Several tensions run deep in Russian society: Politics are decided by elections without democracy. A growing number of Russian billionaires have outlandish wealth but no political power. And Putin is a populist without the people.
Faced with protests for opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s release, the Russian left is torn over whether to join a movement which raises no general social demands. Navalny’s personalized clash with Putin highlights the present hollowness of Russian democracy.
The Western sanctions against Russia are widely being called an unprecedented move. But the major mechanism they use has been road-tested throughout a decade of eurozone crisis — and threatens economic devastation far beyond Russian elites alone.
Last night, Joe Biden sounded like he was about to declare World War III. He won’t, thankfully — but he also won’t do much for working people.
Last fall, Armenia was devastated by a six-week war with its neighbor Azerbaijan, ending in the deployment of Russian peacekeepers across the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet the "peace agreement" has done nothing to resolve the deeper reasons for the conflict, in the ethno-nationalist strife which has simmered since the fall of the USSR.
Since the end of free movement within the EU, Britain's farms have relied on seasonal migrants allowed into the country for just a few months at a time. Denied almost any possibility to change jobs, their situation shows how bosses can use visa rules to blackmail a pliant workforce into swallowing the most degrading conditions.
You wouldn't know it from the belligerent media coverage, but so far, despite his record as a tough-talking anti-Russia hawk, Joe Biden has been taking US policy toward Moscow in a surprisingly reasonable direction.
The Nazis reserved two fates for the Soviet Union's people: slavery or extermination. The outside world still hasn’t fully registered the scale of the horrific crimes unleashed by the Nazis' invasion of the Soviet Union on this day in 1941.
Ever since Amazon arrived in Poland in 2014, the country has been a laboratory for the company's strategy of pitting workers of different nations against one another. We spoke with Polish shop-floor activists who are organizing Amazon workers for a global fightback.
The FBI has quietly revealed further evidence of Saudi government complicity in the September 11 attacks — and nothing’s happened.
Emmanuel Macron won Sunday’s French election with the weakest popular vote for any winner since 1969. But the once “progressive-neoliberal” president has won over the old bourgeois right — the social force whose interests his second term will best serve.
Despite four decades of imperial interventions, the United States was defeated in Afghanistan. Tariq Ali explains the long history of meddling in Afghanistan — and why the US's defeat will set back the broader project of American military supremacy.
The world needs new security arrangements to keep the peace. American "leadership" — the global dominance sought by the US national security establishment — is no substitute for those arrangements.
The leading thinkers of Marxism stressed how important it was to govern in partnership with the peasantry. When communist states imposed collectivization by force, the results were disastrous.
The techniques Russian billionaires use to avoid taxes and hide their wealth are the same ones American billionaires use. In fact, they often execute them with the help of the same Western companies.
Ahead of the French presidential election, Emmanuel Macron’s poll lead has shrunk to almost zero. After years of battering France with unpopular reforms, even the call to rally against the far right is producing diminishing returns.
Serious consideration of the archaeological record puts to bed the myth that human history follows an evolutionary arc from simple and egalitarian to complex and hierarchical, challenging the assumption that democracy can work in small groups while scaling up requires domination.
French president Emmanuel Macron has renewed calls for the creation of a joint EU army. The proposal smacks of a desperate attempt to reverse the old European powers’ declining influence in global politics.
The Pentagon budget, now up to nearly $800 billion, is a monument to waste and profligacy. If we want to tackle the major crises of our times, like climate change and global inequality, we can’t afford to keep showering the military with money.
Opera houses and literature departments have dropped works by Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky. Yuri Gagarin’s name has been erased by a space exploration nonprofit. It’s all part of a wartime anti-Russia frenzy that is astonishingly provincial and foolish.