Frances Abele CM is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy Emerita at Carleton University. She is a research fellow at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and the Broadbent Institute. Much of her work focuses on indigenous-Canada relations.
As the US military increasingly outsources the most important parts of war, American imperialism has evolved into something that can’t be measured merely by counting the number of boots on the ground. But it’s still highly profitable for corporate elites and spreads death and misery around the globe — and it still must be dismantled.
Last April, Keir Starmer was elected party leader on a promise to make Labour a “real opposition” again. Yet instead of pushing back on a dangerous right-wing government, he’s decided to make the socialist left his main enemy.
Why are powerful leaders all trying to be Oprah Winfrey? From Obama’s Netflix series to Bill Clinton’s podcast, the political elite aren’t content with being merely influential — they want to be influencers. But Pod Can’t Save America, and we shouldn’t come along for the ride.
Alberta’s United Conservative Party has whipped up a ludicrous hysteria against a children’s cartoon about Bigfoot — a typical case of the UCP’s diversionary scaremongering. But Alberta’s New Democratic Party has also been guilty of similar tactics that debase the standard of public discourse.
The push to rebuild the nation’s decrepit infrastructure is long overdue. But it isn’t enough to make our parks and public transit more functional — they must be beautiful spaces that affirm the public sphere is worthy of exaltation.
In Finland, high-quality free school meals are provided to all children between six and sixteen as a public service. Students in the United States and everywhere else deserve the same.
A cabal of tech corporations, real estate interests, and business lobbyists are trying to strip Kshama Sawant, the pathbreaking socialist on the Seattle City Council, of the seat to which she was elected by the city’s voters. Sawant deserves your support.
Real estate titans and landlords might just be New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s last base of support. The embattled governor is rewarding them handsomely for their loyalty.
The defeat of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and the ascension of Joe Biden and Keir Starmer hasn’t just meant the defeat of domestic working-class politics — it’s meant the defeat of an egalitarian internationalism that opposes war and imperialism.
It’s not just Jay Carney, the former Obama spokesman who now leads capital’s side of the class war at Amazon. A whole cohort of Obamanauts — those bright, young idealists who wanted to change the world — have positioned themselves in roles in the private sector where they can most effectively be part of the problem.
Media pundits hail the economist Karl Polanyi as a brilliant theorist of capitalism and a thinker for our time. In order to understand Polanyi’s ideas, however, we need to see him in the context of his own time: Europe’s “age of catastrophe” in the early twentieth century.
American police departments are armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry like Humvees and assault rifles. Nothing is stopping President Biden from shutting down this military-to-police pipeline right away.
On Thursday night, the Murcia regional HQ of Spain’s Podemos party was set ablaze with a petrol bomb. The incident was the latest in a string of terrorist attacks against the Left — showing how the growth of the parliamentary far right is combining with the rise of a violent neofascist street movement.
The full story of how Glenn Greenwald revealed the antidemocratic corruption behind Brazil’s supposed anti-corruption investigation Lava Jato — which jailed former president Lula da Silva and gave rise to Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right presidency — is one of bravery against a violent, reactionary right.
West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is threatening to block President Joe Biden’s higher corporate tax rate as part of Biden’s infrastructure bill — a move that could shield private equity firms whose executives boosted Manchin’s campaign and bet big on Trump’s tax bill.
After a stint in the army and a spell as a heroin addict, Nico Walker became a bank robber — a move that landed him in prison for almost a decade. That’s when he wrote Cherry, his first novel and now a motion picture starring Tom Holland. Jacobin spoke with Walker about the Iraq War, socialism in Bolivia, and why robbing a bank is easier than it looks.
A 1995 Illinois state law massively restricted the Chicago Teachers Union’s ability to bargain over anything but pay and benefits. The union has finally succeeded in rolling the law back — opening the door to bargaining over key issues like reversing privatization and the outsourcing of school services, capping class sizes, and more.
Three democratic socialists are on the ballot tomorrow in Milwaukee, a city with a long history of socialist municipal government. We interviewed them about what their socialist vision for the city looks like.
Restaurant chains have told their investors that a minimum wage hike wouldn’t be a big deal — even as their corporate lobbying groups in Washington fight plans for a $15 minimum wage.
Former vice president of Bolivia Álvaro García Linera sat down with Jacobin to discuss socialist strategy, how the Left can mobilize against antidemocratic forces like the right-wingers who recently executed a coup in Bolivia, and why democratic socialism means an “overflowing of democracy.”