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Arvind Dilawar is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere.
In the 1970s and ’80s, internationalism was central to black politics. And few better personified that commitment than Texas congressman Mickey Leland, who fought tooth and nail to end US support for South African apartheid.
Antebellum slaveholders weren’t content with an economic and social system based on trafficking in human flesh in the South alone. They wanted to expand slaveholding territory outward, to the American West and even beyond the borders of the United States.
Martin Luther King argued that the desire for individual greatness marred US society. But he also believed that desire could be channeled into collective action, with everyone acting as “drum majors” for justice against the “triple evils” of racism, capitalism, and militarism.
There’s little doubt the US helped install Haiti’s new prime minister following the assassination of the country’s president. So here we are again: the US is arrogantly shaping Haiti’s affairs rather than allowing Haitians to rule themselves.
Too often, the militant, radical history of Mexican American workers is omitted or forgotten. But from resisting racist exclusion to building CIO unions in the 1930s, Mexican American workers have been central to left-wing politics in the United States.
From a decades-long US occupation to violent foreign-backed coups, Haiti’s history is riddled with disastrous imperial interventions that have helped keep the country mired in poverty. There’s zero justification for more American interference in the country.
Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated this week by alleged mercenaries. In an interview with Jacobin, the English language editor of Haiti Liberté says he suspects that some of Haiti’s richest families hired the attackers to preempt a potential revolution — and possibly even trigger US military intervention.
The Battle of Blair Mountain is one of the most stunning episodes in the United States’ violent history of class warfare. In 1921, twenty thousand armed miners in West Virginia marched on the coal bosses and were met with bombs and submachine guns.
Mexican-American workers have a long tradition of radical organizing, stretching back to the days of the Industrial Workers of the World and the mid-century Communist Party. And in 1968, with a longtime Communist Chicano family at the center, Mexican-American students in LA launched the largest student walkout in US history.
Throughout his adult life, Martin Luther King Jr believed in striking down not only racial apartheid but class exploitation. That twin commitment was embodied in his final effort: the often-forgotten Poor People’s Campaign.
Despite America’s self-image as a land of immigrants, over its history, the United States has deported more people than any other nation in the world. Yet migrant workers have found ways to sabotage the deportation machine to win their dignity and rights.
Haiti’s corrupt, US-backed president is facing massive demonstrations after refusing to step down. US intervention has stifled Haitian democracy and impoverished its people — and the protests are an effort to fight back.
Countless sectors in the US, like the dairy industry, couldn’t run without undocumented workers. Yet those same workers are denied their basic rights and subjected to the constant threat of deportation — dehumanizing and terrorizing them while weakening the power of the broader working class.
James Baldwin went from espousing radical politics as a teenager to disavowing socialist politics as doctrinaire. But by the end of his life, inspired by the radicalism of the Black Panthers, Baldwin was again ready to proclaim himself a socialist.
For more than 40 years, Kim Stanley Robinson has written radical science fiction that offers readers not an easy vision of utopia, but a hopeful alternative that still confronts the ecological devastation wrought by capitalism.
Organizer, lawyer, professor, priest — Pauli Murray held many titles throughout her life. But as a black lesbian with a burning hatred of oppression, her goal was always the same: to challenge discrimination and topple the brutal hierarchies of US society.
Legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie is best known for his anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” which can come off as an innocuous ode to America if you aren’t listening closely. But the singer-songwriter was a lifelong socialist.
Led by A. Philip Randolph, black Pullman porters struggled against the exploitation of the company and the racism of the mainstream labor movement to win a fighting union. They secured dignity on the job — and laid the foundation for the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Strangely enough, Japan’s ruling elites initially viewed the Russian Revolution favorably — until radical ideas started spreading to their colonies.
In the Jim Crow South, the planter class’s greatest fear was that black sharecroppers and white tenant farmers would rise up against their oppressors. In the 1930s, Socialist and Communist organizers tried to make that a reality.