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There is a long and confusing collection of names for those who are both leftists and feminists: Marxist feminist, socialist feminist, materialist feminist, black feminist, feminist socialist, anarcho-feminist… and so on. And straddling the line between socialist and liberal feminists, would be social welfare feminists. In the 1960s and 1970s in the heyday of the women’s liberation movement, when “feminism” was too tame a word, the mainstream feminists were social welfare feminists. They supported abortion rights of course, and equal pay for equal work, as do all feminists, but they also supported public childcare and welfare. Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine are examples. But the movement declined, and at the same time that so many activists were moving into careers and families, American politics was moving right, into neo-liberalism — and it took mainstream feminism with it. …

In Brazil, police officers are rarely held accountable for murderous attacks on citizens. Whenever a member of the police shoots someone, the agent responsible can easily claim that he was counteracting resistance. An “act of resistance” is then written and immediately filed. This institutional and legal justification — which needs only to be unilaterally asserted by the agent — automatically exempts the police from any kind of formal responsibility, ultimately limiting the possibility of an official investigation.The fact that these acts of resistance most often concern a specific population — black poor youth from peripheral areas who are nevertheless formally protected by civil rights — poses the question of how control and repression of different people within the homogenous category of citizenship can vary. Even though they are fully recognized as Brazilian citizens, and thus entitled to all rights formally guaranteed by the state, …

The battle for the presidential nomination has exposed ideological and class fault lines within the Democratic Party. The opposition to Hillary Clinton’s position on trade and other economic issues reveal the sense among many registered Democrats that the Party establishment has abandoned their economic concerns. The shift in the class interests of the Party has not been a sudden one, precipitated by the Trans-Pacific Partnership or even NAFTA, but part of a longer story of transformation, a shift of the Democratic base away from its roots in the labor union halls in northern cities and toward white-collar tech workers in the suburbs and gentrified enclaves of major metropolises. Since the 1960s, suburban knowledge professionals and high-tech corporations have supplanted urban ethnics and labor unions as the party’s core constituency. …