This day in 1945, Nazi Germany finally surrendered. Faced with revisionist attempts to claim the war was a struggle between “twin totalitarianisms,” we should remember the working-class partisans who resisted the fascist violence — and the better world they fought to build.
Juggalos, the intense Insane Clown Posse fanbase, have long been targeted by police, including in a dubious federal investigation under the legacy of a Red Scare law. The group’s crime, it seems, is its very existence as a visible working-class counterculture.
Deindustrialized areas that were once bastions of working-class politics are now playgrounds of the revanchist right.
The slow, decades-long destruction of the US unemployment insurance system has resulted in more than just personal hardship for millions of workers — it has further weakened the fighting strength of the whole working class. The solution is to fully federalize it.
Over the past 40 years, working-class parties have slid rightward toward neoliberalism and workers have increasingly dropped out of the political process.
Growing up in the US, I admired France’s secular vision of social democracy. But teaching in Lyon’s working-class suburbs taught me that, in practice, laïcité is a rallying cry for a Right desperate to exclude Muslims from public life.
The defeat of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and the ascension of Joe Biden and Keir Starmer hasn’t just meant the defeat of domestic working-class politics — it’s meant the defeat of an egalitarian internationalism that opposes war and imperialism.
Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, has issued a decree with over 350 reforms tearing up labor rights and privatizing industries. The “shock therapy” plan marks a dangerous expansion of the president’s powers — but it also faces fierce opposition.
With sexist dress codes and personal harassment from the New York governor himself, women in Andrew Cuomo’s office found themselves facing one of the most pervasive forms of exploitation in the lives of working-class women: the boss’s attempt to control their bodies.
US reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar just introduced the End Child Poverty Act, which would set up a universal child benefit. It’s a major improvement on previous proposals to help poor and working-class families — and would instantly slash child poverty.
In the 1930s and ’40s, Langston Hughes wrote poetic tributes to the working class and socialist leaders worldwide. Some critics allege he abandoned his principles later in life, but they ignore the role of McCarthyist oppression — and Hughes’s creative resistance to it.
Pandemic measures like the stimulus temporarily helped and empowered working-class and vulnerable people. And that’s quickly becoming a problem for an economy based on their hyper-exploitation.
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.
Capitalism imposes massive suffering on the poor and working class. But even the detestable superrich are being made miserable by the sadistic things market competition implores them to do to the rest of us.
Some working-class anthems are sung to the tunes of Christian hymns.
Lamar Johnson’s 1995 murder conviction was overturned on Tuesday — but only after he spent most of his life in jail. The circumstances of his wrongful conviction reflect an American justice system quick to condemn working-class men of color.
Since becoming Unidas Podemos leader last April, Spanish labor minister Yolanda Díaz has broken the populist party out of its rut. She’s won concrete gains for organized labor through her government post — showing how the Left can reconnect with the working class.
Four months into his term, Argentina’s “anarcho-capitalist” president Javier Milei has drastically slashed public spending and sought to suppress wages. It’s a disaster for the country’s working class and its public institutions of research and learning.
Barbara Madeloni's presidency of the Massachusetts Teachers Association has come to an end. Her tenure offers lessons for reformers who want their unions to fight for the entire working class.
The promise of $2,000 survival checks helped the Democrats gain control of the Senate. They should send them out immediately, and absorb the lesson of this election: when Republicans are forced to confront bold proposals to help the broad working-class majority, they lose.