Opal Lee is a writer.
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.
The history of American professional sports is inseparable from a history of protest. But never before has such a large cross-section of leagues been impacted by political action. We should celebrate the development.
Sanitation workers for Metro Services Group in New Orleans are currently in week sixteen of a strike. They say their working conditions are abysmal, deeply unsafe in the middle of a pandemic — and that they’re paid only $10.25 an hour.
In 2016, Democrats put their chips on winning over conservative voters disgusted with Donald Trump and ended up with their worst electoral college margin since the days of Michael Dukakis. For some reason, they seem intent on trying the same strategy again.
Since the latest uprising for racial justice began, police throughout the country have been very friendly with cop-worshipping, armed right-wingers who have shown up on the streets across America to oppose protesters. The teenage shooter in Kenosha who killed two protesters this week wasn’t the first and probably won’t be the last.
Nurses at Mission Health hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, are about to vote on a union. We talked to five of them about why they’re organizing, how health care–worker unions can improve patient care and safety, and what a victory would mean for establishing a beachhead for unions in the South.
It’s not just the right thing to do — canceling student debt would be insanely popular and not very difficult. If Joe Biden’s supporters are serious about him winning, they should pressure him hard to do it.
Among all the people living in Sicily, migrants are the single population best tested for coronavirus. Yet now the regional president is scapegoating them as the source of contagion — insisting that Africans must be expelled in order to “stop Sicilians becoming racist.”
Marek Edelman was a leader of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi genocide. After 1945, Edelman stayed on in Poland as a champion of democratic socialism who played a courageous role in the country’s dissident movement.
To protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Bucks sat out Game 5 of the NBA playoffs — and forced the entire league to shut down. The Bucks players are workers who shut down their workplace with a strike. You can go on strike, too.
America’s animal shelter system is a disaster. We need a well-funded, fully public system that no longer treats animals as expendable commodities — and empowers the workers who staff public shelters.
Facing a tough primary challenge from Alex Morse, embattled congressman Richard Neal is trying to block voters from seeing an ad about him being Congress’s #1 recipient of corporate PAC money.
Joe Kennedy’s campaign for Senate against Ed Markey is utterly pointless, a vacuous bid to leverage his youth and his family crest into another position of power.
Three socialists ran in this month’s Tennessee primaries. With endorsements from the Memphis chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, all three of them won.
The 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan demanded major cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare during Barack Obama’s first term. Joe Kennedy praised the plan as “the right blueprint forward.”