William G. Martin teaches at SUNY-Binghamton and is co-author of After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment (2016) and a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier; he covers local justice matters at www.justtalk.blog
Forty years ago today, François Mitterrand became the first socialist president of France’s Fifth Republic. But after his early attempt at left-wing reforms was defeated, Mitterrand’s tenure helped turn the Parti Socialiste into a pillar of the political establishment.
Billionaire Charles Koch has bankrolled the campaign to end eviction bans during the pandemic. At the same time, his company has been buying up real estate, giving him a strong financial incentive to kick tenants out.
Chipotle says it is raising its starting wage to $11 an hour. It’s not enough for many workers who say the company’s business model relies on understaffing and overwork, leaving them stressed and with little choice but to cut corners on food safety.
Today marks 150 years since the start of the Bloody Week, when the French army drowned the Paris Commune in blood. For Karl Marx, the Paris revolution was the greatest working-class uprising in his lifetime — and a model for what socialism might look like.
More than five million Colombians — 10 percent of the country’s total population — have taken to the streets over the past two weeks to protest neoliberal policies, government corruption, police brutality, and the systematic murder of activists.
A national “Fight for $15 and a Union” action yesterday saw thousands of McDonald’s workers walk out of their jobs against low pay and disrespect on the job. The decade-long campaign has seen acts of heroism by low-wage workers — but it hasn’t yet been enough to win.
Patents were once seen as a temporary reward for inventors. Now, as novelist Cory Doctorow tells Jacobin, they’ve become supposedly inviolable “intellectual property” rights that simply enrich people like Bill Gates.
During his first week in office, Joe Biden signed an executive order pausing oil and gas leases on federal land. But a few months later, it’s clear the modest action will do little to rein in US carbon emissions.
Mexico is set to hold crucial midterm elections early next month. Though far from perfect, the governing MORENA party remains the Left’s best bet to transform the unequal, corruption-addled country that AMLO’s administration inherited three years ago.
Tony Blair has a message for the center-left parties of Europe and the US: let business do whatever it likes and pander to the Right at all costs. Blair’s latest intervention is a glorified infomercial on behalf of the billionaires who support his globe-trotting vanity projects.
The demise of Greyhound Canada underscores the market’s inability to meet the transit needs of Canadians. It’s past time for a national, publicly owned rail and bus service, operated in the public interest.
Richie Floyd is a teacher and Democratic Socialists of America member running for city council in St Petersburg, Florida. He also became famous this week in Brazil for his uncanny resemblance to a Brazilian reality TV star. We talked to him about both.
Nour Alshaer is a Palestinian student living in the besieged Gaza Strip. She told Jacobin about the desperate conditions in Gaza and how Israeli airstrikes have killed several of her loved ones.
In the last week and a half, Texas Republicans moved to block $8 billion worth of pandemic unemployment benefits for 1.3 million people — just days after voting to extend a corporate subsidy program that is enriching fossil fuel companies and has already cost the state $10 billion.
Israel is currently engaged in a brutal crackdown on Palestinian protesters — and it’s using surveillance measures refined during the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor, track, and harass those protesters.
Joe Biden said on the campaign trail he would fight for a public option for health care. He hasn’t — leaving health insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies to work overtime to block states from passing their own public options.
Germany’s Green Party is polling in first place for September’s federal election, spurring hopes of real action on the climate. But in the run-up to the vote, the party’s leaders have spared no effort in boasting of their “pro-business” credentials — and their record in regional government shows they’ll never challenge polluting corporations.
With enormous pro-Palestine demonstrations erupting across the world — including a historic general strike today in Palestine itself — Israeli apartheid is feeling the heat. The next step is to bring it down.
Since it first went mainstream in the 1980s, hip-hop has been a big business, and many of its leading figures have a strongly capitalist ethos. But there’s an alternative tradition of socialist rap music that challenges the status quo.
There was an energized left bloc at the 2021 convention of Canada’s New Democratic Party. Svend Robinson, a veteran leader of the NDP’s left wing, spoke to Jacobin about the role NDP members can play in challenging the party’s centrist timidity and popularizing socialist ideas.