Opal Lee is a writer.
Student workers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have used their union to fight for decent pay, better working conditions, and substantive safety measures in response to coronavirus. Three of those workers explain how they did it.
Polish director Andrzej Wajda created an exhilarating form of political cinema that helped shape events as well as depicting them on screen. His films stand as a powerful document of working-class history in Poland, and a glimpse of a socialist democracy that might have been.
Professional athletes have an enormous amount of power that they put to good use this past week in a series of unprecedented strikes. But workers of all types have similar kinds of power — and could, just like athletes, use it to shut society down to fight injustice.
Rather than asking whether law enforcement and vigilantes like Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse support or oppose one another, we can see them as different groups who are both performing the same function — policing society.
After receiving boatloads of public money, one of the companies developing a COVID-19 vaccine is trying to profit from it. That’s immoral — any COVID-19 vaccine must be free and available to all.
The progressive congressional candidate talks to Jacobin about the smear campaign he’s endured, the limitations of a Joe Biden presidency plus Richard Neal chairmanship, his record on policing, his personal relationship to the opioid crisis, and democratic socialism.
Since Belarus’s disputed election, both President Alexander Lukashenko and the liberal opposition have recognized the importance of strike actions in deciding what happens next. But while there have been protests across Belarus’s major workplaces, a long-shackled labor movement faces an uphill struggle to advance a political agenda of its own.
The Cold War may be over, but its rhetoric demonizing the former Eastern Bloc and valorizing the United States isn’t. Nowhere is that clearer than in popular sport history productions like ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast Heavy Medals and the Netflix documentary Athlete A, chronicling the abuse of elite gymnasts.
At a moment where tens of millions of families will require the government to help fill their pantries and medicine cabinets, this is not the moment to thrust our country into another age of austerity. Resist the call of fiscal hawks everywhere.
The new HBO series Lovecraft Country melds the macabre monster stories of H. P. Lovecraft with the real-life horror of Jim Crow America. Once again, Jordan Peele shows that the scariest American monster is the white-supremacist cop.
This year’s RNC was predictably a circus, while the DNC was largely pitched to a relatively small sliver of affluent professionals and suburban conservatives. While conservatives are pulled ever rightward by an increasingly radicalized fringe, liberal elites discipline their base into accepting a message crafted for someone else.
Despite its outcome, this week’s NBA wildcat strike provided a crucial lesson for all of us: we have to disrupt owners’ profits and engage in collective action if we have any hope of making change.
Reports this month showed how Greek authorities have pushed at least 1,072 migrants into the sea, forcing them to fend for their lives on rickety rafts and dinghies. The murderous policy is a gross violation of international law — yet faced with a harshened anti-migrant mood, other European governments have remained silent.
Richard Neal’s career is the story of a low-profile lawmaker keeping his head down, doing the work, and serving the interests of the corporate donors who give him money.
Instability is a permanent feature of capitalism, but the coronavirus pandemic has introduced a whole new level of volatility. Amid the turmoil, the American right is dreaming more feverishly than ever of apocalypse and heroism.
In response to Mayor Bill de Blasio pushing a public schools reopening despite the serious dangers it would pose, New York City’s United Federation of Teachers is considering their first strike in almost half a century. We talked to union activist and Brooklyn teacher Jia Lee about why a school reopening isn’t safe and what teachers are willing to do to stop it.
A pair of leftist historians has undertaken a massive project: compiling a six-volume collection of Eugene Debs’s writings and speeches. We spoke with one of them, who detailed Debs’s extraordinary journey from moderate young trade union leader to courageous socialist militant.
Proposed Democratic legislation would end a special tax break for Wall Street executives — but the bill is stalled in Rep. Richard Neal’s committee, as Wall Street bankrolls his campaign to try to fight off his progressive primary challenger, Alex Morse.
How he lost and where we go from here.
Earlier this month, Cori Bush ousted a ten-time incumbent to become Democratic nominee for Missouri’s 1st congressional district. She told Jacobin how her experience as a BLM and public housing activist shaped her campaign — and how she’s planning to bring the movements’ demands into Congress.