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
Little noticed in the West, the past two years have witnessed the largest protest wave in decades against Indonesia’s increasingly authoritarian crony-capitalist government. But activists are still mentally stuck in the 1990s, deploying depoliticized concepts like “civil society” and “moral force,” and resorting to ill-conceived methods of resistance that have left the movement in a rut and unable to realize its radical potential.
For more than 120 years, the US has colonized Puerto Rico. But a new bill cosponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would finally give Puerto Ricans the chance to decide their political relationship with the United States — and recognize their right to self-determination.
A recent survey of restaurant workers confirms what insiders know: that the industry has the highest rate of sexual harassment, and a reliance on tips exacerbates the problem. Eliminating the tipped wage would go a long way to fixing the problem.
Canada desperately needs to expand its public health coverage to include dental care for all — and the NDP can lead the fight for it.
Ahead of May’s Scottish elections, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon finds herself embroiled in an intense row with her predecessor Alex Salmond, who last week formed his own separate party. The clash between the two is sure to dominate the election campaign — but it’s also a distraction from the democratic issues at the heart of the independence movement.
The spectacle of Harry and Meghan’s reinvention as a standard-issue, new money California couple shows that the British monarchy’s ability to resist the cultural demands of late capitalism is reaching a breaking point.
FBI files related to the 1969 murder of Fred Hampton, newly obtained by Jacobin, shed light on two key aspects of the bureau’s anti–Black Panthers operation: one, FBI informant William O’Neal was more vital — beyond helping murder Hampton — than previously understood. Two, sabotaging the Panthers’ ability to work with other organizations was an explicit FBI goal.
A Medicare for All system would benefit almost everyone in America — except health care profiteers. The only way to overcome their opposition is to build a mass movement that’s large enough and powerful enough to defeat them.
Conservatives in the Democratic Party are willing to go to the mat for the rich, to the point of threatening to take down Joe Biden’s infrastructure and climate plan. But the left wing of the party has not yet been willing to play the same kind of hardball for the working class.
Tunisia under French colonial rule was deeply undemocratic, with a social order built on formalized racial categories and the near exclusion of women from public life. But women Communists refused to accept a merely subordinate role — and built the only organizations that united Tunisians across the official racial divides.
German philosopher Herbert Marcuse was a leading source of inspiration for the New Left in Europe and the US during the 1960s. In this lecture from May 1968, never previously published in full, he discusses the student revolts in Paris and Berlin with an audience in San Diego.
The story of the boat lodged in the Suez Canal spurred countless memes and dominated headlines for days. It also dramatized the reality that seemingly magical global supply chains are based on real equipment and real workers — and more often than not, drudgery and worker exploitation.
Even as New York bore the brunt of the pandemic in its early days, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were excluded from state COVID-19 relief programs because of their immigration status or incarceration. Now a coalition of organizations is demanding a $3.5 billion fund to help the excluded — but New York’s scandal-plagued governor, Andrew Cuomo, stands in their way.
Federal investigators have seen a spike in complaints by Amazon workers about the company’s COVID-19 protections. So Amazon is asking the Biden administration to help quash an initiative demanding public disclosure of what Amazon has — and has not — done to protect those workers during the pandemic.
Wielding a pivotal Senate seat at a moment when the Biden administration is prepared to spend trillions on fixing the climate, West Virginia is now in a position to make huge demands of the Democratic Party. We can’t let a blend of woke neoliberalism and elite condescension get in the way.
Yesterday was the final voting day for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama. We don’t know the results yet — but we do know that if the PRO Act was already law, Amazon wouldn’t have been able to resort to its dirty anti-union tricks.
The Suez Canal blockage inspired a thousand memes, but its consequences for the world economy were deadly serious. The canal has always performed a vital function for capitalist trade, and there’s no reason to think its economic and geopolitical importance is going to decline.
Winning a Green New Deal will require assembling a broad coalition rooted in the working class. To build that coalition and massively roll back energy usage, we can’t overlook a universal energy efficiency and conservation program for buildings, especially our homes.
Many people think of privatization as a policy of conservative parties. In Australia, however, it was Paul Keating’s Labor that initiated a gigantic fire sale of public assets, setting in motion a process that made billions for private companies at the expense of everyone else.
Water is a basic human right — yet a growing number of New Yorkers are suffering immensely under water debt and face the bleak prospect of an end of the state’s water shutoff moratorium at the end of this month.