Jonathan Sas has worked in senior policy and political roles in government, think tanks, and the labor movement. He is an honorary witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. His writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, National Post, the Tyee, and Maisonneuve.
Lula’s election victory was nearly derailed by a Bolsonaro-supporting police effort to suppress the vote. It was only the most recent episode in which politicized police forces have intervened to thwart democracy — and the US is far from immune to the problem.
Measure ULA, a Los Angeles ballot initiative up for approval by voters, would increase taxes on high-value property deals and use the revenue to address the city’s dire housing crisis. The real estate industry is spending millions to fight the measure.
Unionized workers at the Starbucks Roastery in Manhattan are on day eight of a strike protesting unsanitary conditions, including a bedbug infestation and moldy ice machines. Jacobin spoke with striking workers about their demands and Starbucks’s retaliation.
Britain’s police and secret service has spied on and infiltrated left-wing political organizations since the 19th century. A new book shows that their continued influence poses a serious threat to democracy.
The late socialist writer Mike Davis’s first book was Prisoners of the American Dream, a deep exploration of how the US labor movement became so weakened. Nearly four decades later, Davis revisited the book in an interview with Jacobin.
Lula defeated Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in yesterday’s election. The left-wing veteran will face some huge challenges on taking office, but his triumph over Bolsonaro has given Brazilian politics a fresh chance after a disastrous presidency.
Todd Field wants you to think his new movie Tár is a critique of the pretentiousness of the high art world. But the movie is actually trapped in that suffocating world and can’t find a way out.
In Nazi Germany, industrialists built vast fortunes from slave labor and stolen Jewish property. In postwar West Germany, they were allowed to keep them — with denazification doing little to trouble those who had profited most from the regime.
Liberals who minimize the importance of free speech on Twitter are dead wrong. But we shouldn’t have to hope that a billionaire with a track record of suppressing his critics will live up to his free speech rhetoric.
The Coal Creek War was one of the largest insurrections in American labor history, with thousands of miners batting state troops to end the convict leasing system designed to extend slavery and undermine organized labor.
Millions of dollars of Mississippi welfare funds went to retired Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. That could never have been possible without the grotesque “welfare reform” championed by Bill Clinton.
In the 1962 US-Soviet nuclear showdown over Cuba, there was no shortage of voices calling for escalation or decrying “appeasement.” But there was always broad support for the kind of talks that ended up saving the world — something frighteningly absent today.
Today, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva can return to power and build a more equitable and prosperous Brazil. Former Lula press secretary André Singer spoke to Jacobin about what’s possible in power and the enduring appeal of Lulismo.
In the early twentieth century, Carlo Tresca was one of the most important immigrant labor organizers in the United States. When fascism triumphed in his homeland in 1922, he took up the struggle against its American backers.
GOP leaders say they want to raise the Social Security retirement age. That’s just a deceptive way of saying they want to cut benefits — punishing nonwealthy Americans while leaving untouched the massive government spending on tax shelters for the rich.
Unions aren’t just vehicles for transforming society — they also transform lives, as workers and organizers learn how to build an organization that can overthrow the authoritarian dictatorship of the boss and create a beloved community.
Today, Brazilian voters are not just choosing between Bolsonaro and Lula — the far right and the Left — but whether their nation’s politics will be authoritarian or democratic.
A century since the March on Rome, it is important to remember the horrors of Benito Mussolini’s regime. Fascism was morally repugnant — but also a movement based on violent counterrevolution.
No leftist writer can compare to Mike Davis — not in clarity, breadth, generosity, or ironclad commitment to the working class. Davis has died, but his ideas will continue to find life in generations of leftist activists and thinkers to come.
Emmanuel Macron’s government lost its majority this June, and now relies on strong-arm tactics to push through its agenda. This week’s budget debate showed the government’s weakness — and the possibility of blocking its assault on France’s social model.