Asset-manager firms like Blackstone have become hugely important players in global capitalism since the 2008 crash. They’re steadily taking control of the social infrastructure that’s essential for human life and using it to generate massive profits.
On Thursday morning, nearly 3,000 public school teachers and support staff in Oakland, California, went on strike. Educators say they’re striking to solve an austerity-driven crisis of understaffing and retention.
Working-class reformer Brandon Johnson will soon be inaugurated Chicago’s next mayor, and already businesses are threatening to undermine his agenda. Johnson and the movement behind him should challenge those threats directly by asserting public control of capital.
The New York City budget newly proposed by Mayor Eric Adams had little democratic input from average residents in the city and features more massive cuts to desperately needed public programs like public education.
Last week, graduate student workers at Fordham University in the Bronx went on a three-day strike in response, they say, to the administration’s refusal to bargain in good faith. Jacobin spoke to some of the grad workers.
In an interview, 2024 Democratic presidential contender Marianne Williamson discusses her criticisms of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party establishment.
By the 1970s, New Zealand’s union movement had grown to become powerful, popular, and left-wing. This was in large part thanks to leaders like Bill Anderson, whose organizing skills were matched by his political vision.
In mobile home parks around the country, millions of tenants and owners are being mercilessly exploited and regularly evicted, often by giant Wall Street firms like Blackstone.
In a recent interview, Bernie Sanders was forced to defend his position that billionaires shouldn’t exist to an exasperated Chris Wallace. Sanders is absolutely right: a humane system wouldn’t produce such dramatic disparities in the distribution of resources.
Progressives at the city level face all sorts of constraints, from business interests to hostile state legislatures. But we shouldn’t preemptively clip our wings: left reformers like Chicago’s Brandon Johnson can transform cities into pro-worker havens.
The black population in the United States is roughly the size of the population of Spain. Yet too many ignore class differences and political complexities among millions of African Americans.
Born in Bulgaria, Christian Rakovsky became a major leader of the Russian Revolution who wanted the Soviet Union to be a true partnership of nations. But when Rakovsky challenged Stalin’s dictatorship, he was tried and executed on a trumped-up charge.