Abigail Torre grew up in Chile and now lives in Berkeley, California where she is cochair of the East Bay chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.
This summer, in a COVID-19–driven economic crisis, Chile’s opposition forced the right-wing government to allow desperate citizens to draw on their privatized pension funds. But in a constitutional referendum tomorrow, Chileans may go a step further and vote to scrap these widely hated pension funds altogether.
The failure to provide meaningful work to the vast majority of the population is a powerful indictment of our economic system — one more promise capitalism makes but can’t keep.
Bolivia’s MAS party will confront numerous challenges when returning to power. But its resounding victory against the authoritarian right and its roots as a party of social movements represent a radical vision of hope at a time when we need it most.
Early-twentieth-century American socialist Rose Pastor Stokes became a media celebrity after she married a wealthy heir. But her political life was much more interesting: she was one of the Socialist Party’s most effective speakers, inspiring the era’s striking workers with rousing orations.
The victory of Evo Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo party in Bolivia is a triumph for democracy and a rebuke to the right-wing coup plotters. But Bolivia now faces some serious questions: How will the country engage with these recent atrocities perpetrated by the Right? And what will happen to those who committed them?
With the announcement that Olaf Scholz will lead Germany’s SPD into the 2021 elections, chances for a revival of social democracy in the heart of Europe appear grim. But prospects for the radical-left Die Linke aren’t looking much better, either — stalling hopes of a break with Christian Democratic dominance.
New York has a long history of setting climate goals to great fanfare — and then missing them. A new climate law makes more promises, but will Governor Andrew Cuomo deliver?
A year after mass protests erupted in Chile last October, a historic referendum on the Pinochet dictatorship’s 1980 constitution will take place on Sunday. Three decades after the transition to democracy, Chileans now have an opportunity to break with the legacy of violence and dispossession that the constitution has upheld.
Americans want a universal public health plan, but the idea has no champion in this presidential election. Instead, we have Donald Trump’s scorched-earth campaign against the ACA, and Joe Biden moving further and further away from even a universally available public option.
Auto work is typically remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered, however, is how absolutely brutal and violent life on the auto factory floor was — and still is.
Vulnerable Republican senators say their proposed health care bill would protect people with preexisting conditions. But their legislation would actually hurt protections for such people — unsurprisingly, since those senators raked in more than $2.5 million from insurance industry donors.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is surprisingly good for an Aaron Sorkin production. But the artistic liberties he takes with the historical facts, particularly around downplaying or leaving vague the protagonists’ radical politics, tell you a lot about Sorkin’s own blind spots.
After pushback, at the presidential debate last night, Biden thankfully dropped his deficit hawkery and made a strong statement in favor of public investment. Will he be held to his new position if he wins?
To drum up support for World War I, Australia’s ruling class tried to cancel the 1915–17 seasons of the Victorian Football League, labeling fans “truculent shirkers” and “hoodlums.” This did not go over well with the game’s working-class fans.
Since Donald Trump’s election, hyperbolic warnings about a descent into fascism have been constant background noise, even as he has repeatedly shown his weakness. But that noise has made it harder to hear the alarming signals of the past several months, as the White House has prepared the ground for a major power grab in a second Trump term.
Liberal writers sympathetic to the corporate education reform movement are beating the drum about reopening schools, claiming to stand up for low-income students. But attacking teachers and their unions does nothing for poor and working-class students — it simply scapegoats the people who have dedicated their lives to actually helping those students.
Right-wing propaganda claims that socialism is the enemy of individual freedom. The exact opposite is true: socialists work to create the material conditions under which people can truly be free, without the rigid constraints capitalism imposes on their lives.
Netflix’s new Aaron Sorkin movie on the Chicago Seven tries — and fails — to turn a travesty of justice and an attack on the Left into a defense of American institutions.
Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of more than twenty books, including New York 2140, Red Moon, and the Mars trilogy. He talked to Jacobin about his latest work, his vision of socialism, and why we must fight to imagine the end of capitalism rather than the end of the world.
On Friday, an Islamist extremist murdered a schoolteacher in a suburb northwest of Paris. In response, the French interior minister has called for a ban on an anti-Islamophobia legal association wholly unconnected to the atrocity. We need to resist this turn against democracy and justice.