Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
Before being sent to prison for speaking out against World War I, Eugene Debs delivered a defiant speech to the court that decried the ills of capitalism, held out the democratic promise of socialism, and declared, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” We reprint it here in full.
This summer, military recruiters continue focusing their efforts on twenty-three American cities with large numbers of black and Latino young people. As coronavirus drives thousands into unemployment, the Pentagon is developing bizarre neighborhood profiles and trolling social media to boost their enlistment numbers.
Trump just changed the rules to let Wall Street’s most predatory industry get its hands on hundreds of billions of dollars of ordinary workers’ retirement savings. Now his friends in private equity are celebrating.
Despite the obvious parallels with coronavirus shutdowns, states still show little determination to put in place the measures we’ll need to deal with the climate emergency. For Andreas Malm, we need to stop seeing climate change as a problem for the future — and use state power now to impose a drastic reordering of our economies.
Before smartphones, police violence went mostly unseen — but far more violent interactions are never captured on film. The problem of racist policing won’t be solved by more visibility.
A new book with fresh details about Jeffrey Epstein — his life, death, and relationship with Bill Clinton — reminds us that Epstein’s crimes couldn’t have happened without a system that allowed him to hoard unlimited wealth.
With millions of people ordering basic necessities direct to their homes, the pandemic has massively strengthened big distributors like FedEx and Amazon. But while official discourse celebrates delivery drivers as “heroes,” the logistics firms themselves have used the crisis to undermine workers’ most basic rights.
How much do black lives matter to America’s leading corporations? Not enough to put any real money on the table for their workers.
For centuries, politics on the rock of Gibraltar has been dominated by the imperialist rivalry between Britain and Spain. But faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, communities built solidarity across the disputed border — insisting that the demands of public healthcare stood above the battle for flags and territory.
Mutual aid networks cropped up all over the United States at the start of the lockdown, helping communities organize themselves in the absence of adequate state support. Those projects have a deep history in the US, especially within early organized labor.
Today is International Children’s Day. To celebrate, we spoke to beloved children’s singer Raffi about nurturing the creativity and sense of play of children, his support for Bernie Sanders, organizing against climate change and for racial justice, and how we can create a society in which we “admire and respect the young child as a whole person.”
Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán has used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to silence his critics, even as he endorses street mobilizations by the organized far right. But these aren’t just the pathologies of a country with weak democratic traditions — they’re an extreme version of a reactionary turn happening across the West.
Australia has been hit by one ecological disaster after another this year: first the devastating bushfires, then the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are part of the same rising environmental crisis, and without meaningful action, we’re headed toward dystopia.
Yugoslavia’s partisan movement singlehandedly defeated Nazi occupation and paved the way for a radical transformation of society. Yet socialist Yugoslavia was ultimately broken by its own internal contradictions — and its unwillingness to push that transformation further.
For decades, Europe’s big economies outsourced the problem of pollution by literally shipping their trash to China. When Beijing banned the toxic trade in 2018, it could have served as a wake-up call — but instead, the big polluters have rerouted their garbage to low-wage, low-regulation countries inside the European Union.
While public-health guidance tells citizens to work from home, for millions of low-wage workers, this has never been a realistic option. As Europe’s governments ease the lockdown, it’s working-class people who are on the firing line of a second wave of infections.
Period dramas too often treat their subject with polite reverence and slavish accuracy. Tony McNamara’s new show, The Great, flips the genre on its head, telling the story of Russia’s great Empress with all the grotesque comedy the eighteenth-century Russian court deserves.
The G20’s plans to postpone 76 emerging countries’ debt repayments are a band-aid on fundamental injustices in the global economy. Rebuilding the Global South after the pandemic will require a complete upending of the international order — and the defending states’ sovereignty rather than financial markets’.
The famed historian Walter Rodney was also an important political leader in his native country. In this republished essay, Rodney sets out a biting critique of the Forbes Burnham dictatorship that went on to murder him in 1980, forty years ago today.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, calls to cut police budgets have spread like wildfire. In an interview with Jacobin, two Chicago city council members explain why they’re calling to defund the police and why the city’s mayor Lori Lightfoot can’t credibly call herself a “progressive.”