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.
In the last two weeks, nearly ten million American workers lost their jobs. This is a crisis unfolding at a speed and magnitude unprecedented in the US and what’s left of our welfare state is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the fallout.
An important new book, Sabotage: The Hidden Nature of Finance, skewers the destructive role of finance in our economic system. But its authors shy away from the radical implications of their analysis and end up peddling technocratic illusions about the necessary cure.
Low testing rates and the undersupply of masks for hospital staff highlight the weakness of the French government’s reaction to COVID-19. As Danièle Obono MP tells Jacobin, Emmanuel Macron’s administration has based its response on the resources left after years of cuts — not on what the health system actually needs.
We cannot let capitalists absolve themselves of blame for the COVID-19 crisis. Their choices have turned an emergency into a disaster.
As an apparent safety measure, the Australian government has decided to suspend Parliament for an extended period of four months. As Greens Party leader Adam Bandt argues, in a time of crisis, we need more democracy, not less.
Media coverage has focused heavily on the impact of COVID-19 in Europe and North America. But countries in the Global South are far more vulnerable to the pandemic and its economic fallout. The Left needs to develop a truly global view of the crisis — and act accordingly.
The devastation brought by the coronavirus has been hugely magnified by an irrational system that measures human life in terms of profits and loss. Faced with collapse, states have already had to intervene in the markets — now, we need them to plan to rebuild our societies for the future.
From his hopes in human-dolphin socializing to his claims that UFOs were sent by alien communists, J. Posadas’s quixotic beliefs are today legendarized in countless memes. But a new biography suggests that the Argentinian Trotskyist was not such an outlier — and explains why his revolutionary optimism draws such ironic veneration today.
Bill Gates recently resigned from the board of Microsoft to focus full time on philanthropy. It’s a perfect time to remember: billionaire-funded philanthropy is a public-relations scam.
We could experience in months what took three or four years to unfold after the 1929 stock market crash. Things are going to be very bad unless we see some serious structural reforms.
Despite this weekend’s defeat for the Left in the leadership election, Jeremy Corbyn’s democratic socialism remains hugely popular among Labour members – and the only way out of the economic crisis we find ourselves in. As Corbyn himself put it: “There is no such thing as Corbynism. There is socialism.”
It’s tempting for students and academic workers to hope for a quick “return to normal” at colleges and universities. But normality was misery for an increasing number of us.
Despite the clear public health risk to voters, and despite the sensible delays enacted by fifteen other states across the country, Wisconsin is going ahead with its in-person primary election Tuesday. The coronavirus pandemic will almost certainly worsen — and state Democratic leaders aren’t stopping it.
Thaddeus Stevens was born on this day in 1792. A fierce, uncompromising opponent of slavery, he was a true American revolutionary.
Today’s Labour leadership election is a defeat for the Left. But the real victory for our opponents would be watching the forces we have amassed in recent years scatter to the wind.
Yuri Slezkine’s portrait of the Soviet elite under Stalin is an eccentric masterwork. But his portrayal of the Bolsheviks as a religious sect is a travesty of history.
Earlier this year, Donald Trump presented his so-called peace plan for the Middle East, a travesty of a scheme that seeks to rubber-stamp Israeli land grabs and shatter the project of Palestinian sovereignty. Former Knesset member for the Arab Party list Haneen Zoabi on why it must be overturned.
The United States has been closing vitally needed hospitals for decades. Now, with a pandemic afoot and triage tents popping up in Central Park, we need to stop holding our hospital system hostage to the whims of the market.
On Monday night, workers at a Chicago Amazon warehouse joined a nationwide wave of walkouts over what they say is management’s inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic. One of the action’s organizers spoke to Jacobin about it.
Coronavirus is colliding with American mass incarceration, making clear that warehousing human beings en masse is an often deadly decision. We should use this crisis to push for decarceration.