Opal Lee is a writer.
Catapulted to media attention by its stunts, Extinction Rebellion has wasted its platform on a message of individualized guilt and obedience to the powerful. To avert climate disaster, we need economic transformation, not pointless moralism.
Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin that today’s exploding ecological crises open up a realistic prospect of the final exit of humanity itself. Might socialism be our off-ramp, or is it already too late?
Two years ago, our late friend and comrade Michael Brooks wrote an unpublished piece about his family’s experience with food stamps and Trump’s assault on the SNAP program. We publish it today, the anniversary of Michael’s passing, as a tribute to his memory.
Socialists have rightly taken inspiration from the Russian Revolution for generations, but many of the lessons drawn from it are wrong for our own time. To make change today, we need to take democratic socialism seriously as a theory and practice.
Dave Barrett won a reputation as “Canada’s Allende” by carrying out radical reforms in 1970s British Columbia. Lifelong Canadian labor economist Andrew Jackson, who was part of Barrett’s project, recalls a turbulent and instructive time for the Canadian left.
C. L. R. James was one of the twentieth century’s intellectual giants. During a life of intense political engagement, he wrote classic books about the struggle against slavery and the social history of sport, never flinching in his socialist commitment.
The recent ProPublica exposé about billionaires’ almost-nonexistent tax bill was just the latest to reveal how little the ultrarich pay in taxes. We need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.
Democrats must quickly pass their landmark voting rights legislation if they want to prevent Republicans from gerrymandering their way to a hold on power for the next decade.
The Tokyo “2020” Olympic games are just like every other Olympics: a bonanza for corporate profits, and miserable for everyone else. The Olympics can’t be reformed — it’s time to abolish them.
Even as massive protests confronted the Genoa G8 summit in July 2001, many saw some form of capitalist globalization as inevitable. But today, national capitalisms are regaining strength — and the Left has to adapt its strategy accordingly.
Hundreds of workers are on strike at the Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas. Many of them are working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and some haven’t had a day off in five months — conditions that are literally killing them.
Forty-two years ago today, Sandinista National Liberation Front forces captured Managua and put an end to the Somoza dictatorship. It was a triumph that changed the course of Latin American history.
The leftist electoral wins at the local, state, and federal level in New York City have been much discussed. But the Left is also notching victories in western New York, challenging the moderate Democrats often at the helm in the region.
Joe Biden publicly supports proposals to waive vaccine patents to help end the COVID-19 pandemic. But so far he appears to have no intention of spending political capital to make those proposals a reality.
Jacobin writer Dawn Foster passed away last week at the age of 34. Dawn is irreplaceable, but we can seek to emulate her extraordinary combination of compassion and political commitment.
The world’s top athletes coming together in a spirit of friendly competition is a beautiful vision. But the Olympics have become a machine for the ruthless extraction of profit at the expense of working-class people.
At least 185 people have been killed by floods centered on the Rhineland region. Despite Germany’s supposed green credentials, the weak political response to the disaster shows how unwilling neoliberals are to take real action against corporate polluters.
Too often, the militant, radical history of Mexican American workers is omitted or forgotten. But from resisting racist exclusion to building CIO unions in the 1930s, Mexican American workers have been central to left-wing politics in the United States.
With historic performances by everyone from Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight to Nina Simone and Sly and the Family Stone, Questlove’s documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival is a moving portrait of black music and a radical political and cultural moment.
Last month, a Czech police officer kneeled on the neck of Romani man Stanislav Tomáš until he stopped breathing. Fifty years since the first World Romani Congress, Europe’s Romani people urgently need a new movement against discrimination and deprivation.