Opal Lee is a writer.
The new Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has experienced a spectacular humiliation during her first weeks in office. Her self-defeating agenda reflects the mindset of a Thatcherite ideologue managing an economy already ravaged by decades of Thatcherism.
The Industrial Workers of the World pioneered a radical unionism that built a small but incredibly dedicated group of unionists and union supporters — which is why American capitalists and politicians quickly decided they needed to stop the union.
The Fed has dropped all pretense of aiming for a “soft landing” as it ratchets up interest rates to fight inflation. It now openly admits it’s trying to create a recession in which millions of people will lose their jobs.
New studies suggest that private equity–owned hospitals and nursing homes deliver worse outcomes and higher costs for patients — weeks after Congress gave private equity firms a new tax break.
Published in 1985, Don DeLillo’s White Noise depicted an America blinded by consumerism. Ahead of Netflix’s adaptation of the novel, it’s worth revisiting DeLillo’s masterpiece, which remains one of our most perceptive visions of contemporary America.
Six Republican states are suing to stop Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan — even though a new study shows that borrowers in most of those states would be among the biggest beneficiaries of the program.
Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde ignores the assertive and hardworking real-life Marilyn Monroe and instead gives us a lurid tale of perpetual victimization.
Despite Democrats controlling the White House and Congress since 2020, it has largely been the Right that has taken the political initiative and set the terms of the political conversation. Expect that to get worse after November.
Unlike most world leaders, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has boldly called for peace commission in Ukraine, foregrounding the need for open negotiations to end the war. At home, however, he has increased the power of the military.
The new Oprah Winfrey–produced Sidney Poitier documentary, Sidney, is a gushing tribute film, not a fully rounded portrait of a human being who had weaknesses to go along with his many strengths.
Our resource-starved public education system is not equipped to handle the increasingly extreme heat, condemning students and teachers to sweltering classrooms. New school infrastructure is an urgent priority if we want to have a functional education system.
You’ve heard about tax havens like the Cayman Islands. But billionaires aren’t just dodging their taxes with international loopholes — US states have turned their tax codes into plutocratic rackets where billionaires can stash their cash tax-free.
The Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s work binds together Marxism and indigenous Latin American culture. Her paintings and sculptures present an alternative to the dreariness of contemporary capitalism: a socialism founded on anti-imperialism and human pleasure.
In June, three months before Hurricane Ian battered Florida, Republican state legislators tried to halt a climate risk disclosure mandate for businesses. They also voted against investing in climate-related weatherization and flood mitigation.
The rise of trillion-dollar investment firms like BlackRock has resulted in a massive, unprecedented concentration of economic power. BlackRock’s Larry Fink may use green rhetoric, but his company won’t take real action to address the climate crisis.
In 2018, Dylan Wegela was on the picket line in Arizona, fighting against austerity in public schools. Now he’s preparing to take up the same fight in Michigan’s State House after winning his primary this summer.
Historians have underestimated the role of pandemics in changing the course of history. Long before the Black Death hit Europe, an outbreak of bubonic plague triggered a profound social crisis in sixth-century Byzantium, shaking the foundations of the empire.
Jon Melrod was part of a wave of student radicals who took jobs in factories in the 1970s. He spoke to Jacobin about life in working-class Wisconsin, becoming a workplace leader, and how to merge shop-floor fights with a broader left politics.
A new collection of early writings by Christopher Hitchens reveals the writer as a scourge of American imperialism who skewered Cold War hypocrisies in shining prose. But it also foreshadows Hitchens’s post-9/11 transformation into a neoconservative mascot.
In parts of Queens, socialists hold office at the local, state, and federal levels. Those victories are no accident: they’re the fruit of years of local organizing in a borough known for being anything but flashy.