Review of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Jane McAlevy, Oxford University Press (2016)

Tony Wilsdon is a member of Socialist Alternative in the US. The spark ignited by West Virginia teachers in 2018 has given new energy to the labor movement. The dynamic teacher strikes which spread from “red states” to big urban areas like Los Angeles and Oakland, centered around mobilization of teachers themselves with active support […]

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COVID-19, War and Economics

The metaphors of war have been in abundance since the onset of COVID-19. In Britain, the Queen, in a speech, evoked the WW2 song, “We’ll Meet Again.” The Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, also invoked WW2 when he used Winston Churchill’s words to talk about Italy’s “darkest hour.” Donald Trump has described himself as a […]

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The Second World War

Per-Åke Westerlund is a member of Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna (ISA in Sweden). Review of The Second World War by Anthony Beevor, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2012 Seventy five years ago, the European continent and large areas of Asia and Africa were on fire in the second world war, with inhuman suffering of the worst kind caused by […]

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Lenin — 150 Years Since His Birth

Rob Jones is a member of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (ISA in Russia). Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his revolutionary alias, Vladimir Lenin, was born in the city of Simbirsk, now known as Ulyanovsk, on Russia’s Volga river a century and a half ago. By the age of 30, he had earned the reputation as one […]

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Capitalism and the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919

Keishia Taylor is a member of the Socialist Party (ISA in Ireland). The 1918-1919 “Spanish Flu” killed between 50-100 million people, more than the number of deaths in the First and Second World Wars combined. According to expert Laura Spinney the Spanish flu “re-sculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death.” The […]

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Capitalism’s Covid-19 Catastrophe

Apologists for capitalism claim that the system is doing the best it can faced with a new virus in today’s complex and interconnected world. These are, at best, only excuses that seek to hide the reality of global capitalism, which has turned a health emergency into a catastrophe. This article examines, in turn, these excuses: […]

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