for the enfranchisement of the incarcerated, Bernie Sanders is carrying on a long and venerable socialist tradition of fighting for the universal right to vote.
UK Labour MP and potential party leader Rebecca Long Bailey has spent her life immersed in Salford and its working-class life. The right-wing British press wants to undermine those politics by attacking the city. But Salford’s history reflects the best of British working-class culture.
With Ben Affleck playing a lovable bartender and surrogate father, The Tender Bar has its charms, but it stalls out with familiar tropes about working-class kids getting the hell out of the old neighborhood.
Liberal Republicanism’s collapse didn’t spring from some loss of decency in an age of polarization, but from the transformation of class struggle in America.
Class dealignment perspectives tend to overstate the extent to which center-left parties can boost their fortunes today through a strict focus on pocketbook issues.
Class struggle and running for office often pull in opposite directions. But we can’t build a socialist politics without navigating those waters.
With a vacuous social vision, economics confronts the “return of the social question” woefully unprepared.
Most proposals to revive the labor movement focus on expanding labor’s rights. But the “rights” framework hampers working-class solidarity and makes unions subordinate to the state. To build working-class power, we should focus instead on labor freedoms.
E. P. Thompson brilliantly chronicled the ravages of early capitalism — and the fierce resistance it provoked.
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth captures the revolutionary possibilities of decolonization. Yet the book has been marred by a misreading that ignores Fanon’s socialism and class analysis, and turns the great thinker into a prophet of violence.