Author: newpolitics

American Progressives and France’s Surge to the Right

Macron’s newest orders banning demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine reveal even more clearly the real nature of France’s anti-Muslim campaign, one that the U.S. and French Left have with few exceptions mostly ignored.

India’s Covid Crisis: Can the Modi Regime Get India Out of It?

It’s hard to live in India these days, surrounded by death, fear and grief. We are inundated with heart-breaking TV reports of people begging for hospital beds and oxygen as their family members die on the pavement or in vehicles gasping for breath.

Israel’s Racism and the Misuse of Antisemitism

Israel’s official discourse vehemently denies its “deeply ingrained institutionalized” anti-Arab racism and the settler-colonial nature of its state, although it is as blatant as could be and was even acknowledged by Zionism’s prominent historical figures.

Prospects of Joint Class Struggle

Talk of mass ‘joint struggle’ against the Zionist regime in the present circumstances is facile, but it is a mistake to think in a rigid static way.

Their anti-imperialism and ours

The logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a recipe for empty cynicism.

Heads up! Chins down! Resisting the New Bipartisan Neoliberal Project in Education

Teachers’ work is being transformed beneath our collective nose. We have missed an opportunity to combat the project in its earliest stages but we cannot delay in understanding and combating the new iteration of neoliberalism’s global project in education.

Erasing People through Disinformation: Syria and the “Anti-Imperialism” of Fools

Disreputable writers and outlets, often operating under the aegis of “independent journalism” with purportedly “leftwing” views, are spreading corrosive propaganda and disinformation that aims to strip Syrians of political agency.

Union Democracy and “The Final Goal”

Union democracy or more accurately the transformation of major unions into living democratic participatory organizations and cultures is a necessity precisely because of the corporations’ massive powers of resistance.

Union Democracy is Our Goal But Is It Practical? Responding to Nelson Lichtenstein

Nelson Lichtenstein and I agree on two major ideas that I think distinguish our shared viewpoint from the practice of many union officials and some of their supporters on the left.

Unions and Democracy: A Response to Lois Weiner

When I think of the tasks before the labor movement, and even more so the left in general, I think not of how to shift the policy program of the AFT or even of SEIU, but of what it will take to organize Walmart and Amazon and now Google.

The Cost of “Financial Literacy”

The book suggests that the key to ascending from the working class is to join the owning class through investing, where you can forever feed from the golden trough of passive-income, typically replenished by the working class you were once a part of.

Biden's Inauguration

Challenge for the Left, Launching a Movement against the Washington Status Quo

As Biden enters office, the left must properly reflect on what has been perhaps the most contemptible administration in US history, to launch a movement of our own against the bipartisan neoliberal and imperialist hegemony.

Venezuela

How did Chavismo win 92% of the National Assembly?

The high abstention indicates that the working majority understood the irrelevance of the election. Voting could not have any impact on the disastrous national situation because the parliament had been de facto deprived of all its functions for several years.

Structures of Fossil Feeling

In this easily accessible, passionately argued intervention, Dawson gives the reader both a valuable primer on contemporary struggles for energy justice and an entry into the theoretical debates whose outcome will inform and guide movement strategy going forward.

Biden’s pick for Secretary of Education: What to expect from Cardona?

We should let Miguel Cardona know we have his back if he defends what schools, teachers, students really need – while we simultaneously prepare for his not doing so.

Teachers unions and the pandemic: Fighting for life and facing neoliberalism’s new bipartisan push

Biden will endorse the old normal Obama handed to Trump, but he will also push profiteering and control of education through technology, a project supported by both Democrats and the GOP from the start of Trump’s administration.

As Biden Restores A Malignant “Normalcy,” It’s High Time The Left Declared Its Independence From The Democrats

It is misleading to see the election as a victory of democracy over authoritarianism. Biden’s win is the triumph not of democracy but of an oligarchic status quo, itself an increasingly authoritarian system.

The 2020 Elections in the United States: A Socialist View from Afar

Many of us watching with envy from afar—“envy” because the destruction of democratic institutions has gone much further in our countries—have nothing but admiration for the way in which a would-be dictator has been peacefully overthrown.

Say #ByeBetsy – and organize now to fight against Biden’s education policies

Biden’s victory now requires confronting his advocacy of disastrous education policies during the Obama administration, enacted under Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

Fighting for teachers unions that speak back to power, defend students and social justice

School reopenings have become a point of political conflict on a national level, as parent, student, and teachers’ rights to have healthy, safe, equitable schools have been subordinated to the bipartisan consensus to put the economy and profit over human need.

Once More on the Greater Evil

Stephen R. Shalom replies again on the question of voting for the lesser evil to defeat Trump.

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