Smartphones Have Transformed the Fight Against Police Violence
Before smartphones, police violence went mostly unseen — but far more violent interactions are never captured on film. The problem of racist policing won’t be solved by more visibility.
19549 Articles by: Frances Abele
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.
Jeffrey Epstein Was the Monster Capitalism Made
A new book with fresh details about Jeffrey Epstein — his life, death, and relationship with Bill Clinton — reminds us that Epstein’s crimes couldn’t have happened without a system that allowed him to hoard unlimited wealth.
Logistics Firms Have Used the Pandemic to Boost Profits and Make Workers More Precarious
With millions of people ordering basic necessities direct to their homes, the pandemic has massively strengthened big distributors like FedEx and Amazon. But while official discourse celebrates delivery drivers as “heroes,” the logistics firms themselves have used the crisis to undermine workers’ most basic rights.
Corporations Are Claiming “Black Lives Matter.” That Would Be News to Their Workers.
How much do black lives matter to America’s leading corporations? Not enough to put any real money on the table for their workers.
How Solidarity Crossed the Border in Corona-Hit Gibraltar
For centuries, politics on the rock of Gibraltar has been dominated by the imperialist rivalry between Britain and Spain. But faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, communities built solidarity across the disputed border — insisting that the demands of public healthcare stood above the battle for flags and territory.
The United States Has a Long History of Mutual Aid Organizing
Mutual aid networks cropped up all over the United States at the start of the lockdown, helping communities organize themselves in the absence of adequate state support. Those projects have a deep history in the US, especially within early organized labor.
Children’s Singer Raffi on Creating a Society That Respects and Cherishes Kids
Today is International Children’s Day. To celebrate, we spoke to beloved children’s singer Raffi about nurturing the creativity and sense of play of children, his support for Bernie Sanders, organizing against climate change and for racial justice, and how we can create a society in which we “admire and respect the young child as a whole person.”
The Decline of Democracy in Hungary Is a Troubling Vision of the Future
Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán has used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to silence his critics, even as he endorses street mobilizations by the organized far right. But these aren’t just the pathologies of a country with weak democratic traditions — they’re an extreme version of a reactionary turn happening across the West.
In Australia, the Ecological Crises Are Escalating
Australia has been hit by one ecological disaster after another this year: first the devastating bushfires, then the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are part of the same rising environmental crisis, and without meaningful action, we’re headed toward dystopia.
How Yugoslavia’s Partisans Built a New Socialist Society
Yugoslavia’s partisan movement singlehandedly defeated Nazi occupation and paved the way for a radical transformation of society. Yet socialist Yugoslavia was ultimately broken by its own internal contradictions — and its unwillingness to push that transformation further.
How Europe’s “Trash Market” Offloads Pollution on Its Poorest Countries
For decades, Europe’s big economies outsourced the problem of pollution by literally shipping their trash to China. When Beijing banned the toxic trade in 2018, it could have served as a wake-up call — but instead, the big polluters have rerouted their garbage to low-wage, low-regulation countries inside the European Union.
Workers Are on the Frontline of a Second Wave of COVID-19
While public-health guidance tells citizens to work from home, for millions of low-wage workers, this has never been a realistic option. As Europe’s governments ease the lockdown, it’s working-class people who are on the firing line of a second wave of infections.
The Half-True Story of Catherine the Great
Period dramas too often treat their subject with polite reverence and slavish accuracy. Tony McNamara’s new show, The Great, flips the genre on its head, telling the story of Russia’s great Empress with all the grotesque comedy the eighteenth-century Russian court deserves.
The Global South Needs More Than Just Debt Relief
The G20’s plans to postpone 76 emerging countries’ debt repayments are a band-aid on fundamental injustices in the global economy. Rebuilding the Global South after the pandemic will require a complete upending of the international order — and the defending states’ sovereignty rather than financial markets’.
Walter Rodney and the Struggle for Democracy in Guyana
The famed historian Walter Rodney was also an important political leader in his native country. In this republished essay, Rodney sets out a biting critique of the Forbes Burnham dictatorship that went on to murder him in 1980, forty years ago today.
“Police Are Not Designed to Solve the Problems People Are Facing”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, calls to cut police budgets have spread like wildfire. In an interview with Jacobin, two Chicago city council members explain why they’re calling to defund the police and why the city’s mayor Lori Lightfoot can’t credibly call herself a “progressive.”
Why Are the Police Like This?
The police were first created to suppress labor militancy and the Left, before becoming a tool to bludgeon the most marginalized in society, particularly poor black people. We must dismantle this brutal instrument of social control.
The Democrats Who Created the System of Overpolicing Won’t Be the Ones to Dismantle It
Mass protests across the country have beat back police repression and won public support for scaling back police power. The Democrats who built the overpolicing and mass incarceration regime now feel left out and want to channel that energy back into familiar territory: getting them reelected.
Polls Showed Many Americans Opposed to Civil Rights Protests in the 1960s. But That Changed.
Don’t let opponents of the current racial justice protests fool you by citing public opinion polls — such polls often showed the majority of American opposed to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Public opinion is not immovable through protest.
“Defenders of Democracy” Aren’t Bothered by Its End in Bolivia
A new study is the latest to undermine widespread claims of electoral fraud by Bolivia’s Evo Morales. It isn’t the first such debunking — yet democracy remains betrayed in Bolivia, and “pro-democracy” voices don’t seem too bothered.