After denying COVID existed in his country, Tanzanian president John Magufuli died earlier this month, likely from the coronavirus. It was a sorry end to a presidency that began with hopes that Magufuli would improve public services and clamp down on corruption among the political elite.
Mark Rudd was Columbia’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter president in 1968, when the university erupted in protest against the Vietnam War and racism. He then cofounded the Weather Underground. In an interview with Jacobin, he reflects on what radicals like him got right and got wrong, and what today’s socialists should learn from his experiences.
Our current model of pharmaceutical research is based on patent monopolies designed to enrich drug company executives and shareholders. But there's a better way to develop new drugs and vaccines, based on public funding and open-source research.
In the 1920s and ’30s, a summer school for industrial working women built an economics curriculum around the perspective of labor rather than capital. It offers a visionary example of worker education that emphasizes class struggle and worker empowerment.
The case against former Brazilian president Lula da Silva is over and fully discredited. Now the path is clear for Lula to take on Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing government and save Brazilian democracy.
Joe Biden’s inadequate stimulus is the best workers can expect if they aren’t organized and fighting. But if we’re to see more policies that benefit and empower the working class, we’ll need more workplace organizing, more strikes, and more class struggle.
In a 1902 article, Eugene V. Debs described his journey from young labor organizer to militant socialist. We reprint it here in full.
In the 1920s and ’30s, German publisher Willi Münzenberg built a network of magazines, newspapers, and film studios that terrified big business interests. It became the largest left-wing media operation in history.
Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to Walmart’s headquarters. It’s also a town in which the Walton Family Foundation works like a parallel state, creating a kind of twenty-first-century company town.
The United States has been locked in a mental health crisis over the past year, one exacerbated by the miserable material conditions faced by millions. Democratic leaders should promise easement from that sense of dread through redistributive policies, connecting our mental well-being to our material well-being.
Inspire Brands — which owns Jimmy John's, Arby’s, Sonic, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Dunkin’ — bragged in internal documents about its role preventing workers from getting a living wage. $15 an hour and a union is the least we should be demanding from predatory corporations.
When it comes to foreign policy, Joe Biden represents a continuation of the imperialist status quo. We need a leftist alternative that weakens US empire and prizes democracy, rather than one that assumes the US is right to dominate the world.