Unions have been at the forefront of almost every progressive policy advance for a century. So why are AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten denouncing Medicare for All by parroting talking points crafted by health care industry lobbyists?
What was the mass strike and what would a successful one look like today?
Robert Brenner and Bhaskar Sunkara on how the Left can seize the momentum and build a majority.
It’s fashionable to claim that the “rise of the robots” or the “disappearance of work” have changed everything about labor in the twenty-first century. But when it comes to extracting profit from workers, today’s era of ruthless capitalism is fundamentally the same as those of the past.
E. P. Thompson brilliantly chronicled the ravages of early capitalism — and the fierce resistance it provoked.
Voters quite simply do not like the Democrats. The Democratic Party brand is complete trash. Although the structural barriers to a break from the Dems are real, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Too often, the militant, radical history of Mexican American workers is omitted or forgotten. But from resisting racist exclusion to building CIO unions in the 1930s, Mexican American workers have been central to left-wing politics in the United States.
During the Great Depression, radicals played key roles in helping organize the worker upsurges that led to the New Deal’s pro-worker policies. We can do the same today in fighting back against the economic misery and unsafe working conditions of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Bernie Sanders campaign advanced left politics in the US by leaps and bounds. But the campaign could have gone further if it had made the kind of organizing that won states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada central to the campaign’s operations throughout the country.
Over the past century, the US government repeatedly disrupted leftist movements and supported or carried out coups around the world — aided by American labor leaders. A full reckoning with the AFL-CIO’s collaboration with US imperialism can help us forge a truly internationalist, left-wing unionism in the twenty-first century.
Racism and xenophobia are a part of why so many ordinary workers were won over to Donald Trump, but that's far from the whole story. A careful study breaks down how Trump spoke to economic grievances and personal experiences.
In the ten years since Katrina, New Orleans has been remade into a neoliberal playground for young entrepreneurs.
British sociologist Simon Clarke was one of the most sophisticated analysts of how and why capitalist systems descend into crisis. Clarke’s work on the contradictions of capitalism is a valuable guide as we face a new era of global economic turmoil.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone chronicled the growing loneliness and isolation of wealthy societies. Twenty years later, the problem is far worse than he could have imagined.
A new book torpedoes the familiar notion that 19th-century US socialists were indifferent toward race. While flawed, the “interracial internationalism” they espoused should be recognized as part of early socialism’s legacy.
Mass movements outside the Labour Party brought Jeremy Corbyn to power within it. What will it now take to transform British society?
The Democratic Unionist Party supported the Leave campaign, but they’ve been the big losers from Boris Johnson’s Brexit. The union with Britain isn’t in danger yet, but the DUP now faces the prospect of being overtaken by Sinn Féin in this year’s election.
British Marxist Bob Jessop on David Cameron, New Labour, and the best way to take on global capitalism.
In 1981, Lula da Silva spoke to the first Brazilian Workers’ Party convention about his country’s path to democratic socialism. Ahead of the second round of Brazil’s presidential election later this month, we reproduce his speech here.
Greece’s general election handed a huge victory to the conservative New Democracy, as Syriza shed one-third of its support. With Alexis Tsipras’s party crushing any hope of an alternative to austerity, voters reached for right-wingers promising stability.