Benjamin Y. Fong is honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge (Verso 2023).
The US is remarkable for its extreme relationship to drugs, marked by a love affair with psychoactive substances of all kinds and also draconian efforts to curtail drug use. That relationship has roots in America’s particularly virulent strain of capitalism.
Activist and organizer Norman Hill was present for every major development in the civil rights movement during the 1960s. He spoke to Jacobin about the arc of the movement, the legacy of its leadership, and the lessons for the modern left.
In the absence of a powerful workers’ movement, 19th-century reformers blamed alcohol for poverty and despair. Their assumption that moral shortcomings rather than political and economic ones were the root cause unfortunately resonates with our politics today.
John Brophy earned the moniker “Mr. CIO” in the 1930s for his excellent organizing for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He was steadfast and never flashy, which is perhaps why he’s been forgotten. It’s also what makes him a model for our times.
The next Bernie Sanders campaign, if it happens at all, could be used to build an organization that helps transcend the Left’s current impasse. Bernie 2024 — but make it a new beginning instead of a last hurrah.
Pharma companies and shrewd investors are poised to make massive profits off the medical legalization of psychedelics. For now, they’re united with the psychedelic movement’s true believers — an uneasy truce that must break in one party’s favor.
Tasked with carrying out what ought to be state functions, but dependent on private interests, NGOs will never challenge the basic structures of capitalism.
Last year, both Arizona and California voted on ballot initiatives to tax the rich. So why did it fail in blue state California but pass in libertarian Arizona?
Some “anti-elitists” on the Right say they want the GOP to be the party of the working class. But what they’re really offering is a PR campaign that won’t fundamentally change the lives of workers.
We must not choose between staving off economic catastrophe or a public health disaster. We can do both — if we immediately expand Medicare to cover everyone while safely and simultaneously rebuilding our healthcare infrastructure.”
Bernie Sanders can’t continue campaigning as usual, and he certainly can’t drop out of the race. We desperately need Bernie to retool his entire operation to demand a robust government response to the coronavirus — a response the Democratic Party will never spearhead themselves.
Medicare for All is not just about fixing our broken health-care system. It’s about unlocking the power of a mass, working-class movement in the United States.
They say, “Bernie is too old.” We say, “Better to be old and right than young and a shithead.”
Social media will always be destructive for the Left. We should log the fuck off.
The advent of capitalism didn’t just regiment our working lives. It changed the very meaning of free time.