Making the Green New Deal Real

On the first day of the Oakland teachers’ strike, I met up with Oakland teacher and union activist Tim Marshall at the rally downtown. Marshall has been an Oakland public school teacher for twenty-two years. He sits on the organizing committee for the Oakland Education Association (OEA), the teachers union that’s fighting for a living wage, smaller class sizes, more student supports, and an end to school closures. He’s also a cluster leader, in charge of...

On April 11 Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was arrested at the Ecuadoran embassy in London. The pretext for the arrest was that Assange had skipped bail in 2012 on a British arrest warrant related to Swedish sexual assault charges from 2010. The real reason was that the U.S. government wanted to punish Assange for leaking secret documents and had persuaded the post-“red tide” Ecuadoran government to withdraw its grant of asylum to Assange.

The U.S. government immediately filed an extradition...

On December 17, 2010, the self-immolation of a young street vendor in Central Tunisia set off a revolutionary fire that spread across the region. Eight years later, on December 19, 2018, the Sudanese government’s implementation of austerity measures prescribed by the International Monetary Fund sparked a new upsurge of mass protest. And two months after the Sudanese uprising exploded, the Algerian population started...

Vivek Chibber’s “The ABCs of Capitalism”, released through Jacobin, offers an analysis from a “class first”, or, less generously, “class only” perspective. The reality is that the working class is composed primarily of people who experience material oppression related to their identities and Chibber falls short even of his own class-first dictum because he neglects this fact. This, in addition to his decision to not...

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,...

THE ISRAELI ELECTION on April 9, 2019 will coincide with the anniversary of the massacre of the Arab village of Deir Yassin, a turning point in the mass flight of Palestinians during the 1948 war (the Nakba, or catastrophe). According to establishment historiography, this massacre was carried out by the extreme rightwing Irgun militia — the military arm of the party that gave rise to today’s governing Likud — but the truth is more complicated to say the least.

The village of Deir Yassin...

Algeria is experiencing a popular uprising that is unprecedented since the proclamation of national independence. Since 22 February 2019, following calls launched on the Internet, large rallies, with a massive presence of women, have been organized in all cities, followed by workers and young students

The trigger for this powerful popular anger was the obstinacy of the government in keeping Abdelaziz Bouteflika as President of the country for a fifth term — when he has already spent 20 years...

Johanna Brenner (JB): On February 21, Oakland’s 3,000 teachers went out on strike after two years of failed negotiations with the Oakland Unified School District.  Clearly, the strike got the District’s attention and a deal was won after teachers held strong for seven days.  What did the teachers fight for and what did they win?

Joel Jordan(JJ): Oakland teachers struck for three main demands.  The first was salaries: Oakland teachers are the lowest paid teachers in the county;...

In one more of his war-media machinations in the service of U.S. big capital, Donald Trump is using the new political balance of forces in Latin America — where the pendulum has turned to the right — to take his most enthusiastic puppets, Duque, of Colombia and Bolsonaro, of Brazil, to lead a political offensive and military blackmail to topple the Venezuelan government. The goals could not be more evident: reclaiming for the big oil companies of the United States and the West control...

You’ve heard the news: on March 15^th, 2019, Aotearoa/New Zealand experienced its largest mass shooting since the colonial massacres, a coordinated terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch. Throughout the day the death toll climbed; first 6, then 27, then 40, and finally 49 (with more passing away in hospital beds in the ensuing days). Victims included resettled Syrian children, fleeing terrorism in one place only to encounter it in another.

In the aftermath, many said “This is...