Workers Are Being Crushed by Governors’ Unemployment Benefit Shutoffs
Republicans are cutting off unemployment benefits at a time when huge numbers of workers still desperately need them — and the Democrats aren’t putting up a fight over it.
19134 Articles by: Opal Lee
Opal Lee is a writer.
The Summer List You Didn’t Know You Needed: Jacobin’s 2021 Beach Reads
Here at Jacobin, we don’t just offer you radical political dispatches — we give you practical advice on how to improve your summer. Here are our top beach reads for the sweltering summer months.
Jeff Bezos’s Vanity Space Flight Was a Uniquely American Disgrace
Only in a country whose ruling class has grown deeply deluded could a space joy ride like Jeff Bezos’s be seen as cause for public celebration rather than the symptom of moral rot and institutional decay that it so clearly is.
I Survived Anders Breivik’s Terrorist Attack. But His Politics Are Still With Us.
This day in 2011, far-right terrorist Anders Breivik murdered 69 people at the Norwegian Labor Party’s youth camp on Utøya island. A survivor of the attack writes about how he escaped — and the danger that Breivik’s far-right politics still represent today.
Americans Owe $140 Billion to Collections Agencies Because of Medical Debt
A newly published study finds that the amount of medical debt owed by Americans is even larger than previously thought. It’s just further proof of the moral abomination that is for-profit health care.
It’s Literally Impossible to Afford Rent on the Minimum Wage
Even modest rental housing is now out of reach for millions of full-time workers — and the pandemic has made an already bleak situation even worse.
Extinction Rebellion’s Liberal Moralism Can’t Save the Planet
Catapulted to media attention by its stunts, Extinction Rebellion has wasted its platform on a message of individualized guilt and obedience to the powerful. To avert climate disaster, we need economic transformation, not pointless moralism.
Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism
Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin that today’s exploding ecological crises open up a realistic prospect of the final exit of humanity itself. Might socialism be our off-ramp, or is it already too late?
Michael Brooks on Why the War on the Poor Must End
Two years ago, our late friend and comrade Michael Brooks wrote an unpublished piece about his family’s experience with food stamps and Trump’s assault on the SNAP program. We publish it today, the anniversary of Michael’s passing, as a tribute to his memory.
Socialists Should Take the Right Lessons From the Russian Revolution
Socialists have rightly taken inspiration from the Russian Revolution for generations, but many of the lessons drawn from it are wrong for our own time. To make change today, we need to take democratic socialism seriously as a theory and practice.
BC Premier Dave Barrett Showed the Canadian Left How to Make Change Happen
Dave Barrett won a reputation as “Canada’s Allende” by carrying out radical reforms in 1970s British Columbia. Lifelong Canadian labor economist Andrew Jackson, who was part of Barrett’s project, recalls a turbulent and instructive time for the Canadian left.
C. L. R. James and the Black Jacobins of Haiti
C. L. R. James was one of the twentieth century’s intellectual giants. During a life of intense political engagement, he wrote classic books about the struggle against slavery and the social history of sport, never flinching in his socialist commitment.
The US Tax Code Should Not Allow Billionaires to Exist
The recent ProPublica exposé about billionaires’ almost-nonexistent tax bill was just the latest to reveal how little the ultrarich pay in taxes. We need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.
The Clock Is Ticking on Preventing an Undemocratic GOP Power Grab in the House
Democrats must quickly pass their landmark voting rights legislation if they want to prevent Republicans from gerrymandering their way to a hold on power for the next decade.
Abolish the Olympics
The Tokyo “2020” Olympic games are just like every other Olympics: a bonanza for corporate profits, and miserable for everyone else. The Olympics can’t be reformed — it’s time to abolish them.
Twenty Years Since the Genoa G8 Protests, Globalization Is Imploding
Even as massive protests confronted the Genoa G8 summit in July 2001, many saw some form of capitalist globalization as inevitable. But today, national capitalisms are regaining strength — and the Left has to adapt its strategy accordingly.
Frito-Lay Workers Are on Strike for Their Lives
Hundreds of workers are on strike at the Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas. Many of them are working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and some haven’t had a day off in five months — conditions that are literally killing them.
What the Sandinistas Won in Nicaragua
Forty-two years ago today, Sandinista National Liberation Front forces captured Managua and put an end to the Somoza dictatorship. It was a triumph that changed the course of Latin American history.
Across the State of New York, Left Elected Officials Are Winning
The leftist electoral wins at the local, state, and federal level in New York City have been much discussed. But the Left is also notching victories in western New York, challenging the moderate Democrats often at the helm in the region.
Biden Just Turned Down a Golden Opportunity to End Vaccine Apartheid
Joe Biden publicly supports proposals to waive vaccine patents to help end the COVID-19 pandemic. But so far he appears to have no intention of spending political capital to make those proposals a reality.