Nick French is an associate editor at Jacobin.
Early 20th-century unions rejected the idea that bosses should be the dictators of the workplace. Today, the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and other major unions have rediscovered the strike’s power to secure workers’ control over their own lives.
Pundits have lauded the Biden administration for replacing the free-market consensus with supply-side liberalism. But it is geopolitical tensions with China and labor’s weakness that have made elites feel comfortable with a milquetoast industrial policy.
Socialists have a noble history fighting for more and better public parks — not just because everyone loves the park, but because public goods like parks are a challenge to the logic of capitalism.
When he became Burlington’s mayor in 1981, Bernie Sanders was a socialist outsider who had to face down a hostile political establishment. His successful mayoralty may contain lessons for Chicago’s new progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson.
The Right uses “Marxism” to describe everything from LGBTQ rights to corporate diversity measures. It’s a deeply confused definition. But it’s not wrong about one thing: Marxists do indeed want to dismantle all forms of oppression.
Socialists aren’t driven by envy of the “more successful.” We are socialists because we want workers to have what’s rightfully theirs — and we know a world with less greed and envy, and where everyone has what they need, is possible.
Billionaires like Howard Schultz like to claim that that we should be grateful for all the jobs they create. But the ultrarich don’t create jobs in any meaningful sense — they just reap the rewards of asset ownership and the labor of their workers.
The Right likes to say it believes in “personal responsibility” while the Left promotes a culture of blaming others for our problems. In reality, socialism is about allowing people to take charge of their own lives — and ending the parasitism of the ultrarich.
Fed up with rail companies putting profits before workers and surrounding communities, the rank-and-file group Railroad Workers United is launching a campaign for railroad nationalization. We spoke with one of their leaders about the proposal.
It sounds farcical, but GOP politicians like Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney are casting themselves as pro-worker. And corporate Democrats are making the fraud more believable by advancing their own weak-tea program.
The exploitation of workers is central to the functioning of capitalism. The socialist argument is simple: we can live in a world without such exploitation.
Today “ethical consumerism” mostly refers to individuals feeling morally righteous about what they buy. But the consumers movement was once motivated by the broader, collective goal of democratic management of the economy.
Analytic philosophy, a branch of the discipline that emphasizes rigorous argumentation, is often dismissed as a set of abstract puzzle games. But analytic philosophers have reinterpreted Marxism to provide a radical critique of capitalist society.
It’s fashionable to declare that Marxism doesn’t have much to say about complex, modern societies. But class and the material interests it generates are still the central features of capitalism.
The New Deal brought a generation of leftists into the federal government. But Red Scare anti-communists purged these radical bureaucrats or forced their politics rightward — blocking more far-reaching reform and distorting our understanding of the New Deal.
US life expectancy has declined for the second year in a row — a historic drop that hasn’t been seen for a century. We can thank our country’s threadbare welfare state and antidemocratic political institutions.
Since Joe Biden announced the cancellation of $10,000 of student debt per borrower, right-wingers have been frothing at the mouth with outrage. The Right’s desperate response shows exactly why student debt cancellation makes for good politics.
In yesterday’s New York state primaries, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America didn’t win every race. But socialists notched two important victories, both defending and expanding their electoral wins in the state of New York.
Democrats are hoping to win the midterms by touting the pared-down Inflation Reduction Act and their (modest) commitment to abortion rights. That might work in November — but it’s a poor strategy for reversing hemorrhaging support among working-class voters.
In what workers say is another example of its shameless union-busting campaign, Starbucks fired Joselyn Chuquillanqui last month after trying to organize her New York store. We spoke to her about her firing and why she’s not giving up the fight to unionize.