Yi San is a freelance writer based in New York.
Labor organizer and strategist Jane McAlevey saw the disaster of the 2000 Florida recount close up. This time, she says, the labor movement will be crucial in the fight to “force the Democratic Party to do something that we don’t think that they’re going to do on their own.”
People on the Left spend a lot of time arguing about what should be done about the Democratic Party — and rightly so. But first we need to understand what the Democratic Party is. Hint: it’s a lot more complicated than it looks.
As Secretary of Labor, Bernie Sanders could do a lot to empower American workers. But the working class might be better served with Bernie pushing for pro-labor legislation outside the Biden administration rather than inside it.
Katie Valenzuela is a democratic socialist who was elected to Sacramento’s city council earlier this year. In an interview with Jacobin, Valenzuela talks about how Bernie Sanders inspired her candidacy and the fights for environmental justice, defunding the police, and rent control in Sacramento.
In his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to bring back manufacturing jobs with good pay. Those promises were empty. But Democrats haven’t been much better on industrial policy recent decades. Socialists need to fight for a real industrial policy.
The Left shouldn’t wring its hands about whether we should pack the courts or not. Just pack the courts.
Democrats are suggesting that we can all tune out and go back to brunch if Joe Biden wins the election. If we do that, we’re doomed.
If we view the problems of poverty, health care, and criminal justice through a lens that filters out the political-economic underpinnings of these injustices — informed by the language of moral reckoning — we may just end up with modest reforms at best and symbolic gestures at worst, when what we need is fundamental structural change.
Climate activists often argue that carbon-intensive energy like coal is mortgaging our future. It’s true — but coal workers themselves have already been paying the costs for a long time, measured in hundreds of thousands of shortened lives ravaged by diseases like black lung in the US alone.
As COVID-19 cases skyrocket again, hospitals remain understaffed and PPE and ventilators are still in short supply. We can’t leave people’s basic needs up to the whims of profit-seeking actors — we need democratic planning.
In August 1970, campaigners for women’s liberation mounted a huge demonstration that recharged feminism in the US. Ruthann Miller, the protest coordinator, was a socialist activist. She talks to Jacobin about the march, and the need to combine feminist and socialist politics.
All around the world, the Left has been hemorrhaging working-class support for decades. To think it could achieve long-run success as the champion of affluent cosmopolitanism is whistling past the graveyard.
Legendary activist Angela Davis and filmmaker Astra Taylor talk about economic democracy, criminal justice, and why we need a socialist internationalism.
More than three months since they began, the daily anti-corruption protests against Boyko Borissov’s administration are still headline news in Bulgaria. But the rival corruption allegations leveled by both the Left and Right also highlight the lack of real political alternatives — with the country’s harsh social inequality and rising poverty levels drawing no similar political attention.
Keir Starmer’s disgraceful move to suspend Jeremy Corbyn as a member of the Labour Party doesn’t come out of a vacuum. It’s part of a much wider push to stifle political dissent in Britain by coercive means, in which Starmer is now complicit.
A new book capturing the voices of workers in Silicon Valley’s tech industry — from software engineers to cafeteria workers — reminds us that the relentlessness of labor exploitation is just one side of the story. The other is the persistence of worker resistance.
The ANC’s Freedom Charter guided the struggle against white supremacy in South Africa, linking the questions of political and economic freedom. The origins of the charter — and the uses to which it was put — are rich with lessons for anti-racist struggles today.
Like their counterparts everywhere, Canada’s superrich cream off wealth from the working class while resisting paying taxes. In the age of COVID-19, this state of affairs is more obscene — and more unpopular — than ever. It’s time to tax Canada’s rich.
Keir Starmer’s baseless decision to suspend former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is a transparent attack on the Left. Labour members must fight it, or everything Corbyn stood for will depart with him.
Through running a slate of left-wing candidates and ballot referenda on issues like a $15 minimum wage and rent control, leftists in Portland, Maine, are fighting for the right of working-class people to live in the city. Portland’s wealthiest residents are shelling out huge amounts to try to stop them.