
The Anti-Amazon Ground Game
How New York City socialists and their allies combined electoral muscle with front-stoop politicking to keep Amazon’s headquarters out of the city.
How New York City socialists and their allies combined electoral muscle with front-stoop politicking to keep Amazon’s headquarters out of the city.
Companies devalue them, and consumers rarely know they exist. But the apps and companies that millions of us depend on, like Uber and Amazon, couldn’t function without the invisible, low-wage labor of “ghost workers.”
Seattle socialist city councilor Kshama Sawant has been subject to repeated corporate-backed attempts to remove her from office. Last night, she defeated yet another. Despite attacks from some of the world’s most powerful capitalists, Sawant isn’t going anywhere.
This spring, Amazon delivery drivers unionized with the Teamsters — but the logistics giant refuses to bargain with them. The workers are now setting up picket lines at Amazon warehouses across the country, joined by fellow Teamsters from other employers.
As tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in the coronavirus crisis, the richest Americans saw their wealth rise by hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s not a coincidence.
Neoliberalism was never about shrinking the state to unfetter markets and enhance human freedom. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley argues that neoliberalism has always sought to wield state power to maximize profits for the rich.
The Federal Trade Commission is trying to stop the merger of two of the US’s largest grocery-store chains, Kroger and Albertsons. In response, the companies are suing to undermine the FTC and dismantle the country’s antitrust machinery.
The tycoons of Big Tech are following in the footsteps of their Gilded Age predecessors, using a facade of social concern to cover over their depredations. We need to depose the new Robber Barons.
The recent ProPublica exposé about billionaires’ almost-nonexistent tax bill was just the latest to reveal how little the ultrarich pay in taxes. We need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.
Libertarians and conservatives talk a lot about freedom, but the most important kind of freedom is freedom from domination — and if you take that seriously, you should oppose capitalism.
Democrats and Beltway pundits helped Mitch McConnell undermine Bernie Sanders’s push for direct aid to millions of Americans facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy through $2,000 checks. Even for a party that is constantly disappointing, Democrats’ complete capitulation to McConnell and austerity ideology was shockingly pathetic.
Ten years ago, Amazon operated zero facilities in California. It now operates close to 40 facilities in the Inland Empire alone, making it the region’s largest employer. Workers essentially live in a company town — which may be why many want to unionize.
Megapopular right-wing YouTube channel PragerU’s “moral case for capitalism” fails to address capitalism’s massive defects — its injustice, exploitation, and instability. Instead, it offers a glib pep talk about why modern society is better than feudalism.
In his confirmation hearing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr told Bernie Sanders that he opposes health care as a human right. His reasoning reveals how libertarian talking points are being used to defend a cruel and irrational health care system.
The news industry isn’t a marketplace of ideas — it’s just a market. To ensure freedom of speech, we have to take on the rich.
Don’t cry in your champagne. Here’s the best of Jacobin from a remarkable year.
Amazon went all out to defeat Seattle’s socialist city council member Kshama Sawant in this year’s election — but Sawant emerged victorious. In an interview with Jacobin, she reflects on why it’s so important to pick fights with capitalists, and what every socialist running for office should know.
Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has donated $100 million to food banks during the current crisis, but he won’t even pay his own workers sick pay. Instead of charity, we need rights we can rely on — and as Unite leader Len McCluskey argues, the best way to win them is to organize with our coworkers.
Karen Nussbaum was a cofounder of the pioneering labor-feminist organization 9to5. In an interview with Jacobin, she discusses why working women in the 1970s needed to organize as workers, 9to5’s hilarious tactics, and why “individually self-reliant but collectively powerless” women workers today still need to organize on the job.
To build worker power at a mass scale that can challenge Jeff Bezos’s behemoth, worker militancy at Amazon has to be as global and as extensive as the supply chain itself.