Opal Lee is a writer.
The deleterious impact of technology on everyday life is generating a growing backlash in Western societies. At its most radical fringe, this includes a political subculture that promotes violent struggle against technological civilization as a whole.
The welfare state is essential for keeping the nonworking population out of poverty. But we shouldn’t discount the role of predistributive measures like strong unions and minimum wage laws in reducing inequality.
Germany’s Social Democrats often sound the alarm about the rising far right. It would help if their own elected officials didn’t constantly spread misinformation about migrants stealing from the welfare system.
Establishment Democrats spent a full year complaining the Left forced them to be “woke.” But then a left populist, Graham Platner, threatened to win in Maine, so they went right back to trying to cancel someone over old internet posts.
A British court has acquitted the only soldier to face trial over the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972. The outcome is no vindication of “Soldier F” or of the British establishment, whose long cover-up made a successful prosecution so challenging.
Over 51,000 teachers are on strike for fair pay and manageable classrooms in Canada’s most right-wing province. With the threat of back-to-work legislation looming, other unions are indicating that they may join the fight.
The issue of Palestine speaks to a range of constituencies that Zohran Mamdani is trying to stitch together into a new coalition — and creates a cleavage with the establishment leaders of the Democratic Party like Andrew Cuomo and Chuck Schumer.
Ironic fascism is a disturbing symptom of the Trumpist right’s mounting ethnonationalism and authoritarianism.
The Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti was one of the outstanding postwar Marxist thinkers. But Colletti’s subsequent drift to the right symbolized a wider shift in Italy’s whole political axis as its once-powerful left-wing movements went into decline.
In New York City, 20,000 nurses are negotiating contracts with the city’s private sector hospitals. The hospitals are using federal Medicaid cuts as an argument for austerity. But nurses say the richer hospitals, and the state government, can fill the gap.
As contract negotiations with the company stall, unionized Starbucks workers at dozens of stores are preparing for a potential strike. Workers are now holding practice pickets and signing customers up to boycott the coffee giant in the event of a walkout.
In an interview with Jacobin, the political philosopher Philippe Van Parijs discusses the challenges of achieving global justice today, from winning an emancipatory basic income to accommodating mass migration to rich countries.
Recent protests against political corruption in the Philippines led to violent clashes at the presidential palace. The country’s rulers shouldn’t be surprised at the reaction after imposing their own forms of violence on its working classes for so long.
The tech giants behind the AI boom have become too big to fail and are using their position to mount an assault on labor.
A new book by the journalist Paul Holden exposes the lengths that reactionaries within the Labour Party, many of whom now serve in the current government, went to sabotage the electoral prospects of Jeremy Corbyn.
“Premajority unionism” is a new term for corporate campaigns, in which workers try to win concessions from employers using channels outside the workplace, like investor pressure and appeals to the public. Such efforts are not likely to achieve much.
Judith Scheytt joined the Global Sumud Flotilla to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. In her first interview since her release, she told Jacobin about how the mission succeeded in shaming Western governments for their complicity in genocide.
Hundreds of thousands marched in the “No Kings” protests in New York City last weekend, as millions did elsewhere across the US. Organized labor’s marginal presence at the New York protests was emblematic of its anemic opposition to Trump more generally.
Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies featured millions of Americans claiming patriotic imagery against authoritarianism and toward progressive ends. That’s a good thing.
As Canadian politicians proclaim their intention to protect national sovereignty, American shareholders are extracting revenues from Canada’s oil and gas industry — and stiffing workers.