To stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis, at least 80 percent of coal reserves must stay in the ground, according to a conservative estimate in the journal Nature. This means that coal miners would see their already declining industry all but disappear. The Green New Deal, the resolution put forward by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and [...]

Mohamed Hassan looks like everyone’s favorite uncle at a family picnic. He has a stylish goatee with some frost to it. If he told you he was fifty, you’d believe him; if he told you he was eighty, you’d believe him. “I am old,” is all he says. He has a ready smile and an [...]

One of the prime contributors to the suffering of Puerto Rico following Hurricanes Irma and María may be headed to prison. Julia Keleher, the Republican former secretary of education of Puerto Rico who infamously closed 442 schools on the island, was arrested on charges of fraud in Washington D.C. on July 10. Keleher’s arrest is [...]

After months on the presidential campaign trail, alleged Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden has finally rolled out just the sort of health care plan everyone expected of him: a marginal improvement upon the Affordable Care Act, pitched explicitly as a safer, saner alternative to Medicare for All. Bidencare would create a public insurance option to be [...]

West Virginia is a state that embodies the tensions and possibilities inherent in the recent antiestablishment turn in American politics: it is a state that voted 68 percent for Donald Trump in 2016, and it is the state that kicked off a national wave of rank-and-file labor militancy in 2018. And now West Virginia has [...]

Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign is picking up right where he left off in 2016. His stump speeches remain the classic Sanders jeremiad against inequality and exploitation he’s been honing for forty years. And transforming US health care by establishing the most comprehensive single-payer system in the world remains his signature issue and rallying cry. [...]

Joe Biden released a health plan today. Its most significant elements are: 1) the creation of a public option, 2) the increase of subsidies for those buying plans on the exchanges, especially for families with incomes above 400 percent of the poverty line, and 3) the option for individuals in non-Medicaid-expansion states to enroll in the public [...]

Just over one year ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) sent shockwaves through the mainstream political establishment by ousting ten-term incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley in New York. Running as an open democratic socialist on a platform of redistributive economics, universal health care, bold climate action, and abolishing ICE, she lit a spark under a moribund Democratic Party, [...]

A radical analysis must not confine itself to the business of critique — to dismantling dominant ways of thinking about the doing and making of science. A radical analysis must offer lessons for how to transform science in a revolutionary direction. How to remake science in the service of the people. This means using critique [...]

This week we learned just how awesome the players who make up the US women’s soccer team are: they played with immense discipline and relentless energy throughout this year’s World Cup. The lovely star midfielder Megan Rapinoe generated headlines like “Purple-Haired Lesbian Goddess Flattens France Like a Crêpe.” She also declared that if the women’s [...]

A decade ago, the US tech giants — Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook — were seen as the very symbols of human progress. Now, the companies — especially Amazon — are seen as the very symbols of inequality, tyranny, and exploitation. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, is not only the richest man in the world [...]

The debate over abortion rights has galvanized the early primary race. Many Democratic candidates are making high-profile proposals on the issue, such as calling on Congress to codify abortion rights into federal law and to require states with a history of violating abortion rights to clear new abortion restrictions with the Justice Department. Elizabeth Warren, [...]

July 14, 1889 was a historic date for more than one reason. Coming exactly a hundred years after the storming of the Bastille, this day was the central focus of the centenary of the French Revolution, marked by official state pageantry as well as the Left’s own celebrations. Yet socialists didn’t just commemorate the glorious [...]

Thirty years ago this summer, 60,000 telephone workers walked off the job in New York and New England — and stayed out for seventeen weeks. Their struggle against NYNEX, a telecom giant, became one of labor’s few big strike victories, during a decade that began with the disastrous defeat of PATCO, the national air traffic [...]

If you’re on the Left in America, you really need to savor the victories. And in the past century and a half, it was only when radicals made common cause with a broader progressive coalition that made those victories possible. That’s the story of slavery’s demise, Jim Crow’s destruction, and the labor movement’s forward march. [...]

Julián Castro did us all a favor. During his limited time on the debate stage, he challenged fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke and the rest of his rivals to support repealing the law that makes crossing the border between official ports of entry a crime. The press has oversold what this policy would actually do. Alisha Gupta [...]

For years, the Left marched in Seattle. From the 1999 WTO protests to the anti-Iraq War movement, through Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, the city incubated an insurgent politics that learned how to take back the streets. The politicization has taken an electoral turn in recent years, however. Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant became [...]

In 2018, Rashida Tlaib was elected to Congress. Her election was extraordinary in many ways: she ran as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America; she became the first Palestinian-American in Congress; and she was part of a crop of left-wing challengers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar whose victories shocked the Democratic establishment [...]

On July 7, the New York Times produced an alarming headline: “Iran Announces New Breach of Nuclear Deal Limits and Threatens Further Violations.” The “breach,” we were told — which would enable the Islamic Republic to enrich uranium above the 3.67 percent limit set by the 2015 deal — “inches Iran closer to where it [...]

Earlier this week, the Bernie Sanders campaign debuted a webpage quoting condemnations from twelve “anti-endorsers” that included the following words from right-wing plutocrat Haim Saban: We love all 23 candidates. No, minus one. I profoundly dislike Bernie Sanders. He thinks every billionaire is a crook. He calls us “the billionaire class.” And he attacks us [...]

From the onslaught of climate change, to the spread of far-right movements around the globe, to the increased proliferation of nuclear weapons, threats to the natural environment and democratic institutions are increasingly unmistakable, and the sense of crisis palpable. Yet amid such rapid changes, the work of Noam Chomsky remains indispensable for understanding global politics and [...]

It’s no accident that the history of Marxist thought is dominated by a small cluster of European thinkers. Occasionally, some space is made for a Frantz Fanon or a C. L. R. James, whose origins lie outside Europe. On very rare occasions, there is serious discussion of Marxist theorists who operated entirely outside Europe, like [...]

Whenever the Labour left has the temerity to push for the changes it wants to see within the party, it unleashes what Gregory Elliott once derisively called the “Burkean Furies.” Such is the nervousness surrounding the impending reselection of Labour MPs, it only takes a single Labour member to send an (albeit ill-considered) email to [...]

Bernie Sanders has a flair for naming and shaming the rich and powerful. Last month, when he faced criticism for his democratic socialist politics from Jamie Dimon, he responded on social media: “Jamie Dimon is the billionaire CEO of a Wall Street bank that was fined $13 billion for mortgage fraud, admitted to wrongly foreclosing [...]

Six weeks ago, the president of the Colegio de Profesores de Chile (CPC) announced an indefinite strike after the government “shut the door” on negotiations over demands to end the precarious working and learning conditions in the country’s public schools. The union, which represents all of Chile’s public school educators, estimates that more than eighty [...]

As the Trump administration’s saber-rattling toward Iran threatens another disastrous war in the Middle East, foreign policy has gained newfound focus in the 2020 presidential race. And former vice president Joe Biden’s 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq War leaves him with a particularly glaring vulnerability. Biden’s vote had already become a sticking point [...]

As Britain’s Tories decide who to elect as their next leader, the Labour Party has to address two urgent dilemmas of its own. One is the question of Brexit. Should Labour, as prominent figures like Owen Jones have argued, now abandon the idea of an alternative, “soft-Brexit” deal and campaign wholeheartedly for Britain to stay [...]

“Now, I’m a little different from those who say free college for everybody,” clarified Hillary Clinton in 2016, taking aim at her opponent in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders. “I am not in favor of making college free for Donald Trump’s kids.” With this objection, Clinton appeared to beat Sanders, the nation’s political leader on [...]

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed hiking marginal tax rates on multimillionaires to 70 percent earlier this year, the expected conservative outrage filled the airwaves. Fox News warned of the coming apocalypse, and invocations of Venezuela abounded. Many liberals (and even Bernie Sanders) responded by citing the steep marginal tax rates of the 1950s. How could a [...]

The Greek election results were, first and foremost, a victory for the center-right New Democracy, whose nearly 40 percent of the vote secured it an absolute majority in parliament. For the time since 2009 — when the center-left PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) last won an election — a single party will form the government. Throughout [...]