Opal Lee is a writer.
In Denmark, McDonald’s workers receive $22 per hour and 6 weeks of vacation. But it’s not because Danish capitalists are more enlightened — it’s because, when McDonald’s entered the country in the 1980s, unions launched mass strikes and boycotts.
Joe Biden allies ran ads thanking Kyrsten Sinema for fighting for lower drug prices — just before she did the exact opposite by opposing Democrats’ drug pricing plan.
Norway’s billionaires spent the election campaign smearing the Red Party as totalitarian extremists. But the party kept its focus on working-class Norwegians’ material interests — and secured a historic electoral breakthrough.
In Sunday’s elections in Graz, Austria, the Communist Party romped to victory for the first time in history. Jacobin spoke to one of its winning candidates about how the party built a “red fortress” in the city.
Two people have died at Rikers Island in the past week, bringing the total to 12 this year. We spoke with socialist assemblywoman Phara Souffrant Forrest, who just visited Rikers Island, about the unconscionable conditions and why we must close the prison facility once and for all.
Cuba is facing a new set of challenges as a post-Castro leadership confronts the pandemic and its economic fallout. But Cuban socialism has repeatedly shown its capacity for survival and adaptation since the revolution of 1959.
In the 1940s, Canadian workers were essential to the nation’s war effort, but the government and employers used the war to justify a clampdown on labor rights. In Windsor, Ontario, workers fought back, securing gains that lasted decades.
Ahead of today’s German election, all the main parties have emphasized the need to green the auto industry. But the state’s strategic support for electric cars isn’t an attempt to save the planet — it’s about enhancing German capital’s supremacy over its foreign competition.
Polls for today’s German election point to a once unlikely victory for Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. The party’s campaign has focused on Scholz’s personal credentials as a future chancellor — yet his record suggests he will never stand up to the powerful.
Today’s German elections mark the effective end of Angela Merkel’s 16-year rule. Yanis Varoufakis writes for Jacobin about how she became Europe’s most dominant peacetime leader — at the expense of Europe itself.
Capitalist “liberty” is just another word for private tyranny. Workers, not capitalists, should control economic enterprises.
The Civilian Conservation Corps, FDR’s original Green New Deal, cared for the environment and gave jobs to the unemployed. And though its record on racial equality was imperfect, it helped undermine key parts of Jim Crow.
Enraged at the rise of an “intransigent” left, Larry Summers put his credibility on the line with wild predictions of runaway inflation in the wake of Joe Biden’s stimulus package last January. It’s looking like his predictions were wrong.
New York City made a killing off of taxi drivers who purchased medallions by driving them into enormous debt. Those drivers need debt forgiveness — but the city’s relief policies won’t provide it.
The Facebook founder intends to usher in a new era of the internet where there’s no distinction between the virtual and the real — and no logging off.
Working people can be won to support radical action on climate change — so long as decarbonization is tied to a vision of shared prosperity for all.
In a display of worker militancy not seen in Hollywood for decades, members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) are about to vote on whether 60,000 of them will go on strike in October.
Chiefs at soccer governing body FIFA are calling for the World Cup to be held every two years instead of every four. The plan is a naked cash grab — and shows that undemocratic sports authorities will always put chances to sell advertising above the quality of the game.
New York State Assembly member Emily Gallagher recently visited the city’s jail on Rikers Island. “Nothing prepared me for the level of abuse and neglect that I witnessed there,” she writes in Jacobin.
Robert Michels developed his “iron law of oligarchy” after seeing the bureaucratization of the early socialist movement. His warnings are relevant today — but the path to social transformation still runs through building mass, working-class political parties.