For a materialist conception of history, it is necessary to understand that the world cannot be consciously changed without understanding it correctly.
Subjects Archives: Class
How the middle half lives
A Review of David Roedeger’s book The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History
Fighting evictions: The 1930s and now
Out of the 110 million Americans who pay rent for housing, by 2021, some 30 to 40 million will face eviction. Such mass homelessness would be an unprecedented social catastrophe with possible revolutionary consequences.
COVID and Kafala
To imagine that a country as structurally classist as Kuwait could have ever succeeded in fighting a pandemic that was born from exploitation and thrives on inequality is the kind of naivety one dreams of achieving, so comforting must it be.
Happy Birthday: Critique of Dialectical Reason!
On the 60th anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s key text on Marxism, Robert Boncardo shows us why it is still relevant, and urgently needed, today.
Death of the Liberal Class – review
Radical Reviewer reviews the book Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges
Yes, defund the cops–and put them under community control
Community control of the police means empowering the people to shape and oversee the mechanisms of their own security and end forever the armed occupation of our communities by hostile forces.
Billions of children are being punished by the pandemic
There are immense casualties from this Great Lockdown. Incomes have collapsed for half the world’s population, while hunger rates are on the rise. But there are other casualties, other victims, often less remarked upon.
Reflections from Vermont
That there are good and honorable people who believe that the Democratic Party can be turned around. I don’t. Our major task is to change the entire nature of political discussion in the country. In my view that’s just not going to happen within the Democratic Party.
Victory: Ohio’s plan to deny workers their unemployment insurance is shelved
In early May, Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine began reopening the state economy. And to support business and slash state expenses, both at worker expense, he had a “COVID-19 Fraud” form put up on the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services website where employers could confidentially report employees “who quit or refuse work when […]
The lockdown protestors are not working class
Sarah Jones, in The Coronavirus Class War in New York Magazine, does a neat, tidy job of kneecapping the notion that the anti-lockdown protests are manned by workers who want to get back to their jobs so they can start making money again.
Engels was right, class society and women’s oppression aren’t inevitable or irreversible
There is a view of human history which holds effectively that there is little difference in essentials between modern, capitalist society and the societies of the past.
The COVID-19 crisis and the end of the ‘low-skilled’ worker
IN A PANDEMIC, “ESSENTIAL” LABORERS ARE WORKING, BUT THE LABOR MARKET ISN’T.
Surviving this pandemic is hard, for America’s most vulnerable, its nearly impossible
This coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the exclusion of whole subsets of the most vulnerable in our society, exemplifying the toxic mix of racism, sexism, imperialism, and capitalism that the U.S. blends so well.
How the poor die in New York
Van Dyke I is a series of 22 hulking brick apartment blocks in Brownsville, the poorest part of Brooklyn, New York. At least 10 people have died there from COVID-19, including a mother and son whose bodies were discovered only after neighbours reported the smell to city officials.
The Black Plague
The rapidity with which the pandemic has consumed black communities provides an unvarnished look into the dynamics of race and class that existed long before it emerged.
#MintTheCoin & COVID Relief with the Modern Money Network
Rohan Grey and Nathan Tankus join Money on the Left to discuss the flurry of debate about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) arising out of the Coronavirus crisis. We focus, in particular, on the Modern Money Network’s multi-pronged efforts to illuminate and remedy the resulting economic devastation. At the center of our conversation is Rohan’s contribution […]
COVID-19 proves workers, not bosses, are essential
The Marxist argument that it’s the labour of workers, and not the supposed intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit of bosses, that keeps society running, has long been ridiculed by defenders of capitalism. In the conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the truth of Marx’s claim has been brought into sharp relief.
Unemployment pandemic
Capitalist crises are neither predictable nor do they stem from a single cause. Instead, at least as I see it, the possibility of a crisis is always there but the causes and triggers are all historical and therefore multiple and varied.
Engels’ pause and the condition of the working class in England
Engels was just 24 years old when he wrote the Condition. He had already developed left-wing ideas when he was despatched to England at the end of 1842 to work in the family firm of Ermen and Engels, manufacturers of sewing thread in Manchester.
