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
Supreme Court Justice John Roberts has been praised recently as a heroic force for moderation. But his court’s recent ruling just helped Wall Street giants stomp on thousands of public-sector workers and retirees in one of America’s poorest states.
The 1975 “dismissal” of Gough Whitlam by the Queen’s representative, Sir John Kerr, is one of the defining moments in Australia’s modern history. It also forms part of a Cold War history that saw left-wing governments around the globe punished for daring to break with US hegemony.
For today’s liberals, the default approach to combating the Right is to fact-check the Right. But conservatives aren’t contestants in a debating contest: they’re waging a political struggle and playing to win. Fact-checking won’t save us.
Ahead of his reelection on Sunday, Polish president Andrzej Duda claimed that “LGBT ideology” was a threat “worse than Soviet communism.” Together with his homophobic offensive, Duda successfully played on Poles’ fears over the economy — fusing a reactionary culture war with the promise to defend families’ benefits.
Republicans would have a tough time convincing the country that reopening the economy is safe when it’s actually extremely dangerous. But as bills pile up and fears of eviction grow, desperate Americans may come to see a premature reopening as the least bad option and head back to work — the outcome that the Right wanted all along.
Trump’s decision to rescind his directive targeting international students is an enormous win. But he wouldn’t have been able to use students as political pawns if states hadn’t imposed austerity and privatization on universities in the first place.
With the help of a handful of labor unions, Wall Street tycoons, and other corporate interests, the Democratic establishment has successfully blocked progressive Senate candidates in primaries.
The United Arab Emirates is a US-backed monarchy that crushes dissent and viciously exploits migrant workers. Its latest assault on democracy: using the coronavirus pandemic to further erode civil liberties.
On Tax Day, here’s a guide to arguing with libertarians about redistribution.
A new amendment from Bernie Sanders gives Senate Democrats the opportunity to shift the Pentagon’s bloated budget to poor communities. Let’s see how many decide to invest in welfare instead of warfare.
Last weekend’s Croatian election saw a fresh step forward for the Green-Left coalition, with the Workers’ Front electing Katarina Peović as its first MP. She told Jacobin how activists in the former Yugoslav republic are building the fight for democratic socialism.
In 2018, Amazon beat back Seattle’s attempts to tax the corporation. Last week, socialist city council member Kshama Sawant and a working-class movement helped win a veto-proof majority for a new “Amazon tax.” Now it’s time to defend this victory.
Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson has a simple message for airline companies’ management who are preparing to demand massive concessions from their workers: absolutely not.
The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged influential figures like Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to press for new structures of global governance. But the system they have in mind won’t be democratic. We need a radically democratic world government.
On this day in 1420, a force of peasants and artisans won a famous victory at Vitkov Hill on the outskirts of Prague — the high point of Bohemia’s Hussite revolution. The Taborite rebels dreamed of social equality and terrified Europe’s rulers, but they were too far ahead of their time.
The government has taken the extraordinary step of giving prosecutorial power to a law firm that has worked for Chevron — and is allowing that prosecutorial power to be aimed at Chevron’s chief adversary, who has been under house arrest for the past year.
We don’t have to leave ourselves at the mercy of the most profitable sector on Earth to get the drugs we need. We must nationalize the pharmaceutical industry and turn the medicines millions rely on into public goods.
Liberal writer Peter Beinart recently wrote that he no longer believes in the project of a Jewish state, but rather a “Jewish home” within a democratic, equal state. In an interview with Jacobin, Beinart reflects on how his thoughts on Israel and Palestine have evolved, generational shifts within American Judaism, and why Jews must be part of a movement for justice led by Palestinians.
Donald Trump’s humiliating Tulsa rally showed how K-pop fandom has been able to mobilize fans in a common political cause. But if boy band BTS declared their solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests, the big labels have remained tight-lipped — and even less willing to address their own record of exploiting and abusing hopeful young “idols.”
The “intellectual dark web” made up of thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris likes to pose as a bastion of serious intellectual inquiry and open debate. But its animating spirit is deeply conservative: a determination to “prove” that our societies’ hierarchies of wealth and power are natural and inevitable.