For over a decade, Édouard Louis has been one of France’s most perceptive writers on his country’s working class. But as he has drifted away from this milieu, he has swapped clear-eyed analysis for cliché-ridden romanticization of the suffering poor.
Douglas Stuart’s debut novel, Shuggie Bain, richly conveys the harshness of life in Thatcher-era Scotland. Yet with its focus on the resilience of working-class women, this love letter to Glasgow is anything but misery-lit.
We caught up with Candi CdeBaca, a democratic socialist on Denver’s city council who took on the city’s for-profit prison system and won. She spoke to us about growing up working class and becoming a socialist: “When I got to college, I really recognized that the game was rigged.”
The Belgian Communist leader Julien Lahaut was murdered on this day in 1950. The circumstances of his assassination were hushed up for decades — but it was quickly clear that he was killed because he was a powerful leader for his class.
Pat Carta was part of a generation of workers and organizers whose immense knowledge about overcoming fear to build class consciousness and worker power will never be found in a book.
In a speech to United Auto Workers members on Wednesday, Shawn Fain laid into the Big Three, explained the UAW's new “stand-up strike,” and invoked the Bible to declare their battle a righteous fight for justice. We print his prepared remarks here in full.
In 1872, Friedrich Engels wrote The Housing Question, tying the working class’s perpetual housing crisis to the free market in Victorian England. The century and a half of housing crises since have proved Engels correct.
As Melbourne’s October council elections approach, the Victorian Socialists are stepping up their fight against neoliberalism — by fielding an unprecedented slate of 19 candidates, across five municipalities.
Abortion was illegal in Weimar Germany — and poor women were most often punished for breaking the law. The fight for legalization was also a struggle for the justice reform and welfare measures that would truly empower working-class women.
Rich parents bribing their kids' way into elite schools shows how college admissions is anything but a meritocracy. But the flipside is how poor and working-class kids face barrier after barrier to attending higher education at all, as this advisor to first-generation college students explains.
Faced with France’s snap elections, the left-wing parties built an alliance in record time. But to defeat Marine Le Pen, sounding the alarm about the far right won’t suffice. The Left will need to offer a positive vision for working-class France.
From Bob and Doug McKenzie to the Trailer Park Boys, the Canadian hoser is an integral part of the country’s cultural landscape. The hoser is also a working-class emblem, whose uncertain fortune in the face of economic downturns reflects the wider experience of Canadian workers.
We talked to four tenant organizers about how to build working-class movements for housing justice.
While the armed forces carry out the mission of US imperialism, millions of working people sit at the heart of that machine, drawn to become soldiers by the promise of economic stability. A Left looking to rebuild links with the working class can’t avoid them.
A burst of enthusiasm among the membership has given Germany’s socialist party Die Linke what might be its last chance at renewal. But becoming a party of the working class will take a lot more than a last-minute turnaround at the polls.
What have three decades of market reforms meant for the world’s largest working class?
Democratic Socialists of America is pushing for the PRO Act as part of its climate strategy — because it realizes that rebuilding working-class power is crucial to confronting the climate crisis.
Labor is struggling with how to build international working-class power. The United Electrical Workers offer a model of just that.
The story of how America’s imperial quest for labor shaped the hemisphere’s working class.
As the UK Labour Party aims to organize its forgotten heartlands, it can learn from a rich history of socialist culture in working-class communities.