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 fine-graining of data collection and increasing isolation of consumers is leading to surveillance pricing, a new trend where corporations exploit personal information to set individualized prices for each person.
The late labor strategist Jane McAlevey’s horizons were never limited to winning particular campaigns or even to revitalizing unions. What she wanted above all, and what she believed was possible if our side got “serious,” was for workers to take power.
Deindustrialization has helped create a right-wing turn in many Midwestern towns. Long traditions of labor militancy can explain why it hasn’t in others.
The world craves Italy’s Castelvetrano olives. But Italy doesn’t want the workers needed to pick them.
When and where organized labor’s been on the move.
Instead of imposing collectivization from above, Julius Nyerere tried to build a rural socialism based on the values of Tanzania’s villages.
This small town was envisioned as a socialist paradise. Now it’s Trump country.
What happened when assimilated German Jews tried to settle their Eastern European brethren in rural America?
The leading thinkers of Marxism stressed how important it was to govern in partnership with the peasantry. When communist states imposed collectivization by force, the results were disastrous.
Capitalism spread through India’s countryside without developing it.
In Brazil, Lula has wagered that concessions to agribusiness elites are necessary to advance his redistributive project. Yet these very elites may undermine his whole program.
Supposedly the first of four films, Kevin Costner’s dull and messy Western throwback, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, is almost certainly dead on arrival.
Country, folk, and bluegrass songs that capture the realities of rural labor.
Country music became the sound of Richard Nixon’s coalition in the early 1970s — but it has always been too unruly to be fully co-opted by a reactionary agenda.
White Rural Rage is another attempt to blame the Democratic Party’s decline in rural counties on mean and bigoted white Americans.
Studio Ghibli is not the Japanese Disney but the anti-Disney. Dreamed up by animators with roots in the Japanese communist movement, its films celebrate creative labor and human solidarity against capitalism and war.
Nicolas Grospierre’s photographs of collective farm buildings in Israel and the Baltic states reveal these communities’ utopian dreams — and their uncomfortable colonial underpinnings.
Pastoral visions of farmwork don’t square with the reality of what it means to live in rural areas today.
Musician Nick Shoulders talks to Jacobin about a genre that has long broadcast the struggles and aspirations of working people.
Urban elites’ contempt for rural America is centuries old — but so is rural populist resistance.