The legendary nonviolence theorist Gene Sharp wasn’t just a lonely scholar studying how political change happens. He was a Cold War defense intellectual whose ideas left a profound imprint on the way America wields power in the world.
So far in the Democratic primary, unions have been riding the fence. But they could play the decisive factor in Bernie Sanders’s efforts to defeat the Democratic Party establishment, oust Donald Trump, and win transformative social change.
Our conceptions of black politics today are often monolithic and juxtaposed as separate from or even against democratic-socialist politics. But 75 years ago, black leaders and activists shared a broad consensus around the importance of the labor movement and multiracial class organizing for black liberation.
The movement for Aboriginal self-determination has a rich history, steeped in the internationalism of anti-colonial struggles and black liberation movements throughout the world. We shouldn’t ignore it.
Jeff Bezos is donating billions of dollars through his new foundation. But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argues, we need to redistribute his power, not just his wealth.
The Root’s laughable rankings of the Democratic candidates on their approach to black issues — assembled by an anonymous panel of experts — show just how out of touch many pundits are with the actually existing black electorate.
The New Atheists had reactionary politics and a distorted view of science, but they owe their demise to a more fundamental flaw in their ideology: religion can’t explain all the world’s problems.
Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism has always centered on improving the lives of working-class people and exposing how exploitation by the rich robs them of the opportunity to live dignified lives. Corporate Democrats who continue to ignore or undermine this agenda are putting themselves, the country, and the world in great peril.
The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history — destroying untold millions of lives and families in just a few decades. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created in the first place, and how we can finally dismantle it.
People tend not to rebel against their oppressors, because the cost is simply too high. But sometimes they do, overcoming extraordinary odds — and understanding how and why rebellions like the Civil Rights Movement happen is crucial for socialists today.
In a speech announcing the end of his candidacy, Bernie Sanders was defiant, saying that “together, we have transformed American consciousness as to what kind of country we can become.” We reprint the address here in full.
Bernie Sanders took socialism out of the margins and into the American mainstream for the first time in generations. His contributions to the struggle for a better world cannot be overstated.
Earlier this month, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina voted to unionize. Taking place in one of the most anti-union states in the country, and challenging a bitterly anti-labor employer, the campaign is a monumental victory for labor.
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.
In the years immediately following World War II, the movement for black equality, rooted in the militancy of black workers, was making massive strides. The McCarthyist anticommunist campaign of the late 1940s dealt a hammer blow to that project, attacking its unions and scattering its activists, ultimately narrowing the ambitions of the black freedom movement.
The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a fresh round of soul-searching in establishment media outlets about the problems of urban America. Unless we address the root cause of those problems in the structure of our economic system, we’ll never be able to solve them.
In the 1960s, a nun in California decided to make contemporary art — and managed to serve both the Vatican and the anti–Vietnam War movement in the process.
Don't let opponents of the current racial justice protests fool you by citing public opinion polls — such polls often showed the majority of American opposed to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Public opinion is not immovable through protest.
Today’s protests for racial justice are strikingly multiracial. Civil rights organizers have historically considered this an asset and often used it creatively and strategically to their advantage, as they did during the Freedom Rides through the American South in 1961.
The CIA has operated above the law and resisted accountability throughout the century, and now we find out it’s been operating an illegal domestic spying program for years.