Enver Motala is an associate of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg and of the Centre for Integrated Post-School Education and Training at the Nelson Mandela University.
If we view the problems of poverty, health care, and criminal justice through a lens that filters out the political-economic underpinnings of these injustices — informed by the language of moral reckoning — we may just end up with modest reforms at best and symbolic gestures at worst, when what we need is fundamental structural change.
Climate activists often argue that carbon-intensive energy like coal is mortgaging our future. It’s true — but coal workers themselves have already been paying the costs for a long time, measured in hundreds of thousands of shortened lives ravaged by diseases like black lung in the US alone.
As COVID-19 cases skyrocket again, hospitals remain understaffed and PPE and ventilators are still in short supply. We can’t leave people’s basic needs up to the whims of profit-seeking actors — we need democratic planning.
In August 1970, campaigners for women’s liberation mounted a huge demonstration that recharged feminism in the US. Ruthann Miller, the protest coordinator, was a socialist activist. She talks to Jacobin about the march, and the need to combine feminist and socialist politics.
All around the world, the Left has been hemorrhaging working-class support for decades. To think it could achieve long-run success as the champion of affluent cosmopolitanism is whistling past the graveyard.
Legendary activist Angela Davis and filmmaker Astra Taylor talk about economic democracy, criminal justice, and why we need a socialist internationalism.
More than three months since they began, the daily anti-corruption protests against Boyko Borissov’s administration are still headline news in Bulgaria. But the rival corruption allegations leveled by both the Left and Right also highlight the lack of real political alternatives — with the country’s harsh social inequality and rising poverty levels drawing no similar political attention.
Keir Starmer’s disgraceful move to suspend Jeremy Corbyn as a member of the Labour Party doesn’t come out of a vacuum. It’s part of a much wider push to stifle political dissent in Britain by coercive means, in which Starmer is now complicit.
A new book capturing the voices of workers in Silicon Valley’s tech industry — from software engineers to cafeteria workers — reminds us that the relentlessness of labor exploitation is just one side of the story. The other is the persistence of worker resistance.
The ANC’s Freedom Charter guided the struggle against white supremacy in South Africa, linking the questions of political and economic freedom. The origins of the charter — and the uses to which it was put — are rich with lessons for anti-racist struggles today.
Like their counterparts everywhere, Canada’s superrich cream off wealth from the working class while resisting paying taxes. In the age of COVID-19, this state of affairs is more obscene — and more unpopular — than ever. It’s time to tax Canada’s rich.
Keir Starmer’s baseless decision to suspend former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is a transparent attack on the Left. Labour members must fight it, or everything Corbyn stood for will depart with him.
Through running a slate of left-wing candidates and ballot referenda on issues like a $15 minimum wage and rent control, leftists in Portland, Maine, are fighting for the right of working-class people to live in the city. Portland’s wealthiest residents are shelling out huge amounts to try to stop them.
The US political system was intentionally set up to thwart popular democracy. To win Medicare for All or any other transformative measures, we’ll need to push for radical political reform that finally democratizes the country’s institutions.
Faced with soaring case numbers, the Italian government has imposed tougher restrictions on businesses and social gatherings. Yet as millions face a miserable dilemma between personal safety and financial ruin, protesters have begun to defy the curfew — a sign of the fraying social consensus behind shutdown measures.
Newly revealed emails show that Pennsylvania officials have had to overcome a lack of leadership from Trump’s Centers for Disease Control to carry out basic digital contact tracing.
There’s a real danger that the Right will steal the election by halting the vote count. But US elections can be stolen in more prosaic ways — like the Electoral College. If there’s a discrepancy between the Electoral College and the popular vote, the Left should make it clear that the result is illegitimate.
If New York City is going to avoid catastrophic austerity measures in response to the COVID-19–induced fiscal crisis, the city’s municipal unions will have to summon a fighting spirit that has been missing for a very long time.
Rossana Rossanda died last month after decades of commitment to first the Italian Communist Party and then the dissident manifesto group. She insisted that a left party should be shaped by the demands of workers’ everyday struggles.
Orlando Gutiérrez, the Bolivian militant trade union leader, has been murdered by a fascist gang in Bolivia. He gave his life to the struggle for democracy, workers’ rights, and socialism. Orlando will not be forgotten. And fascism will not win.