US police have long recruited military veterans with conditions that make them prone to violence and aggression. The problem is even worse when it comes to ICE, whose leaders valorize brutality and allow officers to kill with impunity.
Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work
Two University of California tech workers explain their unionization process — and how unions can help recapture the original promise of tech being used to better people’s lives rather than make the worst people in the world ever richer.
Hollywood Is Losing Not Just Jobs but Entire Lineages
Runaway production isn’t just costing Hollywood jobs. It’s severing the intergenerational chains along which film crafts are passed down, replacing an industry town’s living inheritance with a dislocated workforce that must always start from scratch.
The US Beats Europe — in Wasteful Health Care Spending
People sometimes point to individual consumption to argue that the US is better off than Western Europe. But this comparison neglects how much more unequal the US is and how much more money we burn in our irrational private health care system.
Yes, the Left Won Big Last Night
Before the votes had even been counted, some were treating last night’s Michigan result as a defeat for the Left. This is hard to square with the fact that well beyond Abdul El-Sayed’s win, progressives and socialists won major races.
American Freedom Was Built on Endless Conquest
The Founders made expansion the precondition of American freedom. We must find an alternative.
Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic essay claims the Democratic Socialists of America has betrayed the legacy of its founder, Michael Harrington. It gets DSA’s history, and what the organization is today, wrong.
What to Do When Your Union Contract Is Voted Down
The answer to union contracts being voted down is not for organizers to lower workers’ expectations. It’s to seize that vote as an opportunity to organize those expectations into collective power.
Ruling-Class Disarray Let the GOP Go Off the Rails
The Republican Party’s descent into chaos wasn’t Donald Trump’s doing. After successfully beating back the labor movement, the capitalist class became too disorganized to restrain the monster it created.
No, Americans Aren’t Better Off Than Western Europeans
You were born on the wrong continent. Yes, the United States has a greater GDP per capita than Western Europe. But that GDP has not translated into broader prosperity in time and well-being for ordinary workers.
Nobody Asked for AI
We tend to think that markets reflect consumer choice. But the artificial-intelligence boom has been powered by the investment decisions of concentrated capital rather than by consumer demand.
Mainstream economics cannot accept the concept of contradiction that is foundational for Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism. David Harvey explains why we need the Marxist perspective if we want to make sense of capital’s latest mutations in the age of AI.
New York’s Socialist Victories Can't Be So Easily Dismissed
Centrist Democrats are writing off New York City socialist wins as a fluke reducible to gentrification and low turnout. But it was the Democratic Party machine itself that spent decades cultivating a depoliticized electorate.
The Marxist Case for the Technofeudal Hypothesis
Yanis Varoufakis has called Big Tech’s overweening power to shape the modern economy “technofeudalism.” Writing for Jacobin, he argues that this isn’t a moral critique but one based in the dynamic of capital accumulation today.
Mexican Sovereignty in the Era of the Donroe Doctrine
US governments have long relied on Mexico as a southern gendarme, even as it proudly declares its sovereignty. Faced with Trumpian imperialism, the challenge for Claudia Sheinbaum’s government is to make that independence more real.
Socialists Are Out-Organizing the Democratic Establishment
The Democratic establishment’s hysteria over the Democratic Socialists of America’s organizing methods has it exactly backward: the Democratic Party has almost no ability to democratically organize voters, while DSA is reviving grassroots campaigning.