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.
The importance of cleanliness in the workplace has become key in the COVID-19 era. But conspicuous scrubbing can also become a key form of boss propaganda — and a substitute for real worker protections.
More than fifty years ago, the black lung movement shone a spotlight on the ways that hazardous and exploitative conditions were making coal workers sick. In the age of COVID-19, we’re reminded once again of the need for collective organization to fight against disease where we work.
Republicans captured the South through racist “dog-whistle” appeals and by exploiting the deindustrialization that ravaged the region after NAFTA. But we can’t write off the South as hopelessly reactionary — there’s a base for progressive politics that speaks to workers of all races.
The Westons, owners of Canadian retail giant Loblaws, are leading the fight against decent pay in Canada. Having profited during the pandemic while working people faced hunger and eviction, the family is now fighting tooth and nail to deny labor any share of the gains.
Mitch McConnell desperately wants unanimous consent to pass a measure keeping Trump’s Supreme Court nomination on track. Democrats could potentially stop it. The question is whether they’re willing to.
We don’t hear about them very often, but the estimated 800 US military bases around the globe have played an essential role in turning the whole world into a bloody battlefield. Any effort to roll back US empire has to include dismantling the machinery of US military bases.
Brooklyn Friends School, a Quaker institution in New York City, teaches its students to work for social justice — yet it’s engaging in union-busting against its teachers and staff. So starting today, workers are launching an indefinite strike.
If the roles were reversed, Mitch McConnell would use his power to to stop a Democratic president’s Supreme Court pick. Democrats now face pressure to fight Trump’s nominee just as vigorously.
Neo-Keynesians, nostalgic for the postwar economic boom, imagine that state spending can create full employment and resolve the crisis of neoliberalism. But their analysis is wrong about the past, wrong about the present, and wrong about capitalism itself.
With his 1971 book A Theory Of Justice, John Rawls became the most influential political philosopher of his time — just as the liberal agenda he supported was retreating under conservative fire. A close look at Rawls can help us understand the fate of contemporary liberalism.
Bosses use the possibility of workers losing their ability to pay for the basic necessities of life like food, shelter, and health care to force workers to do what they want. We can’t use such threats against workers as a way to fight racism — we need to organize instead.
Anti-racists in France are constantly accused of being “identitarians” undermining the supposed universalism of the “color-blind” Republic. But the demands raised at the protests following George Floyd’s murder uphold actual universalism: a commitment to fighting oppression that recognizes the reality of racist and colonial violence.
Even after Spain’s late 1970s transition to democracy, its political establishment maintained a tactful silence over the record of Franco’s dictatorship. But a bill advanced by the left-wing government insists on the need to acknowledge the dictator’s crimes — and identify the estimated 112,000 people lying in unmarked graves across Spain.
Throughout the history of the German Democratic Republic, its leaders faced opposition from dissenters who believed that a socialist system needed to have democratic rights. The arguments they made — often at great personal cost — still resonate today.
Thirty years since reunification, the former East Germany is routinely presented as a “second German dictatorship” where human rights were all but nonexistent. Yet when that state took sides with Third World causes and antifascists in the West, it frequently used the language of human rights — an expression of solidarity that often clashed with realities in East Germany itself.
In the last years before the Berlin Wall’s fall, most opposition movements in East Germany sought a reformed, more democratic socialism. But the effect of reunification on October 3, 1990 was a wave of neoliberal triumphalism in both East and West — undermining the principles of social solidarity and pushing the Left into the wilderness.
After the Berlin Wall’s fall, the introduction of the West German currency was widely presented as the East’s path to prosperity. But the result was a fire sale of East German industry to Western businesses — a massive destruction of jobs and public property whose harmful effects are still felt 30 years after reunification.
When Jacobin was founded in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Left was dominated by academic jargon, sectarian organizations, and samba bands. Ten years later, we have a long way to go, but it’s become a lot easier to talk about socialism as a real political force.
Thirty years since German reunification, the “new states” from the former East still suffer the effects of mass deindustrialization and emigration. But if reunification hasn’t delivered the promises of 1990, socialists should recognize why most East Germans didn’t defend the old system — and why welfare and public services aren’t enough to build a viable socialist society.
The president made a big show of stepping in to help struggling Americans when Congress failed them. But his executive orders have failed, too. Trump claims to back the working class, but he has abandoned them at every turn.