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Daniel Denvir is the author of All-American Nativism and the host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio.
Over the past two centuries, US imperial interventions have had a devastating impact on the peoples of Latin America. Those interventions have also played a crucial role in US domestic politics, enabling new power blocs to cohere and develop their strategies.
The Bush administration’s war on terror meted out unthinkable violence in the Middle East while imposing an atmosphere of repression and nativism at home. It was the perfectly malignant petri dish for helping produce Donald Trump.
Health care workplaces have replaced steel mills and auto plants as the nation’s big employers. But while industrial workers once had mighty unions, hospital workers have struggled by comparison to win representation and good contracts.
The great labor historian Michael Denning reflects on what Antonio Gramsci’s work has to tell us today.
Inflation is far from being a boring economic concept — it’s a question of who gets what in society, and how much power workers have versus bosses and shareholders.
In order to put social housing back on the agenda in American politics, we first have to understand how public housing was destroyed — especially by Bill Clinton’s Hope VI program.
During the New Deal, right-wing businesspeople were furious that their authority was being challenged in the workplace and in society. So they started organizing. And that’s the origin story of the modern conservative movement.
Neoliberalism is embedded in the European Union’s DNA. But for the continent’s left, there are few good alternatives.
Marxists have a powerful critique of exploitation in the capitalist workplace, but our analysis can’t stop there. A comprehensive analysis of capitalism, Nancy Fraser argues, must also account for the social relations that make the official economy possible.
A group of 20th-century intellectuals saw the democratic nation-state as a threat to private property. Their solution: shifting power to unaccountable international bodies like the WTO, helping pave the way to what we now call “neoliberalism.”
Once an arm of the radical labor movement, the ACLU now defends free speech as a neutral principle — including the anti-union speech of bosses and the political speech of corporations. The story of the ACLU’s evolution is the story of liberalism itself.
The late socialist writer Mike Davis’s first book was Prisoners of the American Dream, a deep exploration of how the US labor movement became so weakened. Nearly four decades later, Davis revisited the book in an interview with Jacobin.
In activist and academic circles, privileged people are expected to automatically defer to marginalized people on issues of oppression. Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argues that this norm kills solidarity and replaces effective politics with endless navel-gazing.
Police and mass incarceration are only the most visible and obvious manifestations of the prison-industrial complex. Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that the prison-industrial complex is a holistic social organizing principle that pervades life under capitalism.
In a global economy defined by overproduction and underconsumption, American and Chinese corporations are struggling to extract profits from developing nations. Without massive wealth redistribution, consumption won’t return to stable levels.
China did not develop capitalism during the 18th century, despite having a market economy as strong as Britain’s. The raw material for China’s 20th-century capitalist takeoff came from an unlikely figure: Mao Zedong.
In the ’80s and ’90s, the Democrats took a jackhammer to education, housing, and social welfare. This isn’t the story of a weak party unable to defend its earlier gains, but a transformed party demolishing them in service of a new neoliberal ideology.
The Supreme Court’s decision overturning the right to abortion is the latest in a long history of reactionary rulings. We shouldn’t have any illusions: the court is an antidemocratic body that has always been about protecting elites.
Trying to win progressive change without rebuilding the labor movement is a fool’s errand. That’s why the union victories at Starbucks and Amazon are so promising: the current uptick in labor militancy could become a transformational upsurge.
Mass shootings are only the latest horrific chapter in the US’s long history of gun violence, which stretches from prerevolutionary slave patrols to our ongoing trade in military technology. Confronting this bloodlust will require more than just gun control.