Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
Despite branding himself as a fresh “pro-worker” conservative, former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass believes that excluding poor children from key social welfare benefits is good and we should do more of it. It’s conservative, all right — but the furthest thing from “pro-worker.”
Bernie Sanders is absolutely right to insist we should ignore the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling against a minimum wage increase. Reducing poverty is far more important than adhering to fusty, old Senate rules.
In recent years, the women’s strike in Chile has become a driving force in the broader fight for dignity and equality across society. As the country prepares to rewrite its constitution, feminist organizers want to steer the process toward deep social transformation.
The far-right Proud Boys is an odious and reactionary force. But the Canadian government’s decision to designate them a “terrorist group” is an overreach that threatens the ability of progressives to organize themselves and protest injustice.
Bill Gates is making the rounds promoting his plan to solve climate change. But his new book ignores the fact that the same capitalist system that made him rich is the one killing the planet. We need a working-class environmentalism.
Here’s a documentary no one asked for: a Van Jones and Meghan McCain production arguing that the problem with America isn’t poverty and exploitation, but political divisiveness. It’s warmed-over centrism that won’t solve any of the problems ailing the United States.
The horrifying story of the 1969 police murder of Fred Hampton is now well known. But there’s still much to be revealed about the case — like the information in bureau files newly obtained by Jacobin showing the FBI awarded Special Agent Roy Martin Mitchell, the handler of informant William O’Neal who was key to the raid that killed Hampton, a $200 bonus for work well done.
Ronald Suny has given us the best picture to date of Stalin’s path to the October Revolution. But the story of the future dictator’s early life doesn’t explain the rise of Stalinism. The key developments and choices that produced that system came after the Bolsheviks took power.
Governor Andrew Cuomo offered blanket immunity from prosecution for negligent nursing home executives last year. Now those who lost love ones during the pandemic thanks to those executives’ greed have nowhere to turn. Those who put profit over human life — and Cuomo — need to be held responsible.
Since the 1990s, workers in the Basque Country have gone on strike more than twice as often as any other workforce in Europe. The Basque unions insist that we have to fight for our interests — a strike-fund-centered strategy that has won huge victories even in the age of austerity.
For years, Germany has imported thousands of underpaid workers from Eastern Europe, as the EU’s richest country seeks to solve its care crisis on the cheap. Now, a Bulgarian care worker and her trade union are taking that model to court — hoping to abolish the sector’s notoriously exploitative practices.
Dozens of congresspeople are pressing Vice President Kamala Harris to ignore the Senate parliamentarian and fulfill her $15 minimum wage promise. The Biden administration has no one to blame but themselves for inaction.
At its high point, the Communist Party of Australia united thousands of working-class militants in a struggle to transform the world around them. These everyday communists were brave, flawed, and sometimes heroic.
Under capitalism, automation destroys jobs. In a socialist society, it could free us from work and offer untold leisure to all.
The Russian Revolution enthused anti-colonial movements around the world, fueling hopes that the European empires could be overthrown. But the revolt against empire was also fundamental to Lenin’s own strategy, as he worked to unite workers’ revolts in the metropoles with national struggles to end colonial exploitation.
Joe Biden’s statement yesterday about the Amazon union drive in Alabama hit pro-labor notes. But he’ll have to back up his rhetoric with concrete action: Biden must fight to pass the PRO Act.
In a country that is already home to some of the worst restrictions on women’s rights, the Honduran Congress voted last month to lock in its bans on abortion and gay marriage, making them almost impossible to overturn. It’s a reminder that, as the feminist green tide washes over much of Latin America, there is still much work to be done.
President Biden’s immigration reform proposal at least rhetorically acknowledges the pain inflicted by existing US policy. But it continues to paint immigrants as criminals, instead of workers responding to labor demands and looking for a better life. We should fight for something better.
The Civil War and Reconstruction–era Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens understood far better than most of his contemporaries that fully uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights — first the right of some human beings to own others, but also beyond it.
From its radical roots in the 1970s, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has gradually been captured by conservative, pro-corporate interests. The festival should be more than a corporate street party: it needs to recover its original spirit by empowering Mardi Gras members.