A pair of leftist historians has undertaken a massive project: compiling a six-volume collection of Eugene Debs’s writings and speeches. We spoke with one of them, who detailed Debs’s extraordinary journey from moderate young trade union leader to courageous socialist militant.
Marek Edelman was a leader of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi genocide. After 1945, Edelman stayed on in Poland as a champion of democratic socialism who played a courageous role in the country’s dissident movement.
Professional athletes have an enormous amount of power that they put to good use this past week in a series of unprecedented strikes. But workers of all types have similar kinds of power — and could, just like athletes, use it to shut society down to fight injustice.
Thomas Frank’s brilliant new book The People, No focuses on the long elite tradition of anti-populism. But it is really an urgent plea to liberals and radicals alike to embrace a left populism and universalism — or keep on losing.
Radical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox argued that racial antagonism was an essential tool for maintaining capitalist power. Cox’s understanding of race and class can help us forge a broad, multiracial movement against oppression today.
In Georgia, Republicans have leaned on voter suppression to push their reactionary agenda for years — and now they’re withholding unemployment benefits for pandemic-wracked workers. The only way to stop their pillaging is for poor and working-class Georgians to unite across racial lines, to finally win the economic and social rights they deserve.
Three social scientists crunched the numbers and found that counties where the Civil Rights Movement was active received almost 50 percent more War on Poverty spending than those counties that didn’t — and the more active the movement, the more funding received. It confirms what the Left has long argued: protests get the goods.
Democrats use Selma, Alabama as a political prop and ignore the city’s current struggles. Residents told Jacobin that they need real help, not just annual photo ops with Oprah and Joe Biden.
In his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to bring back manufacturing jobs with good pay. Those promises were empty. But Democrats haven’t been much better on industrial policy recent decades. Socialists need to fight for a real industrial policy.
Looking beyond Joe Biden’s unexpectedly modest victory, the 2020 election was a historic failure for the Democratic Party. On the other hand, despite some painful hitches coming out of this campaign season, the Left has reason to be hopeful.
World War I wasn’t a war for democracy — it was a catastrophic, barbaric conflict that left tens of millions of people dead and set the stage for anti-democratic rollbacks for years to come. Anti-war socialists were right to oppose it.
James Baldwin went from espousing radical politics as a teenager to disavowing socialist politics as doctrinaire. But by the end of his life, inspired by the radicalism of the Black Panthers, Baldwin was again ready to proclaim himself a socialist.
Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue could actually force a Senate vote on $2,000 checks for almost two thirds of Georgia households. After all, their state is in the middle of a calamity. Instead, they are issuing belated, meek platitudes.
Australian PM Scott Morrison is often compared to Donald Trump. Morrison is certainly a race-baiter who serves the rich, but his brand of reheated “populism” borrows far more from Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and former PM John Howard. Unfortunately, it’s not dead yet.
Yesterday’s events were the expression of a dangerous authoritarian movement that has been long in the making.
Jabari Brisport is one of six socialists now in the New York State Legislature, the most in a century. We spoke to him about how he came to democratic socialism, how elected officials can help build working-class power, and why his top policy priority is to tax the rich.
Decades after the end of Jim Crow, cities like Mobile, Alabama, are still shot through with racial segregation. That segregation is reflected in the city’s Mardi Gras culture, where some social societies still maintain white-only membership.
The postwar Second Red Scare successfully smashed the American left. But in the midst of its devastation, a small number of old leftists refused to be shut up by the climate of fear. Without their heroism, the New Left could never have emerged.
Former state senator and Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign cochair Nina Turner is running for Congress. In an interview with Jacobin, Turner reflects on the heartbreaks and new opportunities of both Bernie campaigns, the left agenda she will bring to Capitol Hill, and why policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal are racial justice issues.
Yet again, both Republican and Democratic party leaders are attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar for telling the truth about American and Israeli war crimes. And yet again, Omar has nothing to apologize for.