Daniel Denvir is the author of All-American Nativism and the host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio.
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.
In the mid-20th century, theorists affiliated with the Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean argued for an international division between the world’s “center” and the “periphery” — terms taken up by Latin Americans to explain and fight exploitation.
On March 8, 2020, thousands across Latin America participated in an international strike to protest gender-based inequality. The movement has attempted to redefine the politics of strikes by acknowledging the value of reproductive labor.
Amazon labor organizer Chris Smalls and Starbucks organizer Jaz Brisack talk to Jacobin about racist union busting, being invited to the White House, and how genuine human interaction is the key to workplace organizing when the boss treats workers like robots.
Lula is free and polling ahead for this year’s presidential election in Brazil. Is the far right losing its stronghold in Brazilian politics?
Under Fidel Castro, Cuba backed independence movements across the Third World. This support was decisive in battling South African apartheid, thwarting US covert operations, and securing self-rule across southern Africa.
It’s impossible to say for certain what could have stopped Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it is possible to situate the war in recent historical context and game out its geopolitical and economic consequences, including the effects of heavy sanctions.
There’s lots of breathless chatter out there about how cryptocurrency will reshape the world. But the truth about crypto is simple: capitalists are using it to get rich and screw the rest of us.
Very little about the horrific war that Russia is waging against Ukraine seems based on solid calculations by Vladimir Putin. It’s hard to imagine the war benefiting Russia in the long run. Why, then, is Putin waging it?
The rule of President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has been grotesque. Is his power finally slipping?
Bitcoin was not just a consequence of public disillusionment during the 2008 financial crisis — it was also a response to neoliberal monetary policies that saw money as somehow above politics. But questions about monetary policy are questions about democracy.