Agathe Dorra is a PhD researcher in political aesthetics at King’s College London
Earlier this year, Spotify announced it would give artists and record labels a boost in promotion if they accepted a lower royalty rate — rates that are already abysmally low. Between fights over compensating artists and the unionization of podcast company workers, it’s clear that even the world of digital streaming has class conflict at its heart.
As Joe Biden staffs his incoming administration, battle lines have been drawn between progressives and centrists. But the real winner has been corporate America, whose lobbyists and consultants have been getting the bulk of the plum jobs.
Sometimes referred to as the “Soviet Bauhaus,” Vkhutemas featured a radical experiment in student democracy and design that went even further than its German counterpart.
As economic trouble mounts, Trump officials are letting Wall Street banks pay out billions in dividends to shareholders. Bankers are taking self-serving risks with the world economy, because they know that if anything goes wrong, they’ll be bailed out.
Forty years after his murder in New York City, we remember John Lennon’s record of political engagement as a champion of the anti-war movement and a self-styled “instinctive socialist” — which brought him into conflict with Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover.
Since normalizing relations in September, Israel and the United Arab Emirates have teamed up to do what both do best: trample on democratic freedoms, commit atrocities, and whitewash occupation.
Writer David Roth has been the preeminent chronicler of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an interview with Jacobin, Roth talks about four hallucinatory years and what makes the deranged president at the center of them tick.
In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many hoped it would contain an inadvertent silver lining, in the form of reduced carbon emissions. But the real lesson of the past few months is now clear: we can’t stop global warming without radical systemic change.
Janos Marton says that the Manhattan district attorney’s office is “extremely punitive when prosecuting low-income communities of color and pretty weak when prosecuting the rich and powerful.” He says, in an interview with Jacobin, that he is running for DA to change that, aiming to reduce the number of people in jail, stop drug prosecutions, and go after bad bosses who steal workers’ wages.
If education is nothing but a provider of the “human capital” that will help students get a job, the argument to privatize public education will be far too convincing. Instead, we should look at our schools as institutions to educate kids to be citizens in a democracy with expectations for better lives.
Xavier Becerra advocated Medicare for All and tough action against Big Pharma. Too bad the incoming Biden administration he’s set to be a part of as Health and Human Services head has refused to take on the health insurance industry.
The only good thing we have to say about the reactionary film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy is that it’s so boringly told you’ll forget about it in an hour.
After decades of chalking up record profits, Australian universities are now mired in a deep crisis. But if we’re going to defend — let alone rebuild — the sector, its champions have to reject the subordination of education to the bottom line.
The Mad Max veteran villain actor Hugh Keays-Byrne died last week. His performances took us to the demonic dark side of politics and showed that if we dare to struggle, we dare to win.
After four years of having a xenophobic reality TV host in the White House, the desire to just “go back to normal” is understandable. But a return to normalcy would be disastrous, shoring up the plutocratic status quo that gave us Trump in the first place.
The multibillion-dollar luxury sneaker market increasingly seems like something out of a sci-fi novel. But for all its bizarre quirks, there’s no better illustration of the way modern capitalism works, and the direction that it’s going.
Deprived of their basic human rights, asylum seekers in Ireland are taking it upon themselves to agitate for change. The system of Direct Provision needs to be abolished and replaced with a radically different policy toward refugees.
In the wake of the pandemic, Australian renters are once again facing the threat of mass evictions. The militant renters’ struggles of the Great Depression are an excellent model for the movement that’s taking shape today.
Amazon represents the pinnacle challenge to union organizers and socialists throughout the country. Are we in a 1919 moment, still a generation of failures away from breakthrough success? Or closer to 1935, approaching the tipping point of winning real worker power?
Stephen Cohen, who passed away earlier this year, resisted ideological conformity at every turn. The great historian of Nikolai Bukharin and the Russian Revolution left behind a deep body of work that will remain invaluable for generations of socialists to come.