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.
The basic function of education under capitalism is to produce the next generation of compliant workers. We should fight instead for fully funded schools that empower students — while challenging the capitalist system that undermines progressive education reform.
The three socialists who effectively won election to New York City Council this month have achieved something many would have thought impossible just a few years ago. But they won’t be the first socialists elected to that body.
Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington’s police force this week is adding insult to the injury of the United States’ long denial of equal political standing to the capital’s residents.
As his fellow West German radicals began to embrace violence in the 1970s, legendary filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder decided to celebrate another path for emancipation: class struggle in the workplace.
Too many anti-racist efforts today obsess over individual actions like microaggressions. We need to fight racism in a collective project rooted in shared material interests — as the United Packinghouse Workers of America did in its heyday.
Nina Turner reflects in Jacobin on her recent congressional campaign, the importance of continuing to fight for Medicare for All, and how the Left can still win real change.
A 60,000-person strike that would have shut down the film and television industry nationwide was averted this weekend when IATSE reached a tentative agreement with the studios. But contract ratification by the union’s members is far from guaranteed.
Jacobin chatted with former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe about why he backed Bernie Sanders, his longtime support for progressive causes including South African anti-apartheid organizing, and why the B-52s are “fucking amazing.”
The working-class son of Haitian immigrants, David Alexis cut his teeth organizing fellow Uber drivers. Now he’s running to unseat the “Joe Manchin of New York” and fight for immigrants’ rights, workers’ rights, and a Green New Deal from Albany.