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
Upon its creation in 2014, Podemos insisted it was nothing like the political parties that had long dominated Spain. Today, Pablo Iglesias’s party looks like an ever-more institutionalized force — yet one whose activists continue to see themselves as belonging to a “social movement” from below.
If we want to make Bernie Sanders’s political revolution a reality, we can’t just propose bold policies to make people’s lives better — we have to rebuild popular confidence in the possibilities of politics itself. And we can’t rebuild that confidence without democratizing the United States’s decidedly undemocratic political institutions.
Recent data from the Center for Disease Control show an alarming spike in suicides across the United States. We can’t prevent every suicide by rebuilding our social safety net. But the uptick is a collective failure — one that requires political solutions.
In the world of philanthropy, George Soros is about as good as it gets. But allowing plutocrats, even progressive ones, to decide what’s best for the rest of us is fundamentally unjust and undemocratic.
Mainstream pundits have recently realized what the rest of us have known all along: Bernie Sanders could actually win this thing. Don’t be surprised that every institution invested in the status quo will soon do everything possible to prevent both a Bernie Sanders nomination and a general election victory.
On the eve of the financial crisis, Nicolas Sarkozy boasted that “when there is a strike, nobody even notices anymore.” But as France mounts its longest strike in decades, organized labor is once again showing its power — and its limits.
Labour needs a socialist leader who can work with our movement, rebuild our communities, and fight for the policies we believe in. MP Rebecca Long-Bailey explains why she’s running for her party’s leadership and why democratic socialism is humanity’s best hope.
There is only one morally justifiable response to tonight’s attack on US military bases, no matter what: the United States cannot escalate the conflict with Iran.
Fires are ravaging Australia, but its government is only doubling down on coal and gas. A transition away from fossil fuels is needed more than ever, in Australia and everywhere else.
Antisemitism endures because capitalist oppression needs a scapegoat. Only by democratizing the economy can the ancient hate finally be extinguished.
Donald Trump will try to whip the US populace into a pro-war frenzy during his reelection campaign. To stop him, we need a candidate with a credible and consistent antiwar record. That’s not Biden, Buttigieg, or Warren — it’s Bernie Sanders.
It’s not enough for Labour leadership candidates to just say they’ll support radical policies. They need to prove they’ll fight for them — against big business, the political establishment, and the billionaire-owned press.
The new government coalition between the PSOE and Podemos is a historic opportunity for the Spanish left. After years of rising nationalist tensions, Podemos can turn the agenda back to the fight against austerity.
In a story released yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she and Joe Biden “would not be in the same party” in a different country. Centrists freaked out. But she’s right — fighters for the working class like AOC and Bernie Sanders aren’t on the same team as defenders of Wall Street and war like Biden.
Ro Khanna is a progressive member of Congress from California. In an interview with Jacobin, he talks about the desperate need for public ownership of California’s electrical utility PG&E, the fight for a Green New Deal, and why he’s a co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign.
For socialists, unions are paradoxical organizations. On the one hand, unions are essential for creating a workers’ organization that can oppose capital and challenge it for power. But they are also an insufficient vehicle for mobilizing those workers to transform the world.
Far-right leaders like Viktor Orbán claim to be reversing decades of Westernization. Yet Eastern Europe’s nationalist turn began even before 1989 — as socialist regimes abandoned their pretense of international solidarity.
François Mitterrand warned that France would be irrelevant to twenty-first-century history unless it maintained its control of Africa. Its instrument for so doing is the CFA Franc — a colonial currency entrenching French rule more than fifty years after independence.
At a moment when capitalism is facing increasing scrutiny, and its apologists are under greater pressure to defend it, Airbnb Magazine reminds us of something that bears repeating about the ideologists of capital today: not only are they as stupid as ever, they seem to be getting desperate.
Jackie Fielder is a democratic socialist running for state senate in California. In an interview, she explains how her activism for public banking, affordable housing, and indigenous rights led her to run for office, and how she found a political home in the Democratic Socialists of America.