Frantz Durupt is a journalist at French daily Libération.
Today, the NBA will host an All-Star Game over the objections of many of its players. But back in 1964, stars were willing to go on strike and not play the exhibition, despite threats from ownership, to win retirement pensions and basic protections. It’s a classic reminder that no matter who you are, collective action works.
Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema was once a Green Party member and a committed antiwar activist. Now she’s best known for a viral thumbs-down on a $15 minimum wage vote. It’s the timeless story of an earnest do-gooder turned Washington monster and what happens when we don’t hold politicians accountable.
Italy’s new premier, Mario Draghi, has pointed to “digitalization” as the key to economic recovery, heralding tax incentives to boost start-ups and foreign investment. But for all the breathless talk of digital revolution, Draghi’s recipes are all-too familiar: rolling out the red carpet for the likes of Elon Musk while doing nothing to help the millions of unemployed.
A series of shocking revelations have exposed endemic sexual harassment and abuse in Australia’s parliament. To change things, we need to hold abusers to account and empower women at work.
Renamed after Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, the Russian city of Tolyatti was chosen as home for a FIAT-backed auto plant in 1966, soon making it the USSR’s largest planned industrial center. Yet its urban landscape shows signs of planners’ concern to create livable spaces focused on community need, not just industrial production.
Kevin Costner’s ’90s blockbusters Waterworld and The Postman could have been compelling portraits of impending dystopias. Instead, they sucked. And they sucked in a way that indicates exactly why their dystopias might yet come true.
Eight Democrats joined with Republicans yesterday to prevent Bernie Sanders from moving to add a $15 minimum wage to the COVID relief bill. History will not absolve them.
Last month, former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi formed a new government whose top ministries were handed to unelected technocrats. Now his “government of experts” has outsourced its economic plan to private management consultants McKinsey — without voters having ever had any say in the matter.
Emmanuel Macron’s first term has seen him wage war on yellow vest protesters, trade unions, and France’s Muslims, undermining his image as a shiny progressive. Yet as the 2022 presidential election draws closer, the broad left is divided — and faces a tough challenge to avoid another runoff between Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen.
Despite America’s two-party duopoly, third parties have played a crucial role in shaping US politics for good and ill — from bringing us pro-worker reforms and the welfare state to laying the groundwork for Donald Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism.
Haiti’s corrupt, US-backed president is facing massive demonstrations after refusing to step down. US intervention has stifled Haitian democracy and impoverished its people — and the protests are an effort to fight back.
150 years since her birth, Rosa Luxemburg is often remembered more as a martyr than a theorist. But as a teacher at a socialist party school she taught worker-militants to see the world like a Marxist — nurturing the intellectual tools that would let them master their own fate.
Today marks 150 years since the birth of Polish-Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. In this 1906 article, published by Jacobin in English for the first time, she drew on the ongoing revolution in the Russian Empire to explain the working class’s power to overthrow the capitalist order.
We’ve learned recently that Senator Joe Manchin is wielding enormous power in US politics right now. But he can be defeated — if Democrats vote down the must-pass COVID-19 bill until it includes an increase in the minimum wage.
Too much writing about Rosa Luxemburg nowadays focuses on her personal letters and relationships at the expense of her ideas. It’s good to humanize our heroes, but we risk belittling the significance of a revolutionary thinker whose understanding of socialism should be a touchstone for today’s left.
One hundred and fifty years ago today, the Polish Marxist thinker and organizer Rosa Luxemburg was born. She is, without question, one of the towering figures in the entire history of the socialist movement.
Despite the pious wishes of many leading Democrats, the “good old” Republican Party is never coming back. Over the past four decades, GOP leaders set out to transform the party into the perfect vessel for Trumpian extremism — and they succeeded beyond their wildest nightmares.
Free-trade agreements enable companies to sue governments if they interfere with profit-making activities, no matter how destructive. The Biden administration now faces a legal threat for halting the Keystone XL project. These trade deals put us in an antidemocratic straitjacket — it’s time we got rid of them.
Joe Biden may have thrown in the towel on a $15 minimum wage, but Bernie Sanders has not. His recent Senate Budget Committee hearing on the country’s biggest retailers’ low wages was classic Sanders: a hard-nosed, commonsense message of class struggle.
Working in a warehouse during a pandemic means taking your life in your hands — and doing it for poverty wages. An activist with Warehouse Workers for Justice in Illinois tells Jacobin the story of how he finally got fed up, how he and other workers are fighting back, and what would happen if every warehouse worker in the country took the day off.