In June 1952, Grace Carlson, one of the staunchest members of the United States’ Socialist Workers Party (SWP), tidied her desk in the offices of the organisation’s Militant newspaper and left the building.1 She had been the only woman defendant… Continue Reading
Despite stronger than expected showings by Democrats in November’s midterm elections, the Republican Party has won control of the United States House of Representatives with a narrow majority.1 The Democrats did pick up one seat in the Senate but then… Continue Reading
The richest and most powerful nation on the globe set the clock back on women’s reproductive rights by half a century on 24 June 2022. This was the day the United States Supreme Court reversed its ruling on the landmark… Continue Reading
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement of 2020 was arguably the most inspiring movement against racism in recent decades.1 It represented the largest social movement in the history of the United States and forced discussions about racism onto the agenda… Continue Reading
A review of Anonymous, A Warning, Little, Brown (2019), £14.99, and Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America, Bloomsbury (2020), £20. No president of the United States has had more written about… Continue Reading
Bernie Sanders’s two presidential election campaigns, in tandem with the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), have captured political attention in the United States and beyond. The excitement inspired by the growth of this new left movement in… Continue Reading
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake. Walter Benjamin, 1940, Notes for “On… Continue Reading
Donald Trump was elected to the United States presidency in 2016 by the votes of the Christian right. Some 81 percent of evangelical Christians, who made up a third of the total electorate, voted for him. Not only did a… Continue Reading
A review of Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket, 2017), £15.99 The centrality of the working class to capitalism through the production of surplus value and consequently its power ultimately to… Continue Reading
This is the story of how a bar-room shooting involving one “Stag” Lee Shelton became one of the most prominent narratives of 20th century popular culture in America: William Lyons, 25, colored, a levee hand, living at 1410 Morgan Street,… Continue Reading