Opal Lee is a writer.
Conservatives in the Democratic Party are willing to go to the mat for the rich, to the point of threatening to take down Joe Biden’s infrastructure and climate plan. But the left wing of the party has not yet been willing to play the same kind of hardball for the working class.
Tunisia under French colonial rule was deeply undemocratic, with a social order built on formalized racial categories and the near exclusion of women from public life. But women Communists refused to accept a merely subordinate role — and built the only organizations that united Tunisians across the official racial divides.
German philosopher Herbert Marcuse was a leading source of inspiration for the New Left in Europe and the US during the 1960s. In this lecture from May 1968, never previously published in full, he discusses the student revolts in Paris and Berlin with an audience in San Diego.
The story of the boat lodged in the Suez Canal spurred countless memes and dominated headlines for days. It also dramatized the reality that seemingly magical global supply chains are based on real equipment and real workers — and more often than not, drudgery and worker exploitation.
Even as New York bore the brunt of the pandemic in its early days, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were excluded from state COVID-19 relief programs because of their immigration status or incarceration. Now a coalition of organizations is demanding a $3.5 billion fund to help the excluded — but New York’s scandal-plagued governor, Andrew Cuomo, stands in their way.
Federal investigators have seen a spike in complaints by Amazon workers about the company’s COVID-19 protections. So Amazon is asking the Biden administration to help quash an initiative demanding public disclosure of what Amazon has — and has not — done to protect those workers during the pandemic.
Wielding a pivotal Senate seat at a moment when the Biden administration is prepared to spend trillions on fixing the climate, West Virginia is now in a position to make huge demands of the Democratic Party. We can’t let a blend of woke neoliberalism and elite condescension get in the way.
Yesterday was the final voting day for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama. We don’t know the results yet — but we do know that if the PRO Act was already law, Amazon wouldn’t have been able to resort to its dirty anti-union tricks.
The Suez Canal blockage inspired a thousand memes, but its consequences for the world economy were deadly serious. The canal has always performed a vital function for capitalist trade, and there’s no reason to think its economic and geopolitical importance is going to decline.
Winning a Green New Deal will require assembling a broad coalition rooted in the working class. To build that coalition and massively roll back energy usage, we can’t overlook a universal energy efficiency and conservation program for buildings, especially our homes.
Many people think of privatization as a policy of conservative parties. In Australia, however, it was Paul Keating’s Labor that initiated a gigantic fire sale of public assets, setting in motion a process that made billions for private companies at the expense of everyone else.
Water is a basic human right — yet a growing number of New Yorkers are suffering immensely under water debt and face the bleak prospect of an end of the state’s water shutoff moratorium at the end of this month.
Joe Biden harshly criticized Donald Trump for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal during the presidential campaign. But two months into his administration, Biden has done absolutely nothing to revive the landmark deal — and his inaction might have already killed it.
In France’s former African colonies, imperialist monetary policies from Paris continue to cripple domestic economies and undermine democracy. Colonialism in Africa won’t have meaningfully come to an end until true economic sovereignty is allowed to flourish.
Jessica Walter thankfully found fame through roles like Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth late in her life. But she should’ve been a major star when she was a young woman. Hollywood’s misogyny in the 1960s and ’70s made that impossible.
After denying COVID existed in his country, Tanzanian president John Magufuli died earlier this month, likely from the coronavirus. It was a sorry end to a presidency that began with hopes that Magufuli would improve public services and clamp down on corruption among the political elite.
Mark Rudd was Columbia’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter president in 1968, when the university erupted in protest against the Vietnam War and racism. He then cofounded the Weather Underground. In an interview with Jacobin, he reflects on what radicals like him got right and got wrong, and what today’s socialists should learn from his experiences.
Our current model of pharmaceutical research is based on patent monopolies designed to enrich drug company executives and shareholders. But there’s a better way to develop new drugs and vaccines, based on public funding and open-source research.
In the 1920s and ’30s, a summer school for industrial working women built an economics curriculum around the perspective of labor rather than capital. It offers a visionary example of worker education that emphasizes class struggle and worker empowerment.
The case against former Brazilian president Lula da Silva is over and fully discredited. Now the path is clear for Lula to take on Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing government and save Brazilian democracy.