The struggle over schools today requires battles over both the privatization of education and the current attempts to limit its social content and meaning. Those fighting against this changing totality must align themselves with the embattled radical teachers in the trenches. In the famous words of Grace Lee Boggs, more than a half-century ago, it is necessary to create “a new system of education that will have as its means and its end the development of the great masses of people to govern over themselves and administer over things.” | more…
The Great Depression is almost one century old. Today in the United States we remember this international economic collapse, and the suffering it engendered, by reading novels and essays about it, watching plays, viewing paintings—often forgetting that the U.S. government of that time encouraged and financially supported much of this art. Not only art: the Depression was one of the few times that the federal government ever stepped in to help ordinary people get on their feet. | more…
The COVID-19 pandemic shows no signs of going away, with a new wave of SARS-CoV-2 now occurring in the form of the more readily transmittable Omicron variant. In these circumstances, the issue of vaccine imperialism, dividing the Global North and the Global South, has taken on new significance. | more…
Free City! is a book for organizers, by organizers. Written from inside the struggle, it is a history of the five-year campaign to save San Francisco’s community college system from being shuttered by a highly politicized accreditation agency. The movement went on to win support and funding for the country’s most inclusive free college measure. | more…
The U.S. government is obsessed with Cuba. Cuba is a small island, ninety miles off the shore of Florida, that is home to eleven million people. Not a day has gone by that the United States has not tried to overturn the Cuban Revolution, through the assassination of its leaders, invasions by proxy forces, preventing it from normal commercial and diplomatic relations, and encouraging social distress in the island to become a counterrevolutionary force. That is the level of the obsession. | more…
Notwithstanding an ongoing commitment to redouble its efforts, Cuban socialism has not taken full advantage of its own human and material resources to develop its productive forces. It is necessary to distinguish between our right and duty to struggle against the blockade and our expectations regarding what one can and cannot hope for if it is lifted. | more…
With the rapidly worsening capitalist demolition of the planetary environment and the expansion of ecosocialist movements in response, leading establishment think tanks, like the corporate-supported Breakthrough Institute, dedicated to promoting the ideology of “green capitalism” at any cost, have found themselves in a difficult place. | more…
We should avoid offering a fatalistic worldview. In fact, the environmental movement in general and ecosocialism in particular are all about combating the current trend toward ecological destruction. Climate change is now “code red for humanity.” This is not a doomsday forecast but a call to action. | more…
The sick and disabled need true co-conspirators who hold politicians accountable, who value the sick and disabled as expert strategists speaking to the needs of the community; who understand and amplify our urgency and our anger. We need universal, single-payer health care—comprehensive care for all, regardless of income or health status—now. | more…