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.
COVID-19 teaches us why Medicare for All should be the floor of our demands, not the ceiling. As an epidemiologist argues, we need to radically rebuild our entire public health infrastructure.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen claims to represent the “spirit of Greta,” yet corporate lobbyists have more influence over Europe’s Green Deal than ordinary citizens do. The green transition ought to be controlled by the social majority, so it serves all our needs — not just the businesses who hold sway in Brussels.
During World War II, UAW leader Walter Reuther had a plan to reorient the economy toward needed production, centering the interests of labor rather than markets. As the global health system faces massive shortages in vital medical equipment, Reuther’s blueprints can help us generate our own mass-scale response to the crisis.
The “UBI” ideas being thrown around as a response to the coronavirus are, in many cases, neither universal, basic, nor an income. But they do show how much the Left has shifted what’s considered possible over the past decade.
Companies like Google and Facebook make money not just by predicting our behavior, but by influencing our choices. It’s an intensification of the surveillance that has always been at the heart of capitalism, not a new economic system.
The Democratic Party elite insists nothing can be done to mobilize working-class nonvoters. By challenging their cynicism, Bernie Sanders is rendering a profound service to American democracy.
At the start of the coronavirus epidemic, Norway’s government said it would help businesses by making it easier for them to get rid of workers. But trade unions and left-wing parties fiercely denied that these measures were “inevitable” — and they won a bailout to serve working people, not just their employers.
Containment isn’t enough. We need a wartime mobilization to expand coverage, capacity, and production in order to test, trace, and treat coronavirus. And Bernie Sanders must play a major role in advocating for more aggressive measures.
In 2008, they told us not to “politicize” the crash. We ended up with a decade of austerity. The coronavirus crisis will reshape the economy in profound ways — now is the time to make socialist arguments about how to respond.
The Oakland group Moms 4 Housing is leading a movement to halt gentrification and de-commodify housing. Their victory in California helps pave the way for a militant housing strategy that we can use across American cities.
On Tuesday, despite urgent pleas from public health experts for postponement of the balloting, voters reported being forced into unsanitary environments and jumping through arduous hoops to vote. The culprit was the party that believes in science and voting rights.
Now isn’t the time to blindly follow orders from bosses. To make sure our response to coronavirus is safe and just, workers need to take on-the-job action like sick-outs and strikes — as New York City educators have over the past week.
As COVID-19 continues to expose the failings of the fragmented, profit-driven health system in the United States, the case for Medicare for All is stronger than ever.
The US and UK responses to coronavirus have failed miserably. But Denmark has moved swiftly to help workers by protecting wages and preventing layoffs — showing yet again, in the midst of a pandemic, that we’d all be better off living in a social democracy.
The Democrats have an opportunity to push for desperately needed, sweeping economic change in response to coronavirus. Instead, they’re letting themselves be outflanked by Republicans.
You might be feeling down about how the primaries are going. But the socialist left is stronger than ever. We spoke with Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar for some words of inspiration.
With the spread of coronavirus now global, arbitrary travel bans such as those implemented by the Australian government are ineffective and nourished by old xenophobic anxieties. The solution to this crisis can only be a coordinated, international effort.
Robert LeVertis Bell is a public school teacher and socialist in Louisville, Kentucky running for city council. In an interview with Jacobin, he talks about his experience participating in the recent red-state teachers’ upsurge, fighting gentrification, and how campaigns like his can be used to build a broader movement that is bigger than any one candidate.
Whatever happens in today’s primaries, Latino voters have made clear they have a strong appetite for leftist policies. By following Bernie Sanders’s lead and focusing on the pressing needs of rank-and-file Latino workers, democratic socialists can continue to unleash the power of this potent voting bloc.
On March 13, 1920, twelve million workers struck across Germany to block an attempted military coup. The successful resistance was organized by the workers’ councils — a form of grassroots democracy that allowed the masses to assert their own power.