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
Graduate workers at Columbia University are currently on strike, the culmination of a yearslong campaign for a decent contract. This kind of confrontation with the neoliberal university is the only way to win decent pay and working conditions in higher education.
The death of five people in a Bucharest hospital fire is the latest illustration of how neoliberal shock therapy has run down Romania’s public services. For the labor protesters who have been in the streets since January, the blaze only confirms their message: Romania has to invest in its own public services, not just rely on remittances from abroad.
On Wednesday, the Netherlands held Europe’s first national election since the start of the pandemic — and the entire center-left took just 20 percent of the vote. While the crisis provided a chance to call for radical economic change, the “post-ideological” center-left posed no alternative to the government’s call to return to normal.
This week, AFA-CWA president Sara Nelson traveled to Bessemer, Alabama, where Amazon workers are now voting on unionization. We spoke to Nelson about the union drive, Amazon’s tone-deafness, and how her members are doing one year into the pandemic.
Talk of Joe Biden as a transformational president is getting ahead of itself. Historically, labor law reform has triggered some of the fiercest battles from business — and Joe Biden has shown no evidence he’ll go to the mat for the PRO Act, the most transformative piece of labor legislation in decades.
To fulfill his campaign promise of raising the minimum wage and safeguard the most basic elements of democracy, Joe Biden must publicly and vocally support scrapping the filibuster.
Jaslin Kaur is a socialist running for New York City Council. In an interview with Jacobin, she talks about the desperate need for debt relief for New York taxi drivers, cutting the New York Police Department’s massive budget, and the spurious attacks on socialists as “white gentrifiers.”
Last year, we reported that New York governor Andrew Cuomo trying to shield killer nursing home execs from criminal liability for actions during the pandemic. Now the FBI is probing how the corporate immunity law came about.
The Biden administration is selling its COVID relief bill as a historic milestone in the war on poverty. In reality, it’s a temporary measure whose anti-poverty impact is roughly the same as last year’s CARES Act signed by Trump. For Biden to claim an anti-poverty legacy, he needs to make the child benefit permanent.
On Monday, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias announced he is resigning as Spain’s deputy prime minister to run for election in the Madrid region. Iglesias’s move to regional politics is aimed at blocking the formation of another far-right government in the capital — but it also highlights his own party’s need to go beyond relying on one brilliant communicator.
Finally, it appears that the filibuster’s days may be numbered. This is good news, because the closer we get to scrapping the filibuster, the closer we get to passing major labor law reform like the PRO Act.
Vice President Kamala Harris now touts herself as a police reform advocate. But troubling incidents — including fatal shootings by police officers in the state — during her time as California’s “top cop” suggest that wasn’t always the case.
At a Senate Budget Committee hearing yesterday, with Bernie Sanders presiding, economists, labor experts, and the day’s star witness — Jennifer Bates, an Amazon warehouse worker in Bessemer, Alabama — exposed the grim workings of an economy that continues to funnel wealth and power to a tiny capitalist elite.
150 years since the Paris Commune, the militants who built the world’s first working-class government are often commemorated as martyrs rather than taken seriously as revolutionaries. Yet in the years after 1871, socialists sought to draw practical lessons from this experience — and build the organizations that could turn the Commune’s promise into lasting social change.
Ten years ago, inspired by revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, Yemenis challenged an authoritarian ruler and dared to dream of a new future for their country. But a backlash by Yemen’s old guard and interference by foreign powers crushed those hopes and plunged the country into war.
On this day in 1871, the working class of Paris seized control of the capital and established the Commune. Though it ruled for just two months, the world’s first workers’ government still stands as a vivid example of the kind of society workers themselves can create, according to their own vision of freedom and equality.
Lenin was so enthused by the Paris Commune that he danced in the snow the day the Bolshevik government had lasted longer than its French forebear. Both the successes and ultimate defeat of the commune gave practical lessons to generations of Russian revolutionaries — most importantly, that working-class rule was possible.
Despite America’s self-image as a land of immigrants, over its history, the United States has deported more people than any other nation in the world. Yet migrant workers have found ways to sabotage the deportation machine to win their dignity and rights.
The Trump administration worked hard to restricted and prevent shareholder actions and divestment strategies against fossil fuel industries. Reversing those rules under a Biden administration is key to defeating the planet’s worst polluters.
Capitalism is often presented as synonymous with peaceful exchange. But the system has always reproduced itself through violence in defense of private property and power.