Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
The far-right violence that Donald Trump has stoked has deep roots in US history. Kicking him from office won’t change that — but it would deal a blow to right-wing vigilantism.
In New York this campaign season, something extraordinary happened: a dedicated effort by AOC and the state’s newly elected DSA-aligned socialist legislators to transform their campaigns into non-electoral socialist organizing vehicles within their districts.
More than 31 million adults who live in the United States are legally prohibited from voting in today’s election. That’s an obscene human rights violation.
Republicans and the broader conservative movement have been trashing democracy and pushing voter suppression for decades — because they know that their oligarchic project is unpopular and they can’t win fair and square.
For too long, progressives have accepted without question the legitimacy of the courts. That needs to change now.
In recent days, Poland has seen its biggest protests in decades, with strikes and demonstrations against the harshened abortion ban. As MP Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk tells Jacobin, the movement is a lightning rod for frustrations at the country’s hard-right government — and can finally put women’s hardships at the center of the political agenda.
Amazon’s Borat sequel tries to replay the zany laughs of the original but picks easy, woke moralizing over funny social satire.
In the Canadian province of Alberta, the United Conservative Party has enlisted accountancy firms to promote its agenda of economic liberalization, cloaking its partisan policies in the bloodless language of efficient management and accounting practices.
Labor organizer and strategist Jane McAlevey saw the disaster of the 2000 Florida recount close up. This time, she says, the labor movement will be crucial in the fight to “force the Democratic Party to do something that we don’t think that they’re going to do on their own.”
People on the Left spend a lot of time arguing about what should be done about the Democratic Party — and rightly so. But first we need to understand what the Democratic Party is. Hint: it’s a lot more complicated than it looks.
As Secretary of Labor, Bernie Sanders could do a lot to empower American workers. But the working class might be better served with Bernie pushing for pro-labor legislation outside the Biden administration rather than inside it.
Katie Valenzuela is a democratic socialist who was elected to Sacramento’s city council earlier this year. In an interview with Jacobin, Valenzuela talks about how Bernie Sanders inspired her candidacy and the fights for environmental justice, defunding the police, and rent control in Sacramento.
In his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to bring back manufacturing jobs with good pay. Those promises were empty. But Democrats haven’t been much better on industrial policy recent decades. Socialists need to fight for a real industrial policy.
The Left shouldn’t wring its hands about whether we should pack the courts or not. Just pack the courts.
Democrats are suggesting that we can all tune out and go back to brunch if Joe Biden wins the election. If we do that, we’re doomed.
If we view the problems of poverty, health care, and criminal justice through a lens that filters out the political-economic underpinnings of these injustices — informed by the language of moral reckoning — we may just end up with modest reforms at best and symbolic gestures at worst, when what we need is fundamental structural change.
Climate activists often argue that carbon-intensive energy like coal is mortgaging our future. It’s true — but coal workers themselves have already been paying the costs for a long time, measured in hundreds of thousands of shortened lives ravaged by diseases like black lung in the US alone.
As COVID-19 cases skyrocket again, hospitals remain understaffed and PPE and ventilators are still in short supply. We can’t leave people’s basic needs up to the whims of profit-seeking actors — we need democratic planning.
In August 1970, campaigners for women’s liberation mounted a huge demonstration that recharged feminism in the US. Ruthann Miller, the protest coordinator, was a socialist activist. She talks to Jacobin about the march, and the need to combine feminist and socialist politics.
All around the world, the Left has been hemorrhaging working-class support for decades. To think it could achieve long-run success as the champion of affluent cosmopolitanism is whistling past the graveyard.