Desert Shooters
Some of the top-selling video games of the post-9/11 world have taken real events as their inspiration.
Some of the top-selling video games of the post-9/11 world have taken real events as their inspiration.

The ex-Pakistani prime minister had many failings. But a recent leaked cable regarding Imran Khan’s military-backed ouster lays bare how the US government uses its power to influence events around the world and how the mainstream press conceals this from the public.

Rosa Luxemburg’s work The Accumulation of Capital described the havoc that capitalism wreaked upon what we now call the Global South. Today’s socialist and environmental activists can draw valuable insights from Luxemburg’s understanding of the world system.

The major capitalist economies of Europe and North America have been experiencing low rates of economic growth and population increase. Japan has been in that position since the 1990s, and its experience offers some important clues about what the future holds.

Despite its extensively documented record of torture and other horrific human rights abuses, the US prison at Guantánamo Bay remains open. The Biden administration should close it immediately and make restitution to its victims.

The Biden administration is entertaining the idea of pursuing a US-Saudi mutual defense pact. How does the prospect of risking lives for the Saudi monarchy sound?

Across Europe, the Right has taken a pronatalist turn. Despite claiming to support mothers, its initiatives — largely ineffectual, according to many studies — serve to reinforce patriarchal gender roles and protect the interests of employers.

Through Angela Merkel’s reign, neoliberal European integration provided the scaffolding for Germany’s export-led growth. But war on the continent and a series of crises have tested this model’s limits, producing splits within Olaf Scholz’s government.

We spoke to some of the Democratic Socialists of America members deciding the future of the country’s largest socialist organization this weekend.

Sohrab Ahmari’s critique of capitalist power is surprising and compelling. But as long as he remains committed to unjust hierarchies of power in gender and sexuality, he can’t be a coalition partner with the Left.

On the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, we should remember that deploying the bomb wasn’t necessary to win the war. US policymakers were aware of this fact, yet they pressed on, thereby authoring the atrocity that launched the nuclear age.

On June 27, French police murdered Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent. Rather than treating the incident as an opportunity for introspection, French police have rebelled against all attempts to be held accountable.

Joe Biden’s policy toward Iran has been marked by incoherence and inconsistency. His prisoner swap deal between the United States and Iran is a rare positive development amid escalating tensions.

Railways that once offered quick routes through Yugoslavia are today slowed by old rolling stock and new border controls. Their frayed infrastructure reflects the collapse of Tito’s internationalist vision, and the capitalist Wild West that followed.

After World War I, Bulgaria had one of Europe’s strongest peasant and worker movements. Within a decade, the Bulgarian left was in shambles, crushed by a brutal military coup and led by the Comintern into an honorable but ill-conceived uprising.

Donald Trump skipped the first GOP debate to chat with his courtier Tucker Carlson. Their conversation revealed the utter insincerity of their branding as opponents of the elite and the military-industrial complex.

Twelve years after the Fukushima disaster, Japanese authorities have started pumping wastewater from the plant into the ocean. They insist there’s no danger to public health, but Japan’s neighbors are up in arms about the controversial plan.

Writers are striking to save film and TV from destruction by corporate giants. New Deal-era schemes like the Federal Theatre Project and the Group Theater offer a tantalizing glimpse of how entertainment could be run as a public good, not as a business.

We keep being told the GOP has become a working-class party that rejects neoliberal economics. Someone should’ve told the Republican candidates at last night’s debate.

Friedrich Pollock isn’t as well-known as other members of the Frankfurt School like Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. But Pollock’s impressive work includes a brilliant, pioneering analysis of automation under capitalism that appears highly prescient today.