Meagan Day is an associate editor at Jacobin. She is the coauthor of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
Joe Biden’s choice of running mate Kamala Harris reveals a bleak truth: nothing the Left has done, from two Bernie Sanders campaigns to the biggest uprising in US history against police brutality, influenced his thinking at all. Big-money donors, on the other hand, did.
Gay identity became possible thanks to capitalism’s emancipatory side: its liberation of the individual from material dependence on the family. But that sexual freedom wasn’t automatic — it required decades of militant struggle. Today, we need more such struggles to combat the oppressive aspects of capitalism, which keep gay and straight people alike from living fully free lives.
Federal unemployment has dried up, rent is past due, evictions are proceeding, the cupboards are bare, and the Senate has adjourned without passing a new coronavirus relief package. Their abandonment of the working class is shameless, but hardly shocking.
After half a decade of Bernie Sanders, the genie doesn’t go back in the bottle.
Cori Bush, the Ferguson activist and nurse running for Congress in St Louis, caused a political earthquake this week, unseating a powerful centrist incumbent. Yesterday, she sat down with Jacobin to talk about how she took on the political establishment’s big money and won.
In the past week, two separate and very painful videos have circulated showing Donald Trump and Joe Biden the presidential nominees of the two major US political parties in action. Watching them, there’s only one conclusion we can reach: we’re so screwed.
The GOP’s proposed coronavirus relief legislation is grotesque — an insult to the working class and a threat to the lives and livelihoods of millions. The fact that Senate Republicans felt at liberty to propose it is a telltale sign of political rot.
Like American Apparel before it, Everlane began as a clothing company for Millennials built on a supposedly ethical business model. But by now the lesson should be clear: when push comes to shove, businesses will always subordinate ethics to profit.
The antislavery movement of the mid-nineteenth century fused moral appeals against the sin of slavery with demands that spoke to the material interests of ordinary Northerners. Matt Karp, author of “The Mass Politics of Antislavery,” explains how that movement led to emancipation — and what lessons it offers to those trying to forge a political revolution today.
Since the clean sweep victory for the Democratic Socialists of America’s slate of New York legislative candidates, the local political establishment has been in a state of shock. Slowly it’s beginning to dawn on them that there is such a thing as “politics” — and that right now they’re losing at it, badly.
José Garza, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is set to become Austin, Texas’s next district attorney after a movement-based campaign promising to end the drug war and radically downsize the carceral state. He says the Left is finally making its mark in Texas politics.
Michael Brooks’s quiet acts of interpersonal graciousness were inseparable from his loftiest political aspirations. His untimely death leaves an enormous hole in our lives and on the Left that will never be filled.
In Portland, Oregon, a coalition of parents, childcare workers, socialists, unions, and progressive organizations has collected tens of thousands of signatures to put a universal preschool measure on the ballot — all in five weeks, and in the middle of a pandemic.
Republicans would have a tough time convincing the country that reopening the economy is safe when it’s actually extremely dangerous. But as bills pile up and fears of eviction grow, desperate Americans may come to see a premature reopening as the least bad option and head back to work — the outcome that the Right wanted all along.
In 2018, Amazon beat back Seattle’s attempts to tax the corporation. Last week, socialist city council member Kshama Sawant and a working-class movement helped win a veto-proof majority for a new “Amazon tax.” Now it’s time to defend this victory.
Doctors for Bernie formed during Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign to unite physicians and other health care workers supporting the movement. The campaign may be over, but they’re not going anywhere until we win Medicare for All.
Nikil Saval went from being an editor at the leftist literary magazine n+1, to a volunteer for Bernie Sanders, to a successful democratic-socialist primary candidate in for Pennsylvania State Senate. In an interview with Jacobin, he talks about the race and his plans for governing as a leftist in the state capitol.
Disgraced opioid tycoon Jonathan Sackler died last week, two decades into a nationwide addiction epidemic that he helped create — and from which he pocketed billions. His life of spreading addiction was a monument to the brutal pathologies of capitalism.
A new study finds that unions don’t just increase wages and benefits for workers on the job — union membership is also linked to diminished racist attitudes among white workers. If we want to defeat racism, building strong, democratic unions is essential.
Jackie Fielder, a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate for California’s State Senate, is refusing to take money from police unions, real-estate interests, and the fossil fuel industry. For her, the connection between capital and police violence is clear: “Our communities face intense repression from the state because it is profitable.”