Opal Lee is a writer.
Throughout the 1860 election, the Wide Awakes, a novel paramilitary-style organization, held mass rallies, marches, and demonstrations to combat slave power. These “young working-men for Lincoln” successfully combined new media and unrepentant partisanship to mobilize hundreds of thousands against the Southern planter class.
The Bath Iron Works strike of over 4,300 shipbuilding workers in Bath, Maine — by far the largest strike in the United States right now — is approaching its third week. Management has cut off health insurance, laid off over 200 members of a sister union local, ramped up subcontracting, and called in strikebreakers.
Nikil Saval went from being an editor at the leftist literary magazine n+1, to a volunteer for Bernie Sanders, to a successful democratic-socialist primary candidate in for Pennsylvania State Senate. In an interview with Jacobin, he talks about the race and his plans for governing as a leftist in the state capitol.
The great composer Ennio Morricone’s melodic writing was among the most distinctive in cinematic history. But beyond his movie musical classics, the “Maestro” was also committed to the radical democratization of music.
According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.
When Steven Pinker insists that the world is getting better and better, much of his case is based on claims about declining global poverty. But a new report from the UN’s top poverty expert dismantles that argument, showing that global poverty has gone nearly unchanged over the last forty years.
It is incredibly important to protect free speech and, by extension, the internet as a space to cultivate and share ideas and viewpoints that may fall outside the mainstream. That means curbing the power of billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s eighty years today since the notorious Vichy regime took power in France under Nazi domination. Vichy-style fascism wasn’t simply a German plant on French soil — it drew on powerful reactionary currents in French politics and society.
In the summer of 1990, Nelson Mandela toured the United States to raise money for the South African anti-apartheid struggle. His trip highlighted the historic links between the struggle for freedom in South Africa with the Civil Rights Movement in the US — a spirit of international solidarity that the US left must rekindle.
Should Yale, bearing a slave trader’s name, be renamed? Yes. Since Ivy League schools are engines of class inequality, we should first nationalize all the Ivies. Then Yale University can become UConn New Haven.
In an interview with Jacobin, former Labour Party shadow chancellor John McDonnell discusses Boris Johnson’s handling of the COVID crisis, recalls the radical atmosphere of the 1980s Labour Party, and draws the lessons from Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as party leader.
Democratic socialism is a living political tradition that emphasizes the need to weaken the grip of capital, empower the working class, oppose authoritarianism, expand democracy, and shift our economy and society away from private profit and toward the fulfillment of social needs. It’s a vision worth debating — and defending.
Qualified immunity is the legal doctrine with deep roots in white supremacy and the Jim Crow era that allows police to get away with wanton brutality over and over again. It’s time to abolish qualified immunity.
As the social safety net is shredded, new data show that billionaires and corporations are refusing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars of owed taxes every single year. It really puts all the hand-wringing about “looting” into perspective.
American leftists look to Canada’s more robust social-welfare state with envy. But all is not well north of the border: Canada’s richest families own 120 times more wealth than the rest of the country combined. There’s never been a better time to introduce a wealth tax.
The great black freedom struggles of the past have been joined by many white people — not just out of a sense of moral obligation or sympathy for the oppressed, but out of a sense of shared interest and a desire for collective liberation. That spirit of solidarity should be central to anti-racist struggle today.
Donald Trump’s labor secretary Eugene Scalia has been busy lately: 1. helping money managers shift workers’ retirement savings into high-risk private equity schemes to enrich Wall Street, 2. relaxing rules dictating that money managers work in clients’ best interests, and 3. stopping the moving of workers’ savings into low-risk, environmentally sustainable investments.
The people of West Papua have suffered decades of oppression and discrimination at the hands of the Indonesian state. Now they’ve drawn inspiration from the Black Lives Matter protests to mount popular resistance to yet another authoritarian clampdown.
Disgraced opioid tycoon Jonathan Sackler died last week, two decades into a nationwide addiction epidemic that he helped create — and from which he pocketed billions. His life of spreading addiction was a monument to the brutal pathologies of capitalism.
As the world’s premier Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm’s intellectual range was unrivaled. Never one to pander to conventional politics, he was often a brave voice of dissent. Today more than ever, Hobsbawm’s work deserves serious examination.