Opal Lee is a writer.
The labor movement’s iconic inflatable rat has survived a pathetic judicial attempt at extermination. But though Scabby is free, unions remain hamstrung by the oppressive federal prohibition on secondary boycotts encoded in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
From Bob and Doug McKenzie to the Trailer Park Boys, the Canadian hoser is an integral part of the country’s cultural landscape. The hoser is also a working-class emblem, whose uncertain fortune in the face of economic downturns reflects the wider experience of Canadian workers.
The megacorporation Tata has shaped Indian capitalism for 150 years. Despite its best efforts to sustain an image as an ethical company, Tata’s roots in war profiteering and the opium trade, and its sophisticated suppression of worker organizing, is testament to the fact that “ethical capitalism” is only ever a contradiction in terms.
This month, Italian courts jailed fourteen men for their roles in Operation Condor, the US-backed Latin American terror campaign. But many more torturers are living out a peaceful retirement — denying justice to the leftists they brutalized and murdered.
Charter schools don’t improve education outcomes. But they do funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of unscrupulous — often criminal — school operators. It’s a national disgrace that needs to end.
This year, the Canadian TV show Trailer Park Boys turns twenty. The program’s refusal to patronize its marginal, working-class characters was key to its comedic and popular success, and won it a special place in our hearts.
Michael Foot was a giant of Labour Party politics. The attempts by Labour centrists to diminish his legacy after his death only reveal the extent to which his socialism, like that of Jeremy Corbyn, threatened the British establishment.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are strengthening their commitment to tech entrepreneurialism as they scale back Canada’s COVID-19 benefits. This is not a road map to recovery; it is a path to austerity and precarity in the workplace.
In more and more of the country Amazon acts like an employer in a company town, sucking up whole communities and shaping public goods and services to fit its profit-making needs.
Two years since millions-strong protests toppled Algeria’s longtime president, June’s regime-organized elections met with a massive popular boycott. For Algerians to really control their lives, the whole regime must go.
Cubans confront a host of problems amid a national health emergency — and the Biden administrative is only adding to punitive sanctions with the intent to make everything worse.
NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes in Jacobin about the meaning of the Milwaukee Bucks’ victory this year, and his own Bucks championship in 1971.
With the new Child Tax Credit, two-thirds of people in the US now receive monthly benefit checks. That’s a very good thing — it means delivering poor, working-class, and middle-class people clear material gains while also destigmatizing the welfare state.
This summer has been a cascade of climate disaster. But we shouldn’t assume that ever-worsening floods and heat waves will spur political change — we need a working-class strategy that can excite and win over people to save the planet.
The 1931 Workers’ Olympiad in Vienna was an inspiring example of mass-scale sports, free of corporate influence. These photos from the games show how the workers’ movement promoted collective joy and class pride, even outside the factory gates.
Twenty years ago, protests at the Genoa G8 summit proclaimed that “Another World is Possible.” But today, Italy’s weak and divided left lacks a vision for a real alternative to capitalism.
Much like Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the air traffic controllers, Scott Walker’s assault on public sector unions should be remembered as a turning point in American history that opened the floodgates to new attacks on the working class — and as a harbinger of Trumpism.
Austrian socialist Julius Deutsch was a key figure in Red Vienna’s workers’ sports clubs. Founder of the Schutzbund workers’ militia, Deutsch and his comrades used the class pride built on the sports field to mobilize against rising fascism.
In the 1960s, radical thinker André Gorz developed a novel concept that went beyond the tired reform versus revolution debate. With non-reformist reforms, popular movements can win immediate gains that shift power away from elites — and clear the way for more radical transformations.
McDonald’s has long portrayed itself as a champion of black uplift through black ownership of its franchises. But McDonald’s version of black capitalism, like the idea of black capitalism as a whole, has only ever benefited the few, not the many.