Opal Lee is a writer.
Last month, former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi formed a new government whose top ministries were handed to unelected technocrats. Now his “government of experts” has outsourced its economic plan to private management consultants McKinsey — without voters having ever had any say in the matter.
Emmanuel Macron’s first term has seen him wage war on yellow vest protesters, trade unions, and France’s Muslims, undermining his image as a shiny progressive. Yet as the 2022 presidential election draws closer, the broad left is divided — and faces a tough challenge to avoid another runoff between Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen.
Despite America’s two-party duopoly, third parties have played a crucial role in shaping US politics for good and ill — from bringing us pro-worker reforms and the welfare state to laying the groundwork for Donald Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism.
Haiti’s corrupt, US-backed president is facing massive demonstrations after refusing to step down. US intervention has stifled Haitian democracy and impoverished its people — and the protests are an effort to fight back.
150 years since her birth, Rosa Luxemburg is often remembered more as a martyr than a theorist. But as a teacher at a socialist party school she taught worker-militants to see the world like a Marxist — nurturing the intellectual tools that would let them master their own fate.
Today marks 150 years since the birth of Polish-Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. In this 1906 article, published by Jacobin in English for the first time, she drew on the ongoing revolution in the Russian Empire to explain the working class’s power to overthrow the capitalist order.
We’ve learned recently that Senator Joe Manchin is wielding enormous power in US politics right now. But he can be defeated — if Democrats vote down the must-pass COVID-19 bill until it includes an increase in the minimum wage.
Too much writing about Rosa Luxemburg nowadays focuses on her personal letters and relationships at the expense of her ideas. It’s good to humanize our heroes, but we risk belittling the significance of a revolutionary thinker whose understanding of socialism should be a touchstone for today’s left.
One hundred and fifty years ago today, the Polish Marxist thinker and organizer Rosa Luxemburg was born. She is, without question, one of the towering figures in the entire history of the socialist movement.
Despite the pious wishes of many leading Democrats, the “good old” Republican Party is never coming back. Over the past four decades, GOP leaders set out to transform the party into the perfect vessel for Trumpian extremism — and they succeeded beyond their wildest nightmares.
Free-trade agreements enable companies to sue governments if they interfere with profit-making activities, no matter how destructive. The Biden administration now faces a legal threat for halting the Keystone XL project. These trade deals put us in an antidemocratic straitjacket — it’s time we got rid of them.
Joe Biden may have thrown in the towel on a $15 minimum wage, but Bernie Sanders has not. His recent Senate Budget Committee hearing on the country’s biggest retailers’ low wages was classic Sanders: a hard-nosed, commonsense message of class struggle.
Working in a warehouse during a pandemic means taking your life in your hands — and doing it for poverty wages. An activist with Warehouse Workers for Justice in Illinois tells Jacobin the story of how he finally got fed up, how he and other workers are fighting back, and what would happen if every warehouse worker in the country took the day off.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn remembers the lifelong struggle for socialism of his late comrade Stan Newens. Newens was a pillar of the Left — and proof that spending years in Parliament doesn’t have to strip left politicians of their radicalism.
Under the Obama administration, millions of people were ripped from the United States and deported to countries they hadn’t known for years or even decades. The Biden administration needs a plan to bring those deportees back home to the United States.
In an essay penned shortly before his death, David Graeber argued that post-pandemic, we can’t slip back into a reality where the way our society is organized — to serve every whim of a small handful of rich people while debasing and degrading the vast majority of us — is seen as sensible or reasonable.
Labour MP Jon Trickett speaks to Jacobin about leader Keir Starmer’s triangulation on the corporation tax and the need for the Labour Party to advance a bold, activist agenda in the pandemic era.
On this day in 1981, Bernie Sanders became Burlington’s first socialist mayor by a margin of just ten votes. Here’s a definitive history of how Bernie beat the political establishment with a working-class coalition behind him and how we can do the same today.
Despite branding himself as a fresh “pro-worker” conservative, former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass believes that excluding poor children from key social welfare benefits is good and we should do more of it. It’s conservative, all right — but the furthest thing from “pro-worker.”
Bernie Sanders is absolutely right to insist we should ignore the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling against a minimum wage increase. Reducing poverty is far more important than adhering to fusty, old Senate rules.