Meagan Day is a senior editor at Jacobin.
The labor movement’s iconic inflatable rat has survived a pathetic judicial attempt at extermination. But though Scabby is free, unions remain hamstrung by the oppressive federal prohibition on secondary boycotts encoded in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
Charter schools don’t improve education outcomes. But they do funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of unscrupulous — often criminal — school operators. It’s a national disgrace that needs to end.
Joe Biden publicly supports proposals to waive vaccine patents to help end the COVID-19 pandemic. But so far he appears to have no intention of spending political capital to make those proposals a reality.
The world’s top athletes coming together in a spirit of friendly competition is a beautiful vision. But the Olympics have become a machine for the ruthless extraction of profit at the expense of working-class people.
Texas’s new “heartbeat bill” offers private citizens $10,000 to successfully sue organizations that help women get abortions. It’s a public subsidy for the anti-abortion movement that harms working-class women.
Agricultural bosses won a Supreme Court case barring California unions from talking to farmworkers on the job site. It’s a major setback not just for farmworkers but all other workers, too.
Buffalo mayor Byron Brown is launching a write-in campaign against socialist primary winner India Walton. Brown has bipartisan establishment support and organized money. Walton will need the Left to rally to her defense.
An iconic 1978 image shows Bob Marley uniting left- and right-wing party leaders on stage, calling for a truce. Misread as apolitical, his gesture was actually meant to rescue a socialist political movement in danger.
Exhausted and alienated Chinese students and white-collar workers are “lying flat” to register discontent with the status quo. For their protest to produce change, they’ll need to transform individual passivity into collective activity.
The 1970s in the Caribbean were marked by major political and social upheaval. Cricket became a primary vehicle for asserting West Indian independence — and defeating England was paramount.
It has long been rumored that a strike in outer space occurred in 1973. Astronauts say that isn’t quite true, but the real story is still a testament to the potential of strikes — or even just the threat of strikes — to shift the balance of power in the workplace.
Commonwealth College was a radical experiment in socialist education nestled deep in the Arkansas mountains. It taught and trained over 1,500 worker-activists before becoming an early casualty of American anti-communism.
A new study shows that disparities in pulmonary health between the rich and poor have been widening for six decades, setting the stage for vastly unequal, devastating outcomes during the pandemic. The rich quite literally breathe easier than the rest of us.
Pathological hoarding, now recognized as a mental disorder, is a fitting malady for an economic system predicated on the compulsive accumulation of profits — achieved, in practice, by flooding the world with stuff.
Novelist Rachel Kushner, author of The Hard Crowd and The Flamethrowers, speaks to Jacobin about bourgeois novels, Italian Marxism, Palestinian resistance, the George Floyd uprising, and Bernie Sanders.
The center has no convincing way to account for unemployment and low wages. Workers are compelled to choose between the solutions provided by the Right and the Left — and unionization can make all the difference in how they choose.
Two bandmates saw their sons both overdose on fentanyl in the space of a few years. The synthetic opioid crisis is more out of control than many realize, and the coronavirus pandemic has only made it worse.
To win over German workers and replace their socialist loyalties with fascism, the Third Reich made a Nazi version of May Day a national holiday. But the real International Workers’ Day is the one that lives on today.
For the Left, it’s easy to hate the media, with its entrenched centrist biases and loyalty to the status quo. But a world without high-quality news is a world where meaningful democracy is impossible. That’s the message of media scholar Victor Pickard, who argues for a transformation of our media system away from the model of commercial news and toward a “public option.”
The New York Times’ Amazon union election coverage is a tale as old as time: When workers vote to back a union, employers blame outside agitators. When workers reject a union after a massive anti-union campaign by the boss, it was the workers’ own free choice.