The Spanish Civil War came to an end on April 1, 1939, only days after Francisco Franco’s Nationalist troops entered Madrid. By the time the capital fell, following a long siege, the war’s body count had reached nearly half a million. About 150,000 of those deaths directly owed to the Francoite terror; a further 20,000 [...]

There is a paradox about the inroads socialism has made in American political discourse in the past five years, thanks to Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacies. Not in many lifetimes, and perhaps never, has socialism figured so prominently in American political rhetoric. But theories of what socialism really means are hard to come by — [...]

Kevin Drum wrote a piece recently that featured a common, but mistaken, criticism of Medicare for All. The criticism is that Medicare for All will increase taxes and government spending so much that there won’t be much fiscal space left to do other things. This criticism is wrong because the amount of fiscal space we have to [...]

In 1984, the English rock musician Robert Wyatt released a song in defense of the British miners’ strike. The track had a lengthy genesis. Having achieved renown with the cult band The Soft Machine, Wyatt underwent a public radicalization in the late 1970s, highlighted by his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain and [...]

In March 1919 Hungary saw the first attempt to create a Bolshevik-style state outside the old Russian Empire. Social democrats and communists combined to form a Council (or “Soviet”) Republic inspired by the Bolshevik example. Mounting sweeping nationalizations, raising wages and slashing rents, the state was however immediately engulfed in the post-World War I chaos. [...]

For the sake of brevity, Turkey’s Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) is often identified as “pro-Kurdish.” But that descriptor is overly simplistic. The HDP is a pro-peace, bottom-up, left alliance that was born out of the Kurdish political movement and has become a key actor whenever ballot boxes are set up across Turkey. Tomorrow, Turkey’s citizens [...]

“There is nothing unusual in the fact that a backward country produces powerful works,” Georg Lukács wrote in an essay on Dostoevsky. By that standard, the cultural work happening quietly in offices and studios throughout Great Britain right now will be of incalculable quality, volume, and worth. Politically, the United Kingdom is waist deep in a swamp of its own creation. [...]

Democratic leadership have now signaled to voters what their party would look like in power, by introducing their vision for American health care policy: the laughably named Protecting Pre-existing Conditions and Making Healthcare More Affordable Act. Hakeem Jeffries, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, believes this bill presents “a clear contrast in terms of what [...]

The tragic Ethiopian Airlines crash this month killed 157 people, including many workers for the United Nations and world aid groups. It followed the suspiciously similar Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 last October. The two disasters shook world travel and resulted in the grounding of Boeing’s 737 Max planes. In the final [...]

In 1932, a group of left-wing intellectuals formed the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, a campaign to back the Communist Party’s William Z. Foster and James W. Ford for president and vice president, respectively. Toward this end, the League produced a pamphlet, titled Culture and the Crisis: An Appeal to the Writers, [...]

The American right is not done trying to entrench health care’s status as an exclusively free market good: in a short letter to a federal appeals court Monday, Trump’s Justice Department asserted its approval of a district court ruling in December that scrapped the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) on grounds widely seen as legally [...]

The European debt crisis that began a decade ago has offered stark insights into not only the European Union itself but also the mechanisms of neoliberal crisis management. Greece was but the most extreme example of a eurozone state unable to refinance government debt and subjected to external “bailouts” designed only to protect the interests [...]

There has been plenty of talk recently about exploitation in Minor League Baseball, in no small part because of the passage last year of the Save America’s Pastime Act. The law exempts Major League Baseball, a $12 billion annual business, from paying minor leaguers overtime. What this means in practice is that athletic laborers who work fifty to [...]

Emmanuel Macron’s decision to mobilize troops on Saturday 23, in a bid to hold back the Paris gilets jaunes demonstrations, was a move unseen in France since the great strikes of 1947–48. In fact, across recent years, we have seen a gradual criminalization of social movements and the rolling-back of civil liberties. And as a [...]

In January, Ignasi Sabater, the left-wing mayor of the small Catalan town of Verges, was arrested in a dawn raid. In the same police operation, another mayor, a journalist from the magazine La Directa, and thirteen other activists were rounded up and arrested because they had organized peaceful protests to demand the release of political [...]

As I’ve noted previously, the UK’s Conservative Party is mired in an Islamophobia problem that it refuses to acknowledge. This week, many Conservative party members and members of Parliament were caught using explicitly racist terms, yet the issue was largely shrugged off by the media. The terms were openly racist and antisemitic. The stark difference [...]

On April 9, Israel will hold elections to its parliament, the Knesset, which appoints the government. On paper, Israel’s fully proportional electoral system is quite volatile, with a whopping ten parties represented in the outgoing parliament, and some polls showing this number might go up as high as fourteen. But few of these parties differ [...]

On June 1, 2013, I joined a thousand people on a march through Fort Meade, Maryland calling for Chelsea Manning’s release. Manning, a former soldier in the US army, was scheduled to be court martialed for passing US war logs and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. The collection of documents painted a shocking portrait of US [...]

Demands for real climate justice got a welcome boost recently as youth walked out of schools worldwide on March 15, urged to go “on strike” by sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden. Images in mainstream and social media exploded with pictures of young people marching into plazas across the world, confronting intransigent elected officials and speaking [...]

After yet another speed-up in a workplace notorious for its lightning pace of work, workers at a Minnesota Amazon warehouse walked off the night shift for three hours. The March 7 walkout at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, was these workers’ second job action in three months. The strikers work in the stow department, [...]

The Green New Deal has moved from a policy few had ever heard of to a litmus test issue for Democrats, thanks mostly to agitation from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. How should we think about the original New Deal in pushing for a green one? Doug Henwood put this question to Richard Walker, professor emeritus of [...]

Socialism’s recent resurgence has revived core debates about socialist politics and strategy: what do socialists want, and how do we get there? Whether figuring out how socialists should relate to electoral politics, how and to what extent socialists should push for reforms from the state, how socialists should engage with broader social movements, or simply [...]

So ends one of the more incoherent political scandals in modern memory. After two long, breathless years of investigation, accusations, leaks, scoops, walk-backs, and wild conspiracies, the main findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump-Russia conspiracy were finally released on Sunday. As most anyone reading this now knows, its conclusions are devastating, though not [...]

There’s a tendency these days to pit race against class. Cracking down on Wall Street, Hillary Clinton famously proclaimed, won’t end racism. Promoting a jobs program, Bernie Sanders’s critics chided, won’t stop racial profiling. Fighting economic exploitation, naysayers maintain, won’t bludgeon the fortress of white supremacy. None of this would have made much sense to the National [...]

I find myself in a peculiar position with regard to the Mueller report (assuming — big assumption, I know — that we have a good enough sense at this point of what’s in it). On the one hand, I was part of the Russiagate skeptic circle. I didn’t doubt that Russia had attempted to influence the election, [...]

The big winner of the Dutch regional elections on March 20 was the far-right Forum voor Democratie (FvD). This was first time the FvD participated in these elections, which also decide the composition of the country’s senate. With almost 15 percent of the vote, it immediately became one of the biggest factions in the upper [...]