Opal Lee is a writer.
Workers in the restaurant industry are in dire straits all across the country. But the RESTAURANTS Act proposed in Congress is a $120 billion handout to industry owners with no substantive guarantees for the workers who are suffering immensely right now. We can’t trust celebrity chefs and CEOs with trickle-down relief.
The newly announced Google employees union, the Alphabet Workers Union, is the first union of white-collar workers at a major tech company. They’ll be tasked with figuring out how to wield power while only a minority of the workforce.
The socialist historian C. L. R. James was born 120 years ago today. His landmark text, The Black Jacobins, is a majestic account of the Haitian Revolution and is still the authoritative history of a heroic struggle for freedom and dignity.
Cold War stereotypes have blocked our understanding of European politics after 1945. On both sides of the future Iron Curtain, liberation from Nazism unleashed a spirit of radical democracy that might have led Europe down a very different path if not for superpower intervention.
One of Britain’s most influential twentieth-century socialists, R. H. Tawney, is often presented as a moralist opposed to Marxist notions of social change. In fact, his Christian socialism was deeply committed to political transformation — marrying a critique of “devilish” capitalism with the burning desire to create a new Jerusalem.
Companies like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup that paid speaking fees to Joe Biden’s Treasury and State nominees also have business before the departments they are set to run — potentially a serious conflict of interest.
The East German protests in the fall of 1989 included many who aspired for a democratic socialism. In the state’s final years, the young supporters of the Modern Socialism Project fought for an alternative to authoritarianism — promoting an ecological socialism rooted in democratic rights.
The Brazilian film Bacurau received international acclaim as one of the best films of 2020. In Brazil, however, it has unleashed the ire of a far-right government, intent on smashing the country’s film industry. Bacurau’s directors speak to Jacobin about the Lula government’s revitalization of the Brazilian cultural scene and what Bolsonaro has been doing since to destroy it.
Dave Barrett’s NDP government in British Columbia was one of the most impressive examples of social democracy in action during the twilight of the Keynesian era. But the BC NDP lacked a proper strategy to deal with the power of capital, which eventually forced it into retreat.
Donald Trump is gone. But the conditions that gave rise to his brand of noxious politics aren’t going away anytime soon.
Since the fiscal crisis of 1975, New York has been repeatedly lashed by austerity. Now, with the latest round of post–COVID-19 cuts on the horizon, a group of socialist legislators and movement organizations are spearheading a fight to fund public services through a campaign to tax the rich.
The Democratic establishment’s obsession with courting affluent suburbanites imperils progressive policies and overlooks the changing composition of US suburbs. A progressive strategy must look to mobilize the increasingly diverse, increasingly working-class parts of American suburbia.
James Baldwin went from espousing radical politics as a teenager to disavowing socialist politics as doctrinaire. But by the end of his life, inspired by the radicalism of the Black Panthers, Baldwin was again ready to proclaim himself a socialist.
Arthur Rosenberg was a leading figure in Germany’s Communist movement and a brilliant Marxist historian. Rosenberg’s penetrating analysis of far-right movements, produced in exile after the Nazis seized power, is as relevant as ever today.
Chuck Schumer spent New Year’s morning pretending he and establishment Democrats are fighting Republicans for $2,000 survival checks — right before he went to the Senate floor to surrender on live television. It’s January 1 and the mask is already off.
David Fincher’s ode to Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz revives an eighty-year-old debate over whether or not Orson Welles deserves a co-writing credit — and it’s exactly as entertaining as that sounds.
In his literary works, Charles Dickens told the story of a society blighted by inequality — and the cruelty of a ruling class which kept so many living in grinding poverty.
Allowing wealth to accumulate from one generation to another is a recipe for unacceptable inequalities. We should abolish inherited wealth.
Italian prosecutors have called for four Egyptian security agents to be tried for the 2016 kidnapping and murder of labor researcher Giulio Regeni in Cairo. Their appeal follows years in which Egyptian authorities have frustrated efforts to find the killers — and the Italian government has turned a blind eye, for the sake of good relations with Al-Sisi’s military regime.
Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin today that we’ve been given a choice between a return to the old exploitative normality and a post-COVID corporate “Great Reset” that promises to be even worse. We need a real alternative, a socialist reset that can win justice for all and save the planet from climate apocalypse.