Portside

I defected to the GDR 70 years ago, finding neither Utopia nor the hunger, poverty and misery American media might have led me to expect. I hope that new generations learn from the GDR, and not only from its blunders, nasty habits and limitations.

More so than any other genre, the blues addressed the misery of black American life under capitalism. The work of the late historian Paul Garon made an invaluable contribution to unearthing this tradition’s radical roots.

Yes, this Communist politician in Graz, Austria, wants to redistribute wealth, but a focus on housing, her own modest lifestyle and a hard childhood have helped her popularity.

A socialist economy, being run by the majority in the interests of all, simply would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest.

Socialist politics, a displaced feature of the international scene

Reader Comments: Hearings and Republican Witnesses Show that Trump Planned Armed Coup; Supreme Court Rules Based on Lies, and Religion; Librarians and Books Under Attack; Starbucks Union Grows; Socialism 2022 Conference Labor Day weekend; more ....

If there’s a lesson to be derived from Gary Dorrien’s account of American socialism, it’s that the movement’s open participation in and with the broad democratic left benefits the socialist cause.

DSA’s six-year growth spurt has fundamentally changed the organization. To resolve the deep issues it faces, it needs to meet the organizational challenges this change poses.

Even among Marx-friendly economists, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor. But its technical validity is less important than the core message: workers are exploited because the value they create is undemocratically taken by capitalists.

Piketty’s new book, “A Brief History of Equality,” is perhaps his most optimistic work. Piketty proposes a truly radical policy agenda — a universal minimum inheritance, worker control over the boards of corporations and “confiscatory” levels of wealth and income taxation — that he calls “participatory socialism.”