There was nothing J. Edgar Hoover feared more than a charismatic black radical who could inspire the oppressed to fight back. And that’s why, according to a compelling new series, the FBI had its fingerprints all over Malcolm X’s murder.
The US is remarkable for its extreme relationship to drugs, marked by a love affair with psychoactive substances of all kinds and also draconian efforts to curtail drug use. That relationship has roots in America’s particularly virulent strain of capitalism.
Of all the internal controversies Occupy generated, the one over whether the movement should adopt specific demands may have been the most significant.
The question is never if resistance will appear, but when. For this generation, Ferguson answered that question.
A historian debunks liberal myths about racism, the New Deal, and why the Democrats moved right.
Even before Trump, the US had begun outsourcing key elements of immigration enforcement to Mexico.
On the twentieth anniversary of New Labor Forum, Steve Fraser reflects on organized labor’s hopes and disappointments over the last two decades.
How Students for a Democratic Society went from building a mass movement to embracing the politics of self-destruction.
Defenders of capitalism say that socialism will squelch minority rights. But the only minority groups we seek to unseat are those who trample the rights of others.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the “strike that changed New York,” the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers strikes have much to teach us about building a strong anti-racist labor movement made up of both workers and community members.
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.
If we want to fight capitalism, the US left has to figure out how to confront US empire. Generations of internationalist struggles in Latin America can help us do just that.
For black meatpacking workers, multiracial class politics was the path to economic and social advancement.
This month, Association of Flight Attendants union president Sara Nelson addressed over 1,000 delegates at the Democratic Socialists of America convention. Here's what she had to say about the labor movement's power to defeat bigotry, the proud legacy of democratic socialists, and why solidarity is the "greatest force for good in human history."
A. Philip Randolph called for a March on Washington to force President Roosevelt to abolish Jim Crow in the war effort, and shaped the trajectory of the postwar left.
On the politics of professional-class anxiety.
The Bernie Sanders campaign is nothing less than the promise to fulfill a thwarted but long-cherished American dream: a society where the wealthy and powerful no longer dominate our lives.
The great black freedom struggles of the past have been joined by many white people — not just out of a sense of moral obligation or sympathy for the oppressed, but out of a sense of shared interest and a desire for collective liberation. That spirit of solidarity should be central to anti-racist struggle today.
On Medicare for All, the Left has won the battle of ideas. But that’s not enough, as the DNC’s rejection of M4A shows. We have to get serious about overcoming the entrenched economic and political power that is stopping us from having free public health care for everyone.
Organizer, lawyer, professor, priest — Pauli Murray held many titles throughout her life. But as a black lesbian with a burning hatred of oppression, her goal was always the same: to challenge discrimination and topple the brutal hierarchies of US society.