OCTOBER 9, 2026

France’s Students Are Defending Their Future: Can We Learn from Them?
The American Revolution helped inspire France’s struggle for liberty. Now, France’s students are offering Americans an example we ought to consider: A generation can defend its future together instead of being told, one person at a time, to adjust it.

On October 6, students, teachers, and parents took to the streets across France in a national day of action over missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and deteriorating schools. Americans should pay attention to what they are demanding — and what their pressure has already helped put on the political agenda [and expanded the protest to near ‘68-style proportions]. Common Dreams

GOP members’ capitulation to Trump is just the latest failure & Congress willingly dropped the ball on separation of powers
As the Supreme Court returns for a new term this week, we are due for another round of debate about the separation of powers — the fight between the executive and the courts, especially. Just as important, though far less frequently noted, is the balance between the Supreme Court and Congress. And that situation is deeply weird. Here’s how it’s supposed to work but no longer does: Congress writes laws, the courts interpret them, and when Congress disagrees with these statutory interpretations, it has the power to pass a new law to override them. In a sense, Congress’s inaction is easy to explain. It’s an increasingly do-nothing institution. Trump and the current MAGA Congress have revealed — and accelerated — a structural flaw that has been developing for a couple of decades. Several presidencies ago, Congress stopped asserting authority to override major Supreme Court decisions [that are not constitutionally grounded]. Its passivity has continued no matter which party is in power. NYT Opinion

America’s renters are emerging as a political movement
Housing policy has long prioritized homeownership. As young Americans face the prospect of renting indefinitely, more tenants are seeking political clout.

Frustrations over high rents and poor conditions for tenants are creating a national political movement for tenant power, featuring MDC DSA’s Aparna Raj, the Connecticut Tenants Union, Rockville (MD) Renters United and more. “The political focus on renting isn’t just limited to progressive, urban enclaves. Tenants [urban and rural] are increasingly organizing politically to secure collective-bargaining agreements with landlords and to push for broader protections like guaranteed access to counsel for renters facing eviction. The rental industry is taking note. “The proliferation of tenant unions across markets,” as well as proposed laws to protect their rights to organize, may “have significant impacts on property operations,” the National Apartment Association, the rental lobby, said. MarketWatch

Black Power, White Heat, and the Work of Solidarity: A Review
What a history of the 1960s can teach us about organizing in an authoritarian age

Building a movement rooted across racial divides is essential to our movement. That is never an easy task, it requires both working in unison and spaces for autonomy. “Echols tells the story of interracial and cross-racial organizing within the Black freedom movement through two organizations that bookend the decade: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and the Black Panther Party. The Panthers’ commitment to armed self-defense, and later debates over militancy and guerrilla warfare, form part of that history.” Alexandria Shaner, a DSA member, active in Extinction Rebellion, discusses this in “What the 1960s Can Teach us About Cross-Border Solidarity,” a review of Alice Echols’ history of SNCC and the Black Panthers: Black Power, White Heat. ZNetWork

Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Campaign Lit a Spark Beyond Elections
Electoral campaigns can feed workplace struggle by politicizing people, raising their expectations, bringing activists together, and giving them experience organizing others. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns did all four.

Bernie Sanders’s impact on the American left is not typically measured in social movement terms. The story normally goes that democratic socialism returned to national politics after 2015, tens of thousands of people joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a new generation of socialist candidates ran for office, and a much larger left media ecosystem emerged. That’s all true. But another part of the story has received relatively less attention: the role Bernie’s campaigns played in inspiring and cohering a new generation of labor activists. Jacobin via Portside