Today is Giving Tuesday, so here’s a 1913 article by Eugene V. Debs, never before republished, about why the charity balls of the rich will never deliver justice for the poor. As Debs declared, “What the poor need is that the rich shall get off their backs.”
In 1845, Friedrich Engels wrote a scathing condemnation of English capitalism, The Condition of the Working Class in England. In it, he accused the bosses of carrying out “social murder” against workers and the poor.
J. Edgar Hoover is notorious for his decades-long campaign to stamp out the Left by surveilling and even killing radicals like Fred Hampton. What is less well known is that liberals played an important role in enabling Hoover’s antidemocratic crusade.
Medical residents and fellows at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx are trying to form a union, citing the need to fight overwork and understaffing that’s endangering patients. Jacobin spoke with unionizing doctors about their organizing drive.
The Biden administration has not prioritized pushing through a confirmation of a member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which oversees labor issues for federal workers. The result is that federal unions are far weaker than they should be.
The next time a speculative bubble is massively inflating around a fancy new asset like cryptocurrency and financial carnival barkers are screaming it will change everything, remember Sam Bankman-Fried and how quickly all of his promises proved to be bullshit.
George Saunders may be one of America’s most lauded fiction writers, but when he turns his pen to the phenomenon of Donald Trump and his supporters, he reveals the limits of his political understanding — and produces some of his worst stories in the process.
Canada’s Trudeau government touts the country as a climate champion. COP27, where Canada was the only OECD country to have fossil fuel delegates in tow, offered a more telling snapshot of the government’s priorities.
The myth of Silicon Valley touts the grit and flair of its tech bro champions. But the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has revealed that there’s no genius or elaborate game of multidimensional chess behind the curtain: just garden-variety capitalists.
If you feel a burning hatred toward our unjust social order, writes China Mieville, don’t run from it. Such hate for a system that immiserates vast swaths of humanity is just and necessary.
In the Vietnam War era, radical psychiatrists and antiwar veterans developed a concept of trauma stemming from perpetrating acts of violence. Over the next decade, the idea of soldier trauma was depoliticized and put at odds with antiwar critique.
Sections of the environmental movement bemoaned the birth of the world’s eight-billionth person, but the Left should have no part in this cynical misanthropy. The cause of food insecurity and climate change is the irrationality of capitalism — not rising populations.