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
The extraordinary generosity of ordinary people and the immense courage of essential workers have been on full display throughout the pandemic. We need to build an economy that harnesses this basic goodness in humanity — and guarantees every worker the dignity, safety, and material well-being they deserve.
Jacobin wrote last week that “Our Revolution failed to live up to its potential.” But the Our Revolution that I know is already a mass organization of working people fighting for real change.
For decades, oligarchs like Real Madrid chairman Florentino Pérez have made Spain’s old-age care sector a favored cash cow. Today, the coronavirus deaths caused by their penny-pinching are a grim monument to the failures of privatization.
The national press has fawned over Mayor London Breed’s coronavirus response. But after being unanimously instructed by San Francisco’s city council to move the homeless into the city’s empty hotel rooms, she has inexcusably dragged her feet — putting the homeless and all San Franciscans at serious risk.
Speculation is growing that the scandal-plagued Joe Biden might drop out of the presidential race. That’s extremely unlikely. But if he does, there’s only one alternative: Bernie Sanders.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is one of the New Deal’s greatest achievements: a publicly owned utility with a large, unionized workforce right in the heart of America. But now it’s under threat.
In 1988, Jesse Jackson ran for president on a platform of uniting workers and pushing universalist policies like single-payer. His success terrified neoliberals in the Democratic Party.
Margaret Thatcher rose to power in Britain during an age of economic crisis and political polarization, much like the country today. By defeating its opponents at home and abroad, her government helped kickstart the neoliberal era. We’re still living with the consequences.
In cities like Chicago and its surrounding Cook County, the coronavirus pandemic is turning longtime health inequalities among prisoners and poor neighborhoods into a nightmare.
German and Dutch leaders’ harsh rejection of economic aid for Italy has shown the hollowness of EU solidarity. Even proposed Eurobonds would merely kick the crisis down the road — failing to challenge structural imbalances that systematically hurt the Eurozone’s Southern periphery.
How might we imagine a transition to a socialist economy? There are clues in unlikely places: the management practices of some private corporations, which have been developing planned economies in miniature.
Many states are racing to reopen their economies, even though the daily number of new confirmed coronavirus cases is holding steady nationwide. Without a comprehensive nationwide plan, if workers go back to their jobs now, we will likely see more cases — and more deaths.
Liberal pundits argue that Bernie Sanders’s policies were too radical for “ordinary Americans.” But primary voters are much richer than the average voter in the general. Among working-class Americans, ideas like Medicare for All are becoming common sense.
New York Democrats have struck Bernie Sanders from the ballot, canceling the state’s June primary. It’s left a bitter taste in the mouths of his supporters, whose disillusionment with the Democratic Party will only deepen.
Michael Moore has defended the rights and interests of working people for decades. But his new film, Planet of the Humans, embraces bad science on renewable energy and anti-humanist, anti–working class narratives of overpopulation and overconsumption.
Bernie Sanders didn’t just put policies like Medicare for All on the map nationally — he also insisted we need to build a mass movement to win. The next phase of the Sanders movement must involve building democratic, nationwide membership organizations.
Norway has become famous for its social harmony and relatively generous welfare system. But the social-democratic compromise we know today doesn’t owe to some eternal national character — rather, it was a product of the revolutionary struggles of the interwar period.
Bernie Sanders didn’t just put forward a set of progressive policies that we can fight for — he showed us that a completely different way of doing politics was possible.
In states like Iowa, right-wing governors have used the coronavirus pandemic to continue their assault on workers — forcing thousands to go back to work prematurely and promising to pull unemployment benefits for anyone who has the temerity to put their health first.
Since the 2003 war against Iraq, a massive 70 percent of the country’s health care infrastructure has been destroyed. As hospitals are besieged by victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, a state enfeebled by two decades of conflict is again at a breaking point.