Working-class authors often write of alienation from hometown life after going to university and becoming professionals. Alberto Prunetti's autobiographical novel instead tells us what it's like to leave an Italian steel town only to find low-paid kitchen jobs in England.
Progressives write off Republican-leaning counties across America to their own detriment. With working-class candidates, populist messaging, and effective organization, we can make major inroads in “Trump country” that will pay dividends for years to come.
Miners’ labor militancy transformed British politics and culture in the twentieth century. Then neoliberalism destroyed coal miners’ institutions and communities, upending British politics at the entire working class’s expense.
Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist candidate for governor in Wisconsin, discusses organizing beyond Madison and Milwaukee, confronting the Democratic establishment, and rebuilding working-class power.
Rachel Lears’ electric new documentary about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and three fellow working-class political insurgents is now in theaters. It tells the story of four ordinary people confronting a corrupt Democratic establishment.
From Berlin to the Ruhr, the organized working class resisted Hitler’s reactionary appeals.
After years of stagnant poll numbers and declining electoral results, Germany's Die Linke party hopes that its new leadership team will return it to the promise of the 2000s. But as its social base in the former East fragments, the left-wing party doesn't just need a different marketing strategy — it needs to rebuild its roots in working-class life.
Jon Melrod was part of a wave of student radicals who took jobs in factories in the 1970s. He spoke to Jacobin about life in working-class Wisconsin, becoming a workplace leader, and how to merge shop-floor fights with a broader left politics.
The history of the 1970s New York City fiscal crisis shows how power under capitalism is ultimately located outside electoral politics — and must be defeated at its source.
UAW president Shawn Fain, speaking at a Center for Working-Class Politics and Jacobin event, emphasized the need for a political program that addresses workers’ most basic issues — and how a broad strike in 2028 could put them front and center.
Bernie Sanders lost in large part because we lacked the strong working-class and leftist institutions needed to defeat the establishment. Key to rebuilding those institutions is waging more class-struggle electoral campaigns and ramping up rank-and-file labor organizing.
Turin was once Italian labor's most famous heartland, inspiring a young Antonio Gramsci to become a Communist. Today, Gramsci scholar Angelo D'Orsi is bidding to win the mayor's office — by mobilizing the working-class voters that the neoliberalized center-left abandoned.
Last year Dan Osborn, a former union president and strike leader, almost won a Senate seat in deep-red Nebraska as a populist independent. Osborn has now started a PAC to recruit, train, and support more blue-collar candidates for public office.
Many unions responded to past attacks by abandoning the rest of the working class. To fight Trump, that won't cut it.
Once powerful Arab left-wing movements took a battering in recent decades, but they’ve reemerged since 2011 to play a vital role in struggles for freedom and social justice. Rebuilding strong labor organizations is crucial for democracy in the Middle East.
In recent upsurges of working-class organizing among teachers, nurses, Starbucks baristas, and Amazon workers, college-educated workers have played central roles. That won’t change anytime soon.
Painters’ union leader Jimmy Williams Jr says that the Democrats have a messaging problem with working-class voters — and it isn’t just going to cost them a single election.
California’s San Mateo County is home to both a booming biotech industry and a large working-class immigrant community. Democratic socialist James Coleman is running for state assembly to represent workers and their families against corporate interests.
The rise of France’s far right is often blamed on increasing labor precarity. In fact, Marine Le Pen’s party is backed by the parts of the working class most hostile to the values of social solidarity — including in the workplace.
Former Bernie Sanders campaign chair Faiz Shakir is running an insurgent campaign for chair of the Democratic National Committee, focused on bringing the working class back into the party’s fold. Jacobin spoke to him about it.