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.
The New York Times attack yesterday on socialists who won’t endorse Joe Biden isn’t actually about convincing socialists to vote for him — it’s about performatively denouncing leftists as irresponsible, for the edification of the liberals who are watching.
Joe Biden has named several progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sara Nelson, to newly announced policy “task forces.” This beats him just sneering at leftists — but it’s no great progressive victory that a few good people are on a random list of names for toothless task forces.
Terrorists killed fewer Americans over twenty years than coronavirus has in two months. Yet the Right, which insisted after 9/11 on the need to give up core civil liberties to “save lives,” is now demanding that we accept mass death for the sake of profit.
The Post Office is a national treasure, providing service everywhere from the smallest town to the biggest city and offering a rare example in US society of democratic values prevailing over private profits. We can’t let the Post Office’s opponents use the coronavirus crisis to dismantle this vital universal service.
Coronavirus has had a devastating economic impact in the United States. Yet the richest country in the world has so far passed paltry relief measures.
Longtime social movements scholar Frances Fox Piven on organizing the unemployed under coronavirus, where the Bernie Sanders movement goes from here, and why breaking rules and disrupting business as usual are central to making social change.
Bernie Sanders is the coauthor of the Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act, which would cover anyone who was uninsured when the coronavirus crisis began. The labor movement’s animating maxim is “an injury to one is an injury to all” — unions should keep that phrase in mind and back this bill.
If you’re curious about who both Republicans and Democrats are prioritizing in providing coronavirus relief, look no further than the new legislation proposed by House Democrats that would give away enormous amounts of money to corporate lobbyists and dark money groups under the guise of aiding average workers.
Political organizing is hard — political education shouldn’t have to be. We’re now offering our ABCs of Capitalism series as free ebooks.
Being a socialist won’t stop being hard anytime soon. But if we want to start winning, socialists need to study the recent defeats of Syriza in Greece, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and Bernie Sanders in the US, along with the failures of twentieth-century social democracy and the declining relevance of Leninism.
The recent failed invasion of Venezuela by several clown cars worth of idiotic “freedom fighters” is almost too absurd to believe. But the goofballs aside, this misadventure can only be understood in the context of Donald Trump’s increased aggression toward Venezuela and open desire to overthrow its government.
Concerns about the spread of coronavirus are legitimate, but the right to public protest must be upheld through the crisis. Unfortunately, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has done the opposite, eroding our rights to assembly during the pandemic.
The Last Dance, ESPN’s highly touted series on Michael Jordan, is not a documentary. It’s a ten-hour exercise in mythmaking that gives Jordan one more chance to sell the corporate product that always mattered to him most: himself.
Bernie 2020 senior adviser and speechwriter David Sirota will join Jacobin as an editor at large.
Right now, government money is flowing. But soon the self-appointed guardians of “fiscal responsibility” will call for cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and SNAP, while leaving the defense budget and large tax breaks for the wealthy intact.
We’re in the middle of a devastating pandemic and economic crisis — but that hasn’t stopped both Democrats and Republicans from coming up with new ways to assault and destroy Social Security.
In 2016, the Retail and Fast-Food Workers’ Union was formed in Australia. Representing some of the most undervalued, low-paid workers in the country, RAFFWU is already among the most radical unions, challenging both employers and the conservative fiefdom of the “Shoppies.”
Latin America has always been vulnerable to shocks from the global economy. But there’s no precedent for the COVID-19-induced slump that’s about to engulf the continent.
A telltale sign of a broken society is when medical workers are forced to beg for supplies on GoFundMe and parents have to write compelling stories to convince random people to pay for their kid’s cancer treatment. Instead of crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe, we need a generous welfare state that ensures everyone’s basic needs are met.
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed a deep contradiction at the heart of the US economy: immigrant labor is more essential than ever, yet immigrant workers continue to be under vicious attack by the government.