Following last year's popular revolt against IMF-backed reforms, Ecuador's neoliberal president Lenín Moreno has systematically pushed phony judicial processes to suppress opposition at the ballot box. The ban on leftist Rafael Correa's candidacy makes a mockery of the 2021 election — and raises worrying questions over the future of democracy in Ecuador.
Sunday saw the passing of Rossana Rossanda, a lifelong communist, anti-fascist partisan, and cofounder of il manifesto newspaper. In this extract from her memoirs, she explains how the upheavals of 1968 marked a radical shift in her political engagement, as both the Prague Spring, and worker and student revolts in Italy drove an enduring split in Communist Party ranks.
Joe Biden wants to have it both ways, issuing bold rhetoric about the climate emergency while refusing to adopt a policy agenda to match. But taking the science of climate change seriously means banning practices like fracking — something Biden has so far refused to do.
The Democratic Party has long made a habit of preemptively surrendering major fights with Republicans before they even begin. They’ll have to change that right now if Democrats want to block a Supreme Court replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Supreme Court is way too powerful — and its power shouldn’t be wielded for good, it should be permanently undermined. Many liberals are close to coming around to this position, but few articulate it clearly.
On September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former minister in Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile who was forced into exile after the US-backed coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, was assassinated by a car bomb in the heart of Washington, DC.
In the US, consumer debt is presented as a crucial rung on the ladder to a better life, a pathway to homeownership, and a good job. But most people never dig themselves out of debt, and the myth of the “good” debtor only conceals the crime of treating health care, shelter, and education as profit centers.
Let's say we accept capitalism's defenders' claims that their system created mass economic growth and pulled countless people out of poverty. Even if that's true, we have clearly reached a point in human development where we can rid ourselves of capitalism's relations of hierarchy and domination — without inviting immiseration.
Before he became Vietnam’s foremost communist, Ho Chi Minh traveled across Europe and the Americas as a ship’s cook. In Rio de Janeiro, he encountered a world of inequality, but also of defiant class solidarity — an experience that helped forge one of the twentieth century’s greatest revolutionaries.
The Supreme Court has been a reactionary institution for most of its history, law professor Sam Moyn tells Jacobin. We need to take on its power and fight for real democracy in the United States.
Even a glance at the "incel" subculture reveals vile misogyny, reactionary politics of all kinds, and multiple acts of horrific violence. The documentary TFW No GF also emphasizes that, in part, that subculture is a product of the breakdown of institutions, the disappearance of decent economic opportunities, and a broader loss of meaning in America.
A "Yes" vote in Italy’s constitutional referendum on September 20–21 would see Italy’s number of MPs and senators slashed by more than one-third. But most main parties are backing the cut — a hollow attack on “the politicians” that pushes austerian arguments for reducing democratic representation.