From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists, leftists have regarded Lincoln as a prolabor hero who played a crucial role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as part of the great radical democratic tradition.
A newly translated memoir takes us inside the Jewish Labor Bund's fight for survival and social transformation in 1930s Poland.
The New Deal brought a generation of leftists into the federal government. But Red Scare anti-communists purged these radical bureaucrats or forced their politics rightward — blocking more far-reaching reform and distorting our understanding of the New Deal.
Iran has exploded in protest following the death of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman detained by “morality police.” We spoke with an Iranian leftist about the mass mobilization and why Western meddling undermines the cause of Iranian democracy.
When the labor movement collapsed, labor journalism collapsed with it. Today labor journalism is making a curious comeback. But without a truly revived labor movement, the labor beat will remain marginal to big media.
Fifty years ago, Studs Terkel documented American workers’ complex inner lives at a pivotal moment of social transformation. His interviews in Working revealed both the dignity and degradation of work, capturing a world on the cusp of profound change.
The late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm recounts the origins of International Workers' Day. "The priests have their festivals," announced a 1891 May Day broadsheet, "the Moderates have their festivals. The First of May is the Festival of the workers of the entire world."
In December’s election, Jeremy Corbyn was constantly accused of wanting to “turn Britain back to the 1970s.” For the Right, this decade before Thatcherism is the ultimate bogeyman — presenting an age of strong welfare and trade unions as something we should fear.
Five German left activists on building solidarity with the Greek people and confronting the pro-austerity elites in their own country.
Confusing marginality with insight leaves movements vulnerable to reactionary mimicry. A renewed engagement with Karl Marx’s structural account of exploitation can give feminism a path out of standpoint theory’s dead end.
Both capitalist exploitation and workers' resistance look fundamentally similar all over the world. Within the West and outside of it, socialism speaks to those experiences.
After the Australian Labor Party’s 2019 election loss to the Liberals, the commentariat bemoaned Queensland’s seemingly entrenched conservatism. Yet as a state election approaches, the experience of campaigners and volunteers on the ground tells a different story.
In Albania after the fall of the Soviet Union, firms promised big returns to ordinary people who invested in them. The investments turned out to be massive pyramid schemes, and their 1997 collapse set off a deadly conflict that killed 1,500 people.
Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are political throwbacks. But whereas Warren wants to fix the policies that went astray in the Clinton era, Sanders wants to change the economic foundations of American life.
Class, race, and gender intersect on multiple levels — we know that. The challenge is to translate this into an emancipatory project.
Ireland’s revolutionary women made the fight for emancipation their own.
Evicted sharply details the injustices renters face. But the book's "solution" would end up enriching landlords.
British suffragette and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst didn't just want to talk to "society ladies" about the right to vote. She wanted the women's movement to be part of a broader emancipatory project.
Unlike many in his party, Eugene V. Debs believed the struggle for black equality was critical to realizing the promise of socialism.
Policymakers who have belatedly recognized the peril of climate change now promote incremental, market-based solutions to the crisis. But there’s no way we can prevent ecological disaster without tackling the vested interests at the heart of global capitalism.