Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
In the face of climate crisis and police killings, thinking about American federalism can seem terribly boring. But the fragmentation of the US state and the dilution of popular power are at the root of many of our most pressing problems — and we desperately need fundamental changes to the country’s constitutional order.
In AMC’s comedic drama series Lodge 49, webs of debt and despair, disappointed dreams, and displaced lives tie the characters together at first. But it’s solidarity that makes the bonds last.
Since the start of the pandemic it’s become common to suggest that education will have to adapt to a “new normal,” with increased use of online platforms. But private tech firms risk having an oversized say in what the “new normal” is — ignoring the needs expressed by teachers and learners themselves.
Despite Trump’s posturing, crime is nowhere near top of mind for most of the American electorate. So why is Joe Biden running on a triangulating law-and-order message?
In Georgia, Republicans have leaned on voter suppression to push their reactionary agenda for years — and now they’re withholding unemployment benefits for pandemic-wracked workers. The only way to stop their pillaging is for poor and working-class Georgians to unite across racial lines, to finally win the economic and social rights they deserve.
The Right wants you to believe that a coddled, overly sensitive left is propping up cancel culture. But punitive, hyper-surveillant ways of interacting online are built into the structure of privately owned social media companies, and they’re practiced across the political spectrum. The Left must insist on a better way.
Socialist leader Salvador Allende became Chile’s president fifty years ago today. Allende’s election inaugurated a unique experiment in radical democracy that was cut short by Augusto Pinochet’s brutal US-backed coup.
Extinction Rebellion leaders have dismissed the idea that protests for climate action have anything to do with “socialist ideology.” But refusing to take political positions — and to relate green politics to the interests of the social majority — will reduce environmentalism to an ineffective moral protest.
We need high-quality, entertaining class-struggle television. The BBC’s period drama The Mill, which was ahead of its time when it debuted in 2013, shows us how it’s done.
Henry Wallace was an ambitious left-winger in Roosevelt’s Democratic Party who, as secretary of agriculture and then as vice president, helped make radical the New Deal of the 1930s. His ultimate defeat by the right of his own party shows the obstacles the insurgent left has always faced within the Democratic Party.
From suffragette jingoism in 1914 to the liberal support for the war in Afghanistan, a long tradition of feminists has made excuses for Western imperialism. But women’s liberation demands that we break up established power structures — and start by focusing on the women who most suffer the effects of imperial violence.
The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was a watershed moment in 1960s student organizing. Through unprecedented mobilization, rejecting the expansion of McCarthyist-inspired rules to strangle political activities on campus, and a refusal to allow the administration’s efforts to split the movement, students won their basic rights to free speech on campus.
The Post Office has been a central force for democracy in American society. We can’t let the Right destroy it now.
By throwing out landmark antitrust regulation, Hollywood just opened the floodgates toward even greater media concentration — all at the public’s expense.
This January, a pact between the Socialists and Unidas Podemos gave Spain its first ruling left-wing coalition since the Civil War. One of two communist ministers, Alberto Garzón, spoke to Jacobin about the government’s survival in these times of crisis — and why the militant right still refuses to accept its legitimacy.
Amazon was recently busted hiring intelligence experts to spy on Amazon workers. The practice is unfortunately common — most major multinational corporations have surveillance divisions which overlap with government intelligence agencies, creating a single, powerful security apparatus at the disposal of both the federal government and private corporations to use against workers.
Yesterday’s primaries were full of disappointments for the Left. But by rallying around the Green New Deal’s coauthor Ed Markey and striking fear into the hearts of conservative incumbents, progressives and leftists have put the Democratic establishment on notice.
For most of his campaign, incumbent senator and Green New Deal cosponsor Ed Markey was losing to Joe Kennedy III’s well-funded and establishment-backed primary challenge. Markey won by doing something few Democrats today are willing to: embracing the Left.
Leading men’s tennis players are in preliminary discussions to form a union. Pro sports unions can wield enormous power — but they’re also not always easy to organize.
As the GOP demands college football teams start the season, new research shows that coaches are getting very rich off a system that prohibits athletes from joining a union and being paid for their work.