Place: North America

A Novel Challenge to the 1% as Populism Comes to the Stock Market

America’s contemporary populist impulse that gave us both the Bernie Sanders progressive campaign and Donald Trump’s reactionary Make America Great Again, has now given us the small trader rebellion against the hedge funds.

Why Does Racism Survive?

Why does this anachronistic ideology survive, and even at times such as these, seemingly flourish? Obviously, the institutions of slavery no longer nourish racism. What then is its wavelike revival rooted in?

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.

Reply to Klyczek

We shouldn’t assume that union and community efforts will inevitably succumb to corporate co-optation.

Community Schools and the Dangers of Ed Tech Privatization

Bottom-up democracy through community schools sounds like a great idea, but there are many dangers from these ‘charter schools on steroids.”

Community Schools Will Help Unions and Education

Community schools are a way to address the challenges faced by low-income school districts; they also provide a unique opportunity to create bottom-up, democratically controlled school governance.

Biden Will have a Short Honeymoon

The current celebratory mood of the Democrats and the honeymoon with the president is not likely to last long, given both who Biden is and the health and economic challenges that he faces.

review
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste

The Occlusion of Political Economy

Wilkerson’s adroit storytelling jumps off the page, but the glaring omission in her book is political economy.

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.

Towards a Year of Crisis and Uncertainty

Will the left be seen as jeopardizing the desire for a period of stability after the insurrection? Will Black Lives Mater demonstrations seem too extreme? Or might the depth of the crisis combined with pressure from the left push Biden to adopt more far-reaching progressive economic and social policies?

Remembering Martin Luther King’s Last, Most Radical Book

King links race and class as the twin pillars of the capitalist exploitation that is the generator of poverty, economic inequality, spiritual disenchantment, and racial animosity in America and across the world.

Biden Replaces Trump: A Malignant “Normalcy” Is Restored

Biden’s win is the triumph not of democracy but of an oligarchic status quo.

Race, Crisis, and Resistance in the United States

An Interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor discusses the significance of the struggle against racism and police violence.

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.

Auditing U.S. Democracy

Classical Liberalism, Contemporary America, the Trump Years, and Beyond

The Trump years were deeply undemocratic, but they did not mark an abandonment of a previously rich democratic politics

Desperado in the White House: Coup Fails, Trump Faces Impeachment

We have to call this a failed coup because the intent was to overturn the election of Joseph Biden by forcing vice-president Mike Pence and the Congress to declare Trump the president. It was an attempt to overthrow the incoming elected government by force.

The Invasion of Capitol Hill

Decaying Institutions, Rightwing Insurrection, and the Need for a Mass Movement

The rise of the radical right is based on interrelated but distinct dynamics: market capitalism’s destructiveness; the Left’s failure to respond to market capitalism; and the Right’s ability to sustain the belief that the Left is still a threat.

Is it still fascism if it’s incompetent?

It would be devastatingly stupid, complacent beyond belief, to expect US democracy to remain sufficiently stable in the coming years to deny this incipient fascism more opportunities to congeal, and grow.

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.

Is socialism winning?

Though Trump lost the election, his base has been strengthened over the course of it. To say now that the Left is winning downplays—perhaps unintentionally—the growing relevance and threat of the Right.

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