We should all cheer on strikes like the recently ended Hunts Point Teamsters walk off in the Bronx. But there’s no substitute for socialists actually showing up on the picket lines to provide tangible material support and engage with striking workers.
Once again, the media are trying to depict the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians as a round of meaningless violence from “both sides” of an equally matched contest — the reality on the ground be damned.
HBO has a new documentary about Barack Obama. It’s so devoid of politics that a viewer just learning about Obama would have no idea he escalated the war in Afghanistan and presided over eight years of rising economic inequality.
We were told we had to sacrifice privacy for security and accept the most radical surveillance state in human history. Yet time and again, mass surveillance proves ineffective for preventing attacks.
The late socialist writer Mike Davis’s first book was Prisoners of the American Dream, a deep exploration of how the US labor movement became so weakened. Nearly four decades later, Davis revisited the book in an interview with Jacobin.
The decline of religious affiliation in the United States has harmed the Left more than the Right. It has also produced millions of spiritual-but-not-religious Americans who are lonely and hungry for a nourishing community. We should organize them.
The Communist Party USA had its share of bureaucrats, morons, sectarians, and incompetents, writes longtime leftist Michael Myerson. But it also included some of the best, most principled, courageous, and heroic fighters for social justice in US history.
The new PBS documentary Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History tells the story of how a board game intended to warn Americans about inequality ended up teaching them how to be good little capitalists.
Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently based on an old McCarthyite state law. The incident is a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived in 21st-century America.
Democratic socialist Cori Bush is leading the legislative push for a cease-fire in Gaza. In remarks introducing her congressional resolution, Bush deplored the “collective punishment of Palestinians” and insisted that “all human life is equally precious.”
The media was obsessed with comparing this year’s DNC to Chicago 1968. But given the party’s rejection of the Uncommitted movement, Atlantic City 1964, when Democrats refused to seat Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, is more apt.
Even as part of a mayoralty characterized by attacking public services, scapegoating of migrants, and raising housing costs, New York City mayor Eric Adams’s pandering to Donald Trump in an effort to escape federal corruption charges is particularly brazen.
The challenge to the Catholic Church in Europe’s Reformation also stirred up a wave of social revolt by peasants and the urban poor. The Anabaptist movement became a channel for this revolt before it was savagely repressed by a fearful ruling class.
The Israel Anti-Boycott Act criminalizes a tactic used by some of history's great protest leaders.
The Black Lives Matter protests have had an electrifying impact. To build on that momentum, we need to forge strategic unity between different struggles against oppression, in the US and the wider world.
Despite the ravages of deindustrialization, the United Auto Workers remain the US’s most important industrial union. Members recently elected a new leadership promising democracy, militancy, and an end to corruption. But change isn’t coming easy to the UAW.
The horrifying story of the 1969 police murder of Fred Hampton is now well known. But there’s still much to be revealed about the case — like the information in bureau files newly obtained by Jacobin showing the FBI awarded Special Agent Roy Martin Mitchell, the handler of informant William O’Neal who was key to the raid that killed Hampton, a $200 bonus for work well done.
Ella Baker was one of the unsung leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. What can she teach us about movement-building today?
Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has uncovered a tradition of African American radicalism that was — and is — a crucial part of the American left’s history. He talks to Jacobin about the need to connect struggles against racism and class oppression.
A new show offers an alternative history of Black Power in Britain, reminding audiences of a neglected era of radicalism.