Opal Lee is a writer.
More than five million Colombians — 10 percent of the country’s total population — have taken to the streets over the past two weeks to protest neoliberal policies, government corruption, police brutality, and the systematic murder of activists.
A national “Fight for $15 and a Union” action yesterday saw thousands of McDonald’s workers walk out of their jobs against low pay and disrespect on the job. The decade-long campaign has seen acts of heroism by low-wage workers — but it hasn’t yet been enough to win.
Patents were once seen as a temporary reward for inventors. Now, as novelist Cory Doctorow tells Jacobin, they’ve become supposedly inviolable “intellectual property” rights that simply enrich people like Bill Gates.
During his first week in office, Joe Biden signed an executive order pausing oil and gas leases on federal land. But a few months later, it’s clear the modest action will do little to rein in US carbon emissions.
Mexico is set to hold crucial midterm elections early next month. Though far from perfect, the governing MORENA party remains the Left’s best bet to transform the unequal, corruption-addled country that AMLO’s administration inherited three years ago.
Tony Blair has a message for the center-left parties of Europe and the US: let business do whatever it likes and pander to the Right at all costs. Blair’s latest intervention is a glorified infomercial on behalf of the billionaires who support his globe-trotting vanity projects.
The demise of Greyhound Canada underscores the market’s inability to meet the transit needs of Canadians. It’s past time for a national, publicly owned rail and bus service, operated in the public interest.
Richie Floyd is a teacher and Democratic Socialists of America member running for city council in St Petersburg, Florida. He also became famous this week in Brazil for his uncanny resemblance to a Brazilian reality TV star. We talked to him about both.
Nour Alshaer is a Palestinian student living in the besieged Gaza Strip. She told Jacobin about the desperate conditions in Gaza and how Israeli airstrikes have killed several of her loved ones.
In the last week and a half, Texas Republicans moved to block $8 billion worth of pandemic unemployment benefits for 1.3 million people — just days after voting to extend a corporate subsidy program that is enriching fossil fuel companies and has already cost the state $10 billion.
Israel is currently engaged in a brutal crackdown on Palestinian protesters — and it’s using surveillance measures refined during the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor, track, and harass those protesters.
Joe Biden said on the campaign trail he would fight for a public option for health care. He hasn’t — leaving health insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies to work overtime to block states from passing their own public options.
Germany’s Green Party is polling in first place for September’s federal election, spurring hopes of real action on the climate. But in the run-up to the vote, the party’s leaders have spared no effort in boasting of their “pro-business” credentials — and their record in regional government shows they’ll never challenge polluting corporations.
With enormous pro-Palestine demonstrations erupting across the world — including a historic general strike today in Palestine itself — Israeli apartheid is feeling the heat. The next step is to bring it down.
Since it first went mainstream in the 1980s, hip-hop has been a big business, and many of its leading figures have a strongly capitalist ethos. But there’s an alternative tradition of socialist rap music that challenges the status quo.
There was an energized left bloc at the 2021 convention of Canada’s New Democratic Party. Svend Robinson, a veteran leader of the NDP’s left wing, spoke to Jacobin about the role NDP members can play in challenging the party’s centrist timidity and popularizing socialist ideas.
Israel’s violent founding in 1948 forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee for the cramped coastal strip of Gaza. The expulsion created the “world’s largest refugee camp” — and Israel is now bombing it mercilessly.
The one major issue that the progressives in New York City’s mayoral contest have failed to address with any degree of radicalism is also one of the city’s most important problems: the lack of affordable housing.
Last week’s standoff between Glasgow’s Southside and the Home Office was an inspiring victory, but it wasn’t spontaneous — it was the product of many years of organizing against evictions and deportations.
New polling shows many Republican voters now consider trampling voting rights a legitimate tactic. It’s a worrying trend — and a threat to democracy.