Robert LeVertis Bell is a public school teacher and socialist in Louisville, Kentucky running for city council. In an interview with Jacobin, he talks about his experience participating in the recent red-state teachers’ upsurge, fighting gentrification, and how campaigns like his can be used to build a broader movement that is bigger than any one candidate.
Whatever happens in today’s primaries, Latino voters have made clear they have a strong appetite for leftist policies. By following Bernie Sanders’s lead and focusing on the pressing needs of rank-and-file Latino workers, democratic socialists can continue to unleash the power of this potent voting bloc.
On March 13, 1920, twelve million workers struck across Germany to block an attempted military coup. The successful resistance was organized by the workers’ councils — a form of grassroots democracy that allowed the masses to assert their own power.
The Bernie Sanders campaign is beholden to no one in high places, has no affiliated elites to please or negotiate with, and has helped unleash new working-class militancy in America. The question now is, how can we sustain this extraordinary left turn in American public life to transform society?
The pharmaceutical industry has so far failed to develop a coronavirus cure. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: the privatized health care model can’t provide the drugs we need to combat even deadlier bacterial epidemics, because they’re producing drugs for profit rather than human need.
The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history — destroying untold millions of lives and families in just a few decades. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created in the first place, and how we can finally dismantle it.
Despite the strange circumstances and urgency of the coronavirus pandemic, last night’s debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders highlighted two visions of our political crises that largely haven’t changed: Biden arguing for a return to normalcy, Sanders insisting that something is deeply wrong in our society.
Joe Biden’s relentless lying in last night’s debate, and the media’s astonishingly servile reaction, have made it clear that the “post-truth era” will not be over when the Trump administration ends.
We all deserve a functioning state that can provide for everyone, and a society that values solidarity above all. That’s the only thing that can get us through the coronavirus pandemic.
The media and the Democratic Party establishment’s singular focus on paid sick leave leaves out millions of contract and informal workers. We need to think much bigger — now.
In last night’s debate, Joe Biden claimed that Italy shows public health care doesn’t help the response to coronavirus. But the Italian health service is providing a vital defense against mass infection — ensuring that any ill person can get proper treatment, regardless of their ability to pay.
Spain has announced it will take over private hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to fight coronavirus. Yet in the PSOE-Podemos coalition, some ministers are still defending fiscal austerity. Their neoliberal dogma could get people killed.