USA/Canada

In his latest Substack newsletter , US socialist and labour-movement writer and activist Eric Blanc writes about the challenges posed for workplace organisation by the fact that many more workers live over wider areas than in the past. He notes that the average American today commutes 20.5 miles to work each way — a 27 per cent commute time increase since 1980 (the first year the US Census began tracking the figure). Britain gives the same picture for average work-commute distances. 1890-99: 2.23 miles; 1930-39: 4.34 miles; 1999-98: 9.07 miles; 2019: 11.5 miles. This means that union...

Bernie Sanders is trying to force a vote to direct the U.S. State Department to look into whether Israel is using U.S. equipment or assistance to violate human rights in Gaza. He spoke to Jake Tapper on CNN about it on 14 January ( click here for video ). What is going on in Gaza right now is a horrendous humanitarian catastrophe. 23,000 people have been killed, almost 60,000 have been wounded, and two thirds of the people who have been killed are women and children. 70% of the housing units in Gaza have been destroyed. If I use the word Dresden, Germany, you think about the horrific...

The Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were a high-water mark for Socialist politics in the U.S. Sanders, who campaigned as a Democrat, won over thirteen million votes, 43% of the total, in his first attempt. The self-defined “democratic socialist” came within a hair’s breadth of defeating Hillary Clinton and winning the Democratic nomination. He would almost certainly have defeated Donald Trump in the general election. It was a remarkable result, considering the history of socialist politics in the U.S. Most historians point to 1912, when Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate...

A Presidential candidate who went around brandishing a chainsaw, claims he got hints on strategy from his cloned mastiff hounds, and relishes in the nickname El Loco? The warning signs were not enough to deter the majority of voters in Argentina from electing anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei their president. Milei’s policies comprise a far-right fantasy wish list for the country. Abolish its currency and central bank. Give the rich massive tax cuts at the expense of social security programmes. Legalise the sale of human organs. Criminalise abortion. Remove controls on gun ownership. Cut ties...

Between the 1880s, when state coercion swelled a previously much smaller-scale system of similar institutions, and the last school closing in 1997, something like 150,000 children from Canada’s indigenous peoples — First Nations, Métis and Inuits — were effectively incarcerated in residential schools. In the 1930s, this included one third of indigenous children. Most of the “residential schools” were run by Catholic organisations; at the system’s height in 1931, 44 out of 81, though only a quarter of Canada’s population was Catholic and, unlike Ireland, it was not a Catholic state. In 1969...

I pay attention to politics in a number of countries, some of which I also vote in. I’m an optimist by nature and I see real possibilities for wins by parties I like. For example, in the UK most polls for a long time now have shown Labour forming the next government, which would be a good thing. Polls in Israel show Netanyahu’s support in free-fall, and that too is good news. But public opinion polls in the United States are the stuff of nightmares. The website RealClearPolitics aggregates all the major polls. The eight most recent polls regarding the 2024 elections — from respected pollsters...

Bradley Onishi’s book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next is an attempt to trace back from the 6 January 2021 riot at the Capitol the influence of White Christian Nationalism (WCN) and see how it has become, according to Onishi, a core part of the Trump-MAGA movement. He concludes that 6 January will not be the last attempt at a coordinated, violent insurrection against democracy. He also tells his personal story about how he became a born-again Evangelical in Orange County, California, a teenage zealot in the Rose Drive Friends Church...

The United Auto Workers (UAW) strikes in the US look close to ending, with major concessions won by the union. Strikes were suspended on Monday 30 October. The UAW had taken six weeks of action (starting 15 September), which was spread to include, eventually, around 35,000 of the UAW’s estimated 146,000 membership in the three affected companies, Ford, General Motors (GM) and Stellantis (Fiat-Chrysler-PSA). Major steps came in late October towards contract agreements, with union president Shawn Fain announcing tentative deals at Stellantis, Ford and, finally, on 30 Oct, GM. These are set to...

This report was written by Viktor Medem, an unaffiliated socialist activist, writing in a personal capacity. We are publishing the report as a contribution to debate and discussion around left perspectives on the issues. For Workers' Liberty's own response, click here . In the United States, the response of left-wing Palestine activists to Hamas’s 7 October massacre of 1,400 Israelis has created fault lines whose full implications are only beginning to become clear. What is clear, however, is how news of the massacre was greeted. When it broke, the response of almost all the major Palestine...

A US woman is suing after being forced to give birth in prison showers. Pregnancy Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center and Sullivan & Cromwell LLP filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in Alabama on behalf of a woman whose constitutional rights were violated when a US prison treated her with cruel indifference, first restricting her access to necessary medical care during her high-risk pregnancy and then ignoring her pleas for help as she delivered her baby alone in a filthy jail shower — almost losing her life. Ashley Caswell was two months into her high-risk pregnancy when she was detained...