Category: Thinking Politically

N 1962, AS a young and rather aimless woman, I was hired by the Oakland Tribune to learn typesetting on the TTS — TeleTypeSetting machine — which attached a misbegotten contraption to a keyboard that punched holes into a sturdy ribbon. The ribbon was later fed into a similar misbegotten contraption on a Linotype, where…

James Bradley, author of The China Mirage, says that “if you stood on the tallest building in Beijing and looked at the oceans and land surrounding you, you would find American destroyers, planes, and missiles encircling you from every direction.” This image embodies the reality of US hegemony across the world, and the nature of the…

Shocking even by Israeli standards, the horrifying truth of the occupation’s systematic torture, rape, and degradation of Palestinian detainees reveals a brutality buried in silence.

The United States, despite occasional statements about withholding weapons, has consistently armed Israel during this genocidal war. Since 1948, the United States has provided $130 billion worth of weapons to Israel. Between 2018 and 2022, 79 percent of all weapons sold to Israel came from the United States (the next was Germany, which supplied 20…

The trouble began for the African People’s Socialist Party in spring 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The APSP was one of the few prominent activist groups that publicly blamed the U.S. government for provoking the invasion, thus contradicting the official position of the U.S. that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked.

The criminal legal system views pretrial detention as a necessary sacrifice that prioritizes crime prevention and court attendance over personal liberty. However, detention is demonstrably ineffective on both fronts: when compared to releasing people pretrial, jail counterintuitively worsens these outcomes on day one while making the system decidedly more unjust for those behind bars. These…

Sonya Massey’s brutal murder at the hands of the police has resulted in anguish and anger but no difference in how state violence is protested. Instead, we see surrender to the crumbs of condolences and fake concern expressed by people who have the power to stop the killing.

In 2023, when Europe was blasted by a record-breaking heatwave named after Cerberus (the three-headed hound of Hades), workers organized to demand protection from the extreme heat. In Athens, employees at the Acropolis and other historical sites went on strike for four hours each day. In Rome, refuse collectors threatened to strike if they were…

One of the defining characteristics of the current crisis is the speed at which contradictory social, political and ideological dynamics can change with contradictions shifting from primary to secondary, antagonistic to non-antagonist and conflicts of interests, as well as struggles among the capitalist oligarchy producing new intra-bourgeois class alignments.