Opal Lee is a writer.
From brands commissioning immersive installations at prestigious art fairs to hedge funds transforming artworks into stock-like financial instruments, the line between art and capital is blurrier than ever.
Throughout history, it’s been hard for agitators and troublemakers to hold down a good job. In the interwar decades, tens of thousands of them were hired by the Communist International — an employer with long hours, difficult bosses, and a lot of opportunities for travel.
Punk rock’s original radical spirit may have been co-opted by the culture industry long ago, but some of its progenitors still have fire in the belly. The most recent album of Canada’s Art Bergmann, Late Stage Empire Dementia, returns punk to its radical roots.
Jacobin contributor Max Zirngast, who was imprisoned in Turkey for his left-wing political writing, has now been elected to the municipal council of his home city of Graz, along with several other Communist Party of Austria members.
When British students demonstrated this week against a far-right Israeli politician, Tzipi Hotovely, the country’s politicians lined up to denounce them as violent antisemites. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has added its voice to this authoritarian chorus.
Gianni Rodari was Italy’s most important children’s author — and a Communist. Cherished by generations of readers, his irreverent fairy tales encouraged children to question authority and think for themselves.
Paranoia about Chinese influence in Australia is on the rise — and the Australian ruling class is stoking tensions between China and the United States. For the sake of world peace and prosperity, they have to be stopped.
Canada’s income supports helped avoid mass insolvencies during the pandemic, but widespread indebtedness continues to prop up the country’s ailing economy. Workers must fight to replace easy credit with living wages.
Oil giant Shell wrought devastation across Nigeria for years. In 1995, nine organizers from the Ogoni region were hanged after a campaign against the company.
This day in 1936, Italian socialist Carlo Rosselli made his famous Radio Barcelona appeal for anti-fascists to join the struggle “today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy.” He was murdered by fascists the following year, but Rosselli’s vision of a free and just society lives on.
Israel has been caught hacking the phones of six Palestinian human rights staffers. It’s the latest incident in Israel’s larger web of blatantly undemocratic mass surveillance practices.
It’s been two years since the right-wing coup against Evo Morales’s socialist government. One of his former ministers tells Jacobin about how the US war on drugs helped create a Bolivian military free from popular control.
Rich people have a carbon footprint 25 times the size of even the typical American. To tackle climate change, we need to start with fossil capital and the most affluent.
At Kaiser Permanente, some 32,000 workers are preparing to go on strike. In addition to proposing measly raises, the health care giant is resisting workers’ desire to have more say in addressing chronic understaffing.
From the Wolf of Wall Street in New York to Jho Low in Malaysia, globalization unleashed a world of well-connected and superrich con artists.
The CIA claimed that any story linking it to the 1980s crack cocaine explosion was conspiratorial slander. But the evidence of its complicity is all there in the congressional record.
In 1993, New York had its first black mayor — and Rudy Giuliani stirred up a police riot at City Hall.
In Colombia and around the world, right-wing paramilitaries and traffickers have adopted a populist feint to win over the communities they terrorize.
The prison reforms on the table are unlikely to make even a dent in the forces that keep millions behind bars.
There’s a reason why urban housing developments and suburban subdivisions can seem threatening and unwelcoming to outsiders: they’re planned that way, in order to “design out crime.”