Opal Lee is a writer.
With the proliferation of favor-trading and the use of public office as a stepping stone to lucrative private gigs, America’s political institutions have become as debased and corrupt as they were in the 1800s.
Being a leftist — or worse, a child of leftists — in the mid-20th century meant constant harassment from the FBI. From my childhood in the 1940s and ’50s through the upheavals of the ’60s, I only told them one thing: take a hike.
Last week, Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her courage in interrogating France’s collective memory. Her work has been concerned with the lives of working-class women, which her books have treated with an uncommon dignity and respect.
The British media still glorifies the SAS despite revelations about its involvement in war crimes in Afghanistan. There’s a yawning gulf between the force’s macho public image and its true role as a brutal accessory for Britain’s imperial adventures.
Xenophobic politics aren’t just on the rise in the West, but in African countries like South Africa. And the culprit is similar: a ruling elite that refuses to address rapacious economic inequality and instead fans the flame of anti-foreign resentment.
President Joe Biden will pardon thousands who’ve served federal time for marijuana possession. That’s a step in the right direction, but there are still plenty of people serving federal time for weed offenses. Biden should pardon them too, like he promised.
University courses present Émile Durkheim as a “value-free” sociologist who gave us timeless insights. But Durkheim’s sociology is inseparable from the bitter class conflicts of the French Third Republic and his profound hostility to revolutionary change.
Reading the Washington Post’s recent profile of Howard Schultz, you might be convinced of the Starbucks CEO’s benevolent, liberal image. But his unrelenting drive to smash the Starbucks union shows he’s no different from any other greedy corporate leader.
Pro-choice groups are being outspent almost two to one in Michigan’s abortion rights ballot initiative. Yet polls show abortion rights proponents are far ahead anyway — suggesting that the Right’s antiabortion stance is not popular in much of the country.
President Biden recently requested leniency for low-level marijuana offenders. The Republican governors who rejected that call are also getting big donations from private prison corporations.
After independence, Kenya’s political class understood that defeating socialism at home was the best way of securing Western support. Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first president, led a vicious campaign to take power by defeating his rivals on the Left.
Today, the right to abortion is secure across Australia. It wasn’t won by parliamentary means, however, but by militant campaigning and union solidarity.
Miners in Alabama went on strike in April 2021 after the company hit them with wage and benefit cuts. A year and a half later, with the company continuing to post record profits, the miners and their families are still on strike — and still refusing to back down.
The common picture we get of the US South is one of resolute conservatism. But the region has a radical history, too — as seen in Atlanta’s role as a center of opposition to apartheid South Africa.
Research repeatedly shows that expanding inequality is intimately tied up with the destruction of the planet. We can’t save the world without taking on the rich.
Ludwig von Mises, the influential right-wing economist, thought of himself as a sober, scientific critic of socialism. In reality, he was a free-market ideologue, using dressed-up dogma to prove why workers should bow before their capitalist masters.
The Australian Greens won three new lower house seats and the Senate balance of power at the last election. By combining radical reforms and community activism, they are building a mass organization with the power to challenge the political establishment.
A series of crises have shaken the liberal triumphalism of recent decades and produced new antidemocratic forces. Historian Geoff Eley tells Jacobin why it still makes sense to speak of “fascism” — and why the new forms of reaction aren’t just a return to the past.
The dreaded wage-price spiral, the price hikes thought to be the result of wage increases, is the explanation for inflation preferred by bosses. The logic behind the idea is simple: bosses’ rights to profits can never, ever be infringed on.
With the Fed’s recent turn to brutally tight money, it’s easy to forget that its post–Great Recession policy of “quantitative easing” was an unprecedented experiment with loose money — whose distorting effects still shape the economy today.