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.
Even as John Kasich reassured conservatives Joe Biden wasn’t moving left, Michelle Obama lectured progressives to muster Obama 2008–style enthusiasm for him regardless. It’s an incoherent message that could cost the party come November.
The recent news that the Democratic Party may abandon the public option after November’s election vindicates the Bernie Sanders strategy for pushing no half-measures on health care reform and demonstrates yet again why nothing short of unwavering support for M4A is enough.
When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit and workers at the online clothing company Everlane faced layoffs, they decided to organize. One laid-off Everlane worker describes the difficulties of remote service work in the 21st century, building solidarity among coworkers who never meet in person, and why other online service workers should get organized.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a fleeting sense of radical possibility quickly gave way to a wave of cuts and privatization. After COVID-19, get ready for a repeat, as leaders around the world push for austerity again.
The German socialist thinker Erich Fromm developed a powerful critique of authoritarian culture in response to the rise of Nazism. Today’s Left has much to learn from that critique, and from his defiant political optimism in the face of dark times.
Movie theaters are set to reopen soon, but neither the safety of viewers, nor support for the film industry itself, can be guaranteed.
The Black Lives Matter protests have had an electrifying impact. To build on that momentum, we need to forge strategic unity between different struggles against oppression, in the US and the wider world.
Trump just scored a victory for workers at the Tennessee Valley Authority — but on the Right’s reactionary, anti-immigrant terms. All while the socialist left was AWOL.
For the past three months, shipbuilders at Bath Iron Works in Maine have been waging the US’s biggest private sector strike of the year. With a tentative agreement now in place, it’s looking like they’re in for a big win.
The DNC is the four-yearly apotheosis of the Democratic Party’s love of progressive symbolism and empty rhetoric in place of real political vision. This year, it’s not even committing to that.
Sex panics keep happening because they tap into Americans’ deepest fears about the need to protect innocents from the threat of evil — fears that are endemic among the Left as well as the Right. Meanwhile, lives are destroyed in the process.
For-profit health companies are launching a new national ad campaign to persuade Democrats to abandon their plans to create a public health insurance plan — something many elected Democrats are very happy to be convinced of.
A new report shows that union health plans, while better than employer-sponsored health care, pale in comparison to Medicare for All. The labor movement should take notice: union members would be better off with M4A than the health plans they have to fight so hard to protect.
The protests in Belarus have widely been painted as a pro-Western “color revolution” or “Minsk Maidan,” ignoring the deeper reasons for popular discontent with president Alexander Lukashenko. Jacobin spoke to left-wingers in Belarus about the forces behind the protests and the prospects of organized labor asserting its own agenda.
To develop the desperately needed vaccine for COVID-19, we need to test that vaccine on human subjects. Socialists have to fight to make sure for-profit medical companies don’t abuse those subjects.
Joe Biden’s choice of running mate Kamala Harris reveals a bleak truth: nothing the Left has done, from two Bernie Sanders campaigns to the biggest uprising in US history against police brutality, influenced his thinking at all. Big-money donors, on the other hand, did.
White-collar crime is barely prosecuted in the United States. It’s time for that to change.
Almost half of the women workers in the United Kingdom who have lost their jobs under the coronavirus pandemic cite lack of childcare as a factor. It’s time to recognize childcare as a public good, a right for everyone, and make it available to everyone.
Labour MP Dawn Butler talks about being stopped by the police, the far-right campaign of abuse which followed, and why she will keep fighting the racism that plagues policing in Britain.
Gay identity became possible thanks to capitalism’s emancipatory side: its liberation of the individual from material dependence on the family. But that sexual freedom wasn’t automatic — it required decades of militant struggle. Today, we need more such struggles to combat the oppressive aspects of capitalism, which keep gay and straight people alike from living fully free lives.