Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart.
“Lean In” feminism doesn’t seem to have the purchase it did a few years ago. Maybe that’s because it is so obviously irrelevant to the lives of the vast majority of women, who need a union and decent pay, not a female boss.
The elite media loves to obsess about the Ivy Leagues. But great public colleges like the City University of New York, once dubbed the Harvard of the proletariat, are far more relevant to most people — and infinitely better at serving the working class.
New York City has seen increasing chaos and immiseration under Mayor Eric Adams. It’s time for the city’s leftists and progressives to unite behind a challenger who can win.
It should be a matter of course that self-identified leftist and progressive members of Congress should vote down the annual bloated, dangerous, war-profiteer bonanza that is the military budget.
Long before disinformation became a moral panic, respectable media outlets like the New York Times trafficked in false information that led to decades of war in Iraq.
The newest of artist Dora Garcia’s films on feminist revolution, Amor Rojo’s simultaneous exploration of Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai and today’s Mexican feminism is the most compelling yet, but it misses the politics of the contemporary moment.
During an official state visit, the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has been feted and praised despite his Hindu nationalism and right-wing policies — even by Democrats.
Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently based on an old McCarthyite state law. The incident is a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived in 21st-century America.
There’s no substitute for building worker power and winning state power to change the world. But we also shouldn’t reject the utopian spirit that has long driven many to create egalitarian living and working arrangements.
In the imbroglio over Pablo Picasso’s misogyny and many personal flaws, the memory of his unabashed leftist politics has been lost — and with it our ability to fully consider his place in history.
A law proposed by New York socialist legislators would prohibit charitable organizations in New York from funding Israel’s illegal settlements — and pick a fight with the powerful pro-Israel organizations that regularly try to destroy progressive candidates.
If you’ve ever visited New York City’s Washington Square Park, chances are good you’ve seen and heard Colin Huggins playing classical music on his piano. Huggins is incredibly talented — and he’s also homeless. Why not make him a city employee?
Even the CIA has debunked “Havana syndrome” — the belief that hypersonic weapons are making American diplomats sick — but diehards in the media and Congress won’t let it go.
Socialists and progressives won a few key demands in the New York state budget battles. But overall, Gov. Kathy Hochul rammed through an awful budget that will make life much worse for the state of New York’s working class.
The California senator Dianne Feinstein is losing her capacity to engage in basic Senate business, yet she refuses to step down. It’s a disgraceful finale to Feinstein’s career, which has been spent faithfully serving the rich.
Enough with the dumb jokes about crystals. You should take Marianne Williamson and her politics seriously.
Some fear Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s new mayor-elect, as a longtime union organizer, can’t serve the public. That’s exactly wrong: the public is served by electing workers and trade unionists to office.
An effort to weaken New York’s climate law was defeated last week by the environmental left. That weakening was backed by State Sen. Kevin Parker, one of the fossil fuel industry’s favorite Democrats.
Bernie Sanders’s grilling of Starbucks’s union-busting billionaire Howard Schultz put a CEO in the hot seat on a national stage. It also forced Senate Democrats who might rather stay on the Democratic donor’s good side to denounce his flagrantly illegal behavior.
Contrary to the New York real estate industry’s propaganda, reducing evictions and strengthening affordable housing protections actually reduces crime and violence.