Pride month was established in June to acknowledge a pivotal event in queer American history — the Stonewall Uprising. On June 28, 1969, a popular gay bar in New York City was targeted by a police raid, as it had been countless times before. But on this occasion, the patrons fought back. The story is common knowledge to most queer people in the U.S., but some details bear retelling.
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In the years since our now-Vice President J.D. Vance published his disingenuous memoir Hillbilly Elegy — which many Appalachians criticized as “poverty porn” designed to launch his political career — Appalachians have continued our tradition of “talking back.” We published books like What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018) and Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy…
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Earlier this month, Donald Trump took his war against California and its web of environmental policies to a new extreme. Around the same time as he was federalizing the California National Guard and preparing to deploy hundreds of marines into Los Angeles, at Trump’s behest, Congress was voting to overturn California’s state laws phasing out the sale of new gas-based passenger vehicles by…
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I’m always consumed by the same question: How will this endless, brutal spectacle of killing finally end? Will it be like a movie — justice prevailing, liberation won, goodness triumphing over evil? Will the ending even be worthy of the horrors we’ve endured? Or will it all fade away in an open-ended scene, full of unknowns, unanswered questions, and the absence of closure?
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My dear friend, Bill Moyers, died yesterday. He was the finest interviewer I’ve ever worked with, probing, fearless, and profoundly attuned to both the fragility and the enduring promise of democracy. With a rare combination of moral clarity and intellectual generosity, Bill devoted his life to illuminating the dangers that threatened the democratic imagination and nurturing its most humane…
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In the final sprint leading up to Zohran Mamdani’s historic win on Tuesday, the New York City mayoral primary took on an unusually refreshing tone: one of cooperation. Shortly before early voting started, Mamdani, a state assemblymember and unabashed democratic socialist, cross-endorsed with City Comptroller Brad Lander. It was a good match. In spots where 33-year-old Mamdani’s political…
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A watershed moment in the fight to hold corporations accountable for complicity in Israel’s war crimes: A.P. Møller Maersk has become the first global shipping company to halt the transport of goods to and from Israeli settlements after facing increasing pressure from the Mask off Maersk campaign. This marks a seismic shift in corporate accountability, and in the shipping and logistics industry as…
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Liberal elites have always pledged allegiance to capital over people. They pretend to be pro-working class but quietly usher in fascism for fear of the evil S-word: socialism. Today, we’re seeing militarized police and the National Guard being called in to crush protests against US-funded genocide and racist anti-immigration policies. A century ago, Italy’s liberal elite watched Mussolini’s Blackshirts brutalize leftists in the streets because those elites fully bought into the idea that fascist violence was better than socialist governance. Time and again, liberals only pretend to fight against rising authoritarianism because actually winning that fight would threaten the capitalist order that benefits them.
The stark reality we’re up against is that capital needs to keep all its consumption units (us!) isolated, desperate, and afraid of each other. It’s the time-tested recipe for waging war on the working class.
Italy’s liberal government in the 1920s maintained the fantasy that they could remain “neutral” between socialist workers and fascist paramilitaries. When factory occupations spread across Turin and Milan, and peasants seized unused estates, the liberals didn’t know what to do. They feared empowering the left more than they feared the fascist reaction. Their courts bent a knee to Mussolini’s squadristi while they violently suppressed communist organizers. Their police stood aside as Blackshirts burned union halls, but then cracked skulls of striking workers who were blocking scabs.
“Liberal elites tolerated fascist lawlessness because it destroyed what they feared most: the factories and fields humming with workers’ councils.” – Clara Mattei, The Capital Order
US Democrats’ refusal to wield state power isn’t incompetence, it’s class discipline. Every feigned helplessness (“the Senate parliamentarian said no,” or “we need Republican votes”) reveals the truth: liberal governance exists to enforce capital’s boundaries. With a few pen strokes, the Biden administration could have erased all student debt, as they did for $143 billion of it. They could have ordered Medicare to negotiate drug prices down to $0 tomorrow, as the VA already does. They could have abolished the debt ceiling farce, as Treasury’s Platinum Coin option demonstrates.
These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re deliberately unused weapons in the state’s arsenal. Why? Because each would disempower creditors, disrupt insurance & Big Pharma profiteering, and expose the debt ceiling as yet another class war tactic.
Look at the recent Democratic mayoral primary election in New York City. The Democratic Party doesn’t fear left primary challengers, it manages them. It allows just enough dissent to let off steam, just enough “progress” to keep up the supply of hopium, but never enough to actually shift power. AOC’s victory was absorbed into the machine. Sanders’ movement was neutralized. Mamdani’s win will either be crushed outright or, if he somehow makes it past the general election, immediately shackled by the party’s real power brokers. That’s the function of the Democratic Party: not to represent voters, but to discipline them.
The left keeps falling for the same trick, election after election. We pour energy into primary battles, celebrate narrow victories, and then act shocked when the party’s backroom operators step in to void the results. We shouldn’t be shocked though – the DNC already told us (in court, under oath!) that it doesn’t owe voters a damn thing.
The “political will” deficit is a power surplus for capital. When liberals plead procedural constraints while rubber-stamping $900 billion military budgets, expanding ICE detention camps, bailing out Silicon Valley Bank in 48 hours, they’re not failing. They’re succeeding spectacularly at their real mission, which is protecting capital’s veto over human needs. This is what class rule looks like with a government that can instantly mobilize trillions for banks and bombs while imposing devastating austerity.
It’s a government that claims ‘no money’ exists to house the homeless while 16 million homes sit vacant. It’s a government that claims spending is out of control and we can’t possibly feed children, while farmers are paid to destroy crops. It’s a government that claims nationalized healthcare would bring about long wait times and death panels while underfunded hospitals are already closing in rural areas and corporate consolidation is driving small medical practices out of business.
The “neutral” state is a myth. Every inaction is a choice to preserve the hierarchy where capital commands and people are forced to beg. Every inaction by those in power is deliberate.
Waiting for establishment politicians to act has always been a losing strategy. Civil rights victories followed decades of illegal sit-ins and economic boycotts. Even the New Deal didn’t happen because politicians suddenly grew hearts – it came from worker uprisings that shook the system. The specter of communism, still lingering from Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik revolution, haunted America’s elites. Terrified of labor’s ultimate victory here, they granted concessions only after strikes and boycotts began to make business as usual impossible.
Half-measures and performative platitudes have made 21st century liberals functionally indistinguishable from their supposed opponents. We’ve seen this before. The Italian liberals handed power to Mussolini rather than risk socialist victory. Social Democrat leaders in 1930s Germany refused to form a coalition with the communists against Nazism.
“As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” – Michael Parenti, Blackshirts & Reds
We have the power to break the cycle by acknowledging what earlier movements let slide: that state power under capitalism cannot be reformed, only replaced. Every community fridge, every eviction blockade, and every wildcat strike builds muscle memory for the revolutionary change of hearts & minds we need. The fascists already have their playbook. Their police, military, and private militias are already on duty to suppress any & all dissent while liberals waste time debating procedural rules.
Our task is to build dual power structures that make the capitalist state unnecessary for survival. Mutual aid networks must evolve beyond temporary crisis response and one-off GoFundMe drives into permanent alternative infrastructure. Let’s replace broken promises with community land trusts that evict BlackRock, worker councils that redirect production to meet our needs, and neighborhood assemblies that redistribute resources without waiting for permission from the oligarchy’s crumbling institutions.
These are the logical next steps beyond existing tenant unions, food distribution projects, and strike funds. The more we can meet people’s material needs through collective action, the less hold the decaying system has over us. We need to get into a position where our communities are already practicing self-governance.
The Democratic Party will never be a vehicle for liberation. It will occasionally let a leftist through the gates, either to co-opt them or to make an example of them – but it will never, ever surrender control. Our way out is to stop begging for scraps and start building real power elsewhere: in our own communities, in our workplaces, in organizations that answer to the working class and nobody else. Otherwise, we’re just playing a rigged game – and we all know Lucy always pulls away the football.
Only organized people power can stop what’s coming. Not petitions. Not voting drives. Not appeals to decency. The networks of community & working class solidarity we build today will determine whether we bow to fascism with weak individualism or stand as an unbreakable collective.
The time for accepting incrementalism is over. Bipartisan compromise is a fairy tale. We need to become the crisis that capital cannot contain.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
As an Iranian, I felt a surge of relief — and cautious hope — when I heard news of the ceasefire between Iran and Israel. The bloodshed had gone on for 12 long days. The killing, the airstrikes, the relentless tit-for-tat violence — it all had to stop. If for nothing else, for the sake of the people on both sides. Now, of course, Israel’s massacre in Gaza must end, too. But even in that…
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It’s been three years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an odious Supreme Court ruling that has unleashed a veritable crisis of rights, health, and safety for people who can become pregnant. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and sent abortion’s legality back to the states, abortion bans have spread widely across much of the U.S. As of June 2025…
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Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.
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On June 10, my brother Mohammad and my cousin Kareem set out on foot at 2 am from Rimal neighborhood in northern Gaza, walking nearly 15 kilometers to the aid distribution point located near the dividing line between the north and south of the Strip. These aid points are under full Israeli control and are deliberately opened during the most dangerous hours — deep in the night…
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Inflation is not some natural economic phenomenon, nor is it merely the result of too much money chasing too few goods. That’s the myth popularized by Milton Friedman and his monetarist acolytes. Rather, inflation is always and everywhere a function of the power of monopolies and capital to manipulate scarcity and extract greater profits from the working class. We’ve seen this reality on full display in recent years, from the pandemic profiteering of 2020-2022 to the ongoing corporate price-gouging under the guise of “supply chain issues” and “inflationary pressures.” As economist Isabella Weber demonstrates in her work on sellers’ inflation, corporations leverage moments of crisis to hike prices far beyond cost increases, not because they must, but because they can. The pandemic was a textbook example: under the cover of public confusion about government spending, firms engaged in brazen price-gouging, with some sectors seeing profit spikes of up to 1000%. Even now, as inflation cools, corporations from PepsiCo to ExxonMobil continue to post record profits while blaming “the economy” for price hikes.
From a Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) perspective, inflation is not caused by government spending in and of itself, but by how that spending interacts with real resource constraints. Warren Mosler, a foundational MMT thinker, argues that inflation occurs when the currency-issuing government chooses to pay higher prices – whether through excessive military expenditures (like the $175 billion in new Ukraine and Israel funding just passed by Congress), poorly targeted subsidies (such as the unchecked corporate bailouts of the CARES Act), or failure to regulate corporate profiteering. Yet mainstream economics, particularly since the Bolshevik Revolution, has deliberately conflated inflation with fiscal profligacy to justify austerity. As Clara Mattei meticulously documents in The Capital Order, the push for austerity economics was not born out of necessity but as a political project to discipline labor and safeguard capitalist hierarchies. It’s a playbook we see repeating today as the Fed jacks up interest rates despite clear evidence that corporate greed, not wage growth, is driving inflation.
The Federal Reserve’s approach to inflation by raising interest rates is not just ineffective but actively counterproductive. Mosler has long argued that the Fed misunderstands inflation entirely. When central banks hike rates, they signal to industry that higher costs are acceptable. They aren’t curbing inflation; they’re embedding it. Worse, higher interest rates redistribute wealth upward. Asset-holders reap windfalls from increased yields while workers face layoffs and wage suppression. When the Fed raised rates to 5.5% in 2023, corporate profits hit record highs while real wages stagnated and layoffs spiked in tech, media, and manufacturing. The Fed’s tools are not designed to stabilize prices for the many, but to protect the financial interests of the few. The class bias is undeniable.
The solution to inflation is not austerity, but structural intervention. If supply chain disruptions drive price surges (as with the ongoing Red Sea shipping crises), the answer is public investment in resilient infrastructure and domestic production, not reliance on exploitative global supply chains. If wages rise after decades of stagnation (as with the UAW’s historic 2023 contract wins), the resulting price adjustments are a one-time recalibration, not runaway inflation. And if artificial scarcity is the culprit, as is blatantly the case in sectors like pharmaceuticals (where insulin price-fixing continues) and housing (where private equity firms hoard homes), then the state should break corporate price-setting power through antitrust action, price controls, and direct public provisioning. In a noncapitalist system, the state would surely take these measures. The refusal to do so is not an economic oversight but a political choice. As Mattei’s work reveals, capitalism relies on the myth of inflation as an uncontrollable force to justify dismantling social programs and suppressing wages. It’s a tactic we’re seeing today as Republicans demand cuts to Social Security and Medicare under the guise of “fighting inflation.”
Under capitalism, inflation is weaponized against the working class. Rising rents (up 30% since 2020), food prices (with “shrinkflation” hitting 95% of grocery items), and energy costs (as oil giants post $200 billion in profits) are wielded as a cudgel to enforce discipline, forcing workers into longer hours, reduced benefits, and precarious gig labor. Yet inflation is not inherently harmful to all. As MMT scholars note, inflation erodes the value of debt, which is a boon to indebted households. The real issue is not inflation itself, but whether wages keep pace. For decades, they haven’t. Capital has seized an ever-larger share of income while labor’s share stagnates, a direct result of weakened unions and systemic attacks on working-class organizations. The recent wave of strikes – from autoworkers to Hollywood actors – show the path forward: militancy works.
The path forward demands we do more than tinker at the edges. Princeton researchers have confirmed what the 2024 election cycle makes obvious: the US is not a democracy but an oligarchy, with policy crafted to serve capital’s interests. Inflation discourse, like all economic narratives under capitalism, is a battleground. To reclaim it, the working class must reject the lie that inflation stems from government generosity (like Biden’s stimulus checks) and instead recognize it as a symptom of capitalist predation. The alternative is not technical policy tweaks, but a fundamental challenge to the capital order – one that replaces private control with democratic planning, and scarcity with solidarity. The recent successes of rent control campaigns in cities like Minneapolis and the growing push for public utilities (as in Maine’s Pine Tree Power initiative) prove another world is possible if we’re willing to fight for it.
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This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
Democrats claim that they are looking for candidates to fix their electoral losses following Donald Trump’s victory. The data shows that Democrats lost ground among young men, urban communities of color, and among voters who cared about affordability issues. Much of the Democratic Party’s leadership is so old that three Democratic Congressional Caucus members died while still in office in 2025…
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Rani Dasi, a U.S. citizen whose roots in North Carolina stretch back nearly two decades, has cast a ballot in at least 20 elections without incident. But her right to vote, along with hundreds of thousands of voters in the state, is now at risk after the Justice Department filed a federal lawsuit which may wrongly remove eligible voters like her from the rolls. On Tuesday, Dasi and others went to…
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Israel’s attack on Iran opens a huge danger of escalation in the Middle East. Israel has a long history of attacking Iran — including bombing Iranian facilities, assassinating Iranian leaders and scientists, launching cyberattacks, and more. Iran has on occasion struck back, including launching strikes on Tel Aviv in this latest back and forth. But this latest assault is more dangerous…
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In 2022, Alabama became one of the first states in the nation to ban slavery without exception. A constitutional amendment, passed overwhelmingly by voters, removed language that had long allowed involuntary servitude to continue in state prisons — a holdover from the 13th Amendment’s infamous “exception clause.” The 13th Amendment, though widely celebrated at the time for abolishing most forms of…
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As Donald Trump considers a U.S. war with Iran and the Pentagon builds up military forces in the Middle East, I find myself returning, oddly, to a question posed by Leo Tolstoy: “How many men are necessary to change a crime into a virtue?” He wondered this in his 1894 treatise on Christian nonviolence, The Kingdom of God is Within You, paraphrasing a pamphlet by Christian anarchist and…
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David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)–United Service Workers West (USWW), was detained earlier this month for doing what every labor leader should be doing right now: showing up. Huerta was arrested this month in Los Angeles while protesting citywide raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), exercising his right to speak out…
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Before the war began, summer in Gaza was a season of joy. Families thrived on creating small moments of happiness, even amid daily electricity cuts and the suffocating siege. Many loved to flock to the beach or spend time at the water chalets, hoping to find some refreshing relief from the scorching sun. They would sit beneath wide umbrellas, spread blankets across the golden beach sand…
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On Saturday morning tens of thousands of protesters gathered in downtown Los Angeles as part of the nationwide “No Kings” demonstrations. Organizers estimated there were over 40,000 people in the crowd. Protesters carrying signs denouncing Trump as well as Mexican, Palestinian, and U.S. flags (sometimes upside down) marched through the streets. They demanded “ICE Out of LA” and denounced Trump’s…
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In the movies, people bolt upright, panting after dramatic awakenings from bad dreams. I thought that was an exaggeration until I experienced it behind bars. In my nightmare, my 2-year-old son entered the prison where I was incarcerated. He was trying to reach me, but the prison guards grabbed him and wouldn’t let go. I jolted awake in my prison cell, just like I’d seen on screen hundreds of times…
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Armored National Guard trucks rumbling down Sunset Boulevard. The mayor declaring a citywide curfew. LAPD officers in riot gear firing flash bangs and rubber bullets. Street medics rushing to neutralize tear gas. I watched all this unfold on the streets of Los Angeles five years ago — in June 2020, when I lived in the city and saw firsthand how peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters were met…
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Early this June, smoke from early season Canadian wildfires, which had necessitated mass evacuations in several Canadian provinces, began wafting into the United States. It was a harbinger of what will likely be another dangerous and disruptive summer of fires across the United States and Canada. Yet, while Canadian provinces such as Ontario have been boosting the resources they provide their…
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When did the act of public protest — a right protected by the First Amendment — become an act of “rebellion” eliciting a military response? What began as a fairly small protest against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at an apparel manufacturer in the Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles on June 6, led to an immediate response by federal agents in riot gear using pepper spray…
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Four and a half months after his inauguration, Donald Trump is exercising his authoritarian chops, targeting immigrants in the state he most despises — California. Making good on Trump’s nativist pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security started conducting widespread raids outside workplaces…
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The left’s economic education has long suffered from two fatal deficiencies: the austerity myths of mainstream economics and the commodity-money fetishism of orthodox Marxism. As Pavlina Tcherneva demonstrates in The Case for a Job Guarantee (2020), the ruling class deliberately maintains unemployment as a disciplinary tool to suppress wages and worker power – concrete evidence that “scarcity” is a political construct rather than economic necessity. Meanwhile, because Marx’s critique of political economy (Capital, Vol. 1, 1867) remains foundational, many socialists have misapplied his labor theory of value by conflating money with commodity exchange, ignoring the modern reality of state-created fiat currency. This theoretical confusion has paralyzed revolutionary potential.
The capitalist state’s monetary sovereignty – thoroughly explained by Stephanie Kelton in The Deficit Myth (2020) – reveals austerity to be nothing more than class warfare. Currency-issuing governments face real physical resource constraints, not financial ones (Mitchell, Wray & Watts, Macroeconomics, 2019). When politicians claim we “can’t afford” universal healthcare while rubber-stamping trillion-dollar military budgets, they’re not making accounting errors but enforcing class priorities through what Wynne Godley’s sectoral balance approach (Seven Unsustainable Processes, 1999) proves mathematically: the government deficit equals the non-government surplus. The so-called “national debt” is simply the financial reflection of real resources transferred to the ruling class.
Even among Marxists who correctly reject electoral illusions, dangerous economic misunderstandings persist. Inflation phobias on the left frequently ignore Godley’s fundamental insight that price stability depends on maintaining balance between real output and demand, not abstract money supply. When the Chilean oligarchy deliberately manufactured shortages to overthrow Allende, they confirmed Marx’s famous dictum that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Communist Manifesto, 1848). Randy Wray’s Modern Money Theory (2015, 2024) clarifies that fiat money derives its value from state authority to impose and collect taxes, not from any commodity backing – yet some socialists still advocate for gold-standard thinking or labor vouchers, retreating into utopianism rather than seizing the existing monetary system.
The Job Guarantee (JG) proposals developed by Tcherneva and Mitchell & Muysken (Full Employment Abandoned, 2008) reveal the dialectical nature of reform under capitalism: implemented within the current system, a JG could simply become another tool for enforcing wage discipline; but under worker control, it could abolish the reserve army of labor entirely. This contradiction defines all MMT insights – they become revolutionary only when wielded by movements strong enough to break capital’s structural power. Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony (Prison Notebooks, 1935) explains how the bourgeoisie maintains control by making capitalist relations appear natural and inevitable.
History’s lessons are unambiguous. As Wray documents, the 1930s sit-down strikes won concessions not through policy papers but by physically occupying factories until the National Labor Relations Act was signed. Mitchell’s research on postwar full employment proves it lasted only while militant unions maintained strike capacity. Today’s financialized oligarchy – armed with Gramscian cultural hegemony and Godley’s sectoral balance tools – deploys more sophisticated repression: algorithmic wage theft, financialized housing, and ubiquitous debt peonage. Kelton is correct that the money exists for all social needs; Tcherneva proves jobs could be created immediately; Marx was right that capital will never voluntarily surrender privilege.
Our task therefore isn’t to “implement MMT policies” but to build working-class power capable of commanding the surplus we produce. Mitchell’s JG models become revolutionary when combined with wildcat strikes. Wray’s monetary analysis matters only when redirecting credit from speculation to social needs. As Gramsci taught, we must fight simultaneously in the “trenches” of immediate struggle (rent strikes, debt refusal) and the “cathedral” of ideology (exposing money as class weapon). Kelton’s deficit truths and Marx’s surplus value theory converge on one demand: expropriate the expropriators. Not through elections – through the organized force that made capital tremble in 1917, 1936, and 1968.
Money is the bourgeoisie’s scorecard in a game rigged against workers. Tcherneva’s JG blueprints, Godley’s sectoral balances, and Wray’s tax-driven money all demonstrate another world’s technical possibility. But as Marx declared, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” We’ll change it when our picket lines outnumber their police, our strikes outlast their reserves, and our solidarity becomes the new cultural hegemony. The factories stand idle, the workers stand ready; only the capitalists’ threat of violence stops us. Let’s make that violence obsolete.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.