The public option sounds like a step toward universal health care, but it’s really a delay tactic. The latest versions would force public plans to mimic private insurers, while the fight over the arcane details buys the industry another decade or two.
The argument that means-tested welfare programs reduce inequality and poverty more than non-means-tested programs is based on an accounting trick. Universal benefits are the best and cheapest way to alleviate poverty.
There is a widespread feeling that the living standard of the average American has declined since the mid-20th century. This is false — but it reflects the reality that it is now much harder for single-earner families to afford a mainstream lifestyle.
Lawmakers and wonks who insist on means-testing every government program like to posture as champions of the poor and downtrodden. But the fake Robin Hood act is just a cover for their deep-seated suspicion of the welfare state.
Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has announced his retirement. Over the last decade, he brought the radical left to the heart of Spanish politics — but its challenge to the establishment ultimately fell short.
Access to mental health services in Canada is woefully inadequate. To build a thoroughgoing mental health infrastructure, the Left must confront anti-psychiatry advocates and insist that mental illness exists — and that the best care is publicly funded.
Most dismiss social democracy as the fading echo of a bygone age — Lane Kenworthy disagrees.
The American pension crisis helps corporations maintain a precarious, easily exploitable workforce.
A venerable theory about people’s political values is making a comeback: the theory of “postmaterialism.” But despite what you may have heard, the theory doesn’t say class politics is doomed in rich countries — and neither did the scholar who created it.
The housing crisis is a calamity that can no longer be ignored. AOC and Bernie Sanders’s newly reintroduced Green New Deal for Public Housing highlights the importance of deeply affordable and generously funded public housing as key to solving this crisis.
New York governor Kathy Hochul is trying to dodge taxing the rich to please her wealthy donors, argue New York City Democratic Socialists of America’s cochairs Grace Mausser and Gustavo Gordillo.
Amid the radical upheavals of the early 1900s, the Austro-Marxists tried to marry revolutionary aims with reform-minded practice.
Queer Eye is a preview of the world to come. Under socialism, with more free time and shared prosperity, people will walk with their heads held higher — not by the ones and twos, but by the millions.
If we view the problems of poverty, health care, and criminal justice through a lens that filters out the political-economic underpinnings of these injustices — informed by the language of moral reckoning — we may just end up with modest reforms at best and symbolic gestures at worst, when what we need is fundamental structural change.
Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph’s Jobs and Freedom Strategy offers a path forward for a Left that has become increasingly insular, minoritarian, and powerless.
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.
In America, school is preparation for “real” life. In the early Soviet Union, school was filled with life.
The characteristics of the middle class, sociology as a discipline, the uses of "utopia," strategies for ending capitalism, the lives of students and colleagues — Erik Olin Wright transformed all of them and more.
As coronavirus spreads rapidly around the world, outpacing our capacity for testing, let alone treatment, the long-anticipated monster is finally at the door. And with global capitalism so impotent in the face of this biological crisis, our demands must be for properly international public-health infrastructure.
Unfortunately, any hope for a national Medicare for All is currently off the table. That’s why organizers throughout the country should launch campaigns at the state level to win M4A.