We have developed the habit of thinking about the Declaration of Independence mainly as an event, an episode in the dramatic unfolding of the American Revolution. But it makes a cogent philosophical case for political equality, a case that democratic citizens desperately need to understand.
At first glance the runways of New York and the factories of Bangladesh couldn’t seem farther apart. But they are part of the same $1.5 trillion industry, where the work is overwhelmingly performed by young women and girls. Can a new wave of organizing, from the sweatshop floor to the offices of Condé Nast, turn that industry around?
In the latest escalation of the low-wage workers’ movement, fast food workers went out on strike this week in hundreds of cities around the globe. Sarah and Michelle speak with Tsedeye Gebreselassie of the National Employment Law Project about the importance of local victories in this global struggle, and why workers must lead the way. Plus: miners’ deaths abroad and at home, teachers’ ongoing resistance to high-stakes testing, Thomas Piketty, and more.
Few scholars have done as much as Frances Fox Piven to describe how widespread disruptive action can change history, and few have offered more provocative suggestions about the times when movements—instead of crawling forward with incremental demands—can break into full sprint.
On Monday, May 5, Occupy Wall Street activist and friend of Dissent Cecily McMillan was unjustly convicted of assaulting a police officer at an Occupy protest. In response to this egregious verdict, members of the Justice for Cecily team have collaborated with fellow activists, writers, and editors to produce the Free Cecily! gazette.
“In sub-Saharan Africa,” a video at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show announces, “there is war that feeds off of global demand for electronics. The place is the DRC—the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The region is ground zero for conflict minerals.” Tech giants including Intel and Apple are now working with NGOs to clean up their supply chains and help promote peace in the region. But will their proposed solutions challenge the deeper patterns of exploitation plaguing the DRC?
Twenty-four hours a day, across more than sixty free product “platforms,” Google is storing, indexing, and cross-referencing information about the activities of a billion people. What are the 30,000 prodigies at Google, Inc. doing with all that data?
In their responses to Michael Walzer’s “A Foreign Policy for the Left,” Eric Alterman and Jeff Faux make the case for the “default position”: minimal engagement, at least until we get democracy right here at home. Michael Walzer responds.
Is there such a thing as a leftist foreign policy? What are the characteristic views of the left about the world abroad? When have leftists, rightly or wrongly, defended the use of force?
Ninety-five years ago today, Beijing students gathered in front of Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and launched a mass movement against corruption and foreign bullying. Seventy years later, in 1989, student protesters would gather at the same spot to claim the May Fourth mantle—only to be brutally repressed.
Ellen Bravo sits down with Belabored to discuss new challenges and milestones in the movement for gender justice and why the basic, structural struggles for women’s economic empowerment are still far from over. Plus: the port truck drivers’ latest labor action; struggles led by sherpas, cabbies, and banking sector workers; divisions in NYC charter schools; and Donald Sterling.
Concluding our nine-part series on inequality, a crash course in the last 100 years of U.S. fiscal and monetary policy, from the creation of the Fed to the Phillips curve to the modern-day bloodletting known as austerity.
The new media gurus claim that everybody can remix and peer produce their way to a networked, cultural cornucopia. But thankfully, as sugar-coated paeans to the power of tech have proliferated, so have sharp, critical accounts. Astra Taylor’s new book, The People’s Platform, rises to the top of this list.
“Is there racism against drones?” asked an audience member at the Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference in New York City last autumn. Drone hobbyists are seeking to divorce their toys from images of war and bloodshed. But even hobbyist drones are the product of extremely powerful institutions with a keen interest in maintaining that power.
At a cost of several hundred millions of euros, the capital of Macedonia is undergoing a makeover that includes one of the largest statues in Europe, a new archaeological museum, and several works of public art, all financed by the government in an effort to paint their poverty-stricken state as the rightful inheritor of a distant grandeur. Critics have wondered whether the money could not be better spent in a country that, if it were to join the EU, would be the poorest member.
