The nation’s original failure to “build back better” was Reconstruction, the attempt to radically remake society in the wake of the Civil War. Then as now, the most powerful people in the country went out of their way to maintain the status quo.
Across England, the most successful businesses in world football grow ever richer — while long-established community clubs from Bury to Bolton and Wigan slowly die in their shadows. Big capitalists are transforming the sport we love for the worse.
Will Sommer, author of the new book Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, explains where QAnon came from, why it isn’t going away anytime soon, and how material deprivation helps drive conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk drew attention recently for announcing the name of his and Grimes's new baby, X Æ A-12. But what’s more disturbing about Musk is the anti-democratic, quasi-eugenicist views that he and other tech elites espouse.
Long a leader of Germany’s left party Die Linke, Sahra Wagenknecht looks set on creating her own rival party. She accuses the Left of abandoning its historic base — but her appeal to conservative values divides the working class rather than uniting it.
Bernie Sanders made the slogan “fight for that person you don’t even know” central to his 2020 campaign. Now that Sanders’s campaign is finished, we shouldn’t abandon that broad ethic of solidarity.
The feminist movement in Chile is one of the strongest in the world, last month bringing millions of women into the streets for International Women’s Day. Building on the mass protests that erupted in October, their movement is only growing bolder, and articulating meaningful alternatives to the country’s neoliberal order.
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 question isn’t whether the mainstream economic consensus on inflation is right or wrong. It’s clearly wrong. The question is, can we do anything about it?
The Italian president has appointed former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi to form a "nonpolitical" government. In fact, this is the latest in a string of technocratic administrations designed to impose unpopular austerity measures — a deeply ideological program that Italians have never voted for.
The already Herculean task of parenting in normal times has now become impossible under coronavirus. Parents are going insane — and it’s made worse by the United States’ complete lack of basic social programs supporting them.
The “UBI” ideas being thrown around as a response to the coronavirus are, in many cases, neither universal, basic, nor an income. But they do show how much the Left has shifted what’s considered possible over the past decade.
The pandemic has been taking the existing injustices of capitalism and exaggerating them to the point of cartoonishness. A case in point is a recent study that finds Wall Street bonuses have grown by more than 1,200% since the 1980s — while the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in over a decade.
US leaders are split between a hard right that would happily sacrifice millions of lives to let businesses keep operating and a liberal center that seems unable to merge the goals of stemming the pandemic and meeting the economic needs of Americans whose livelihoods have been disrupted by it. The truth is, fixing one means fixing the other.
The United States is not a failed state — just ask any American capitalist. But we desperately need something better for everyone else.
In recent years, the air of optimism surrounding the European Union has been replaced by continual crisis management. Yet the pandemic, the financial crisis, and Brexit have all spurred even further integration — and the Left lacks a coherent response.
Over the past few months, pharma giants like Pfizer and Moderna have become household names and fodder for affectionate memes. But their prominence reflects how the market has cannibalized science and public health during a global crisis. Big pharma still is not your friend.
Despite its outcome, this week’s NBA wildcat strike provided a crucial lesson for all of us: we have to disrupt owners’ profits and engage in collective action if we have any hope of making change.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos encouraged his white-collar workers to cancel meetings for Juneteenth and “reflect and support each other.” An Amazon warehouse worker fired after organizing for workplace protections thinks that’s “a bunch of bullshit.”