One of France’s leading socialists, Jean Jaurès was assassinated just days before the outbreak of World War I. An impassioned defender of working-class internationalism, his murder signaled Europe’s descent into war.
Aung San Suu Kyi's electoral victory could bring political reform to Myanmar. Economic justice is another story.
Today marks 60 years since Park Chung-hee’s coup installed military rule in South Korea. His regime is credited with bringing the country rapid economic growth — but its industrial success was built on the massacre of labor activists and the systematic suppression of workers’ basic rights.
In 1831, slaves in Jamaica took up arms against murderous exploitation by the island’s plantation owners. Their courageous rebellion, at the halfway point between Haiti’s revolution and the US Civil War, was a landmark in the battle for slave emancipation.
Born in Trinidad, George Padmore became a key organizer of Pan-African anti-colonial networks. Strongly influenced by Marxism, Padmore always stressed that national independence should lead to social liberation instead of just replacing one flag with another.
Historian Jairus Banaji has developed a highly original perspective on the history of capitalism that stresses the importance of commercial capital. His work is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how the global economic system took shape.
Journalist Sylvain Cypel grew up in a labor Zionist family and served in the Israeli military before becoming disillusioned. In an interview, he speaks about Israel’s unsparing war in Gaza and what it will take to end the occupation.
Ayn Rand believed that the path to social harmony ran through the inferior masses’ acceptance of brutal rule by their natural superiors. Her perspective was wrong, and its implications were just as grim and nasty as her atrocious personality.
A look back at the subjection of Tasmania shows that while Israel’s settler colonialism is brutal, it’s hardly without precedent.
The United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital as part of its decades-long support of Israeli colonialism.
Throughout the Cold War, Moscow-backed bodies like the Afro-Asian Writers' Association and the Tashkent Film Festival brought writers and filmmakers from across the Third World to the USSR. Their exchanges with their Eastern Bloc counterparts reflected the ambitions and limits of Soviet internationalism.
In April 1947, Paul Robeson, the outspoken leftist artist and singer, was barred from performing in Peoria, Illinois. The repressive move, though fought by a radical labor union of black and white workers, prefigured the Red Scare that would soon envelop the country.
Restoring big ideas.
However distorted and exaggerated, antisemitism is a real current in France that needs to be confronted.
Some notes on a recent controversy.
Writers in the US must embrace traditions of radical dissent — not American exceptionalism — if they want to resist Trump.
Though not unblemished, socialists in the United States have a record in confronting black oppression that is unmatched by other political traditions.
In the United States, one of the twentieth century’s most prolific butchers died as he lived — beloved by the rich and powerful, regardless of their partisan affiliation.
Critics claim democratic socialism is pie-in-the-sky idealism. But socialists have always been at the core of reform struggles.