Poet Langston Hughes was invited to speak at Occidental College on this day in 1948, then uninvited when red-baiters released a report calling him a “subversive.” His story shows how the postwar Red Scare targeted radicals, particularly black leftists.
Former rank-and-file Chicago Teachers Union member and organizer Brandon Johnson advanced to a runoff election in the city's mayoral race this week. In 2014, Jacobin interviewed Johnson about the CTU's political strategy. We publish the conversation here.
It’s fashionable to say that black veterans got no real benefits from the GI Bill. In truth, for many, the GI Bill was a rare positive experience with government that contrasted sharply with the indignities of Jim Crow.
Democrats usually waste their electoral majorities. So it’s shocking when the party uses its power to actually pass progressive and pro-worker legislation, as it just did in Michigan — including repealing the state’s right-to-work law.
Rallying behind “free enterprise” mythology, American capitalists have long claimed to be gritty underdogs facing off against a rising statism.
Conservative commentator Peter Hitchens thinks the Nazis were leftists. His case doesn’t even begin to add up.
Despite what conservative pundits say, socialists don’t hate religion. In fact, only democratic socialism can realize the religious promise of a brotherhood of man.
International Workers’ Day traces its roots to the 1886 Haymarket affair, when labor radicals in Chicago were unjustly executed. Ever since, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.
During the Great Depression, St Louis’s Funsten Nut Factory was racially divided. Black workers, mostly women, worked harder and made less than their white counterparts. So they went on strike — and got their white coworkers to join them on the picket line.
The end of Roe v. Wade has shaken up the decades-long bargain between the GOP and the antiabortion movement. As the movement radicalizes, the party faces a dilemma: Should it stand by a cause that threatens to become a disastrously unpopular albatross?
Over 900 died at Jonestown in 1978 in a murder-suicide that shook the world. How did Peoples Temple go from emancipatory project to disaster?
A new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics, Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, and Jacobin shows how labor can play to its strengths — and win. The secret? Run more union members for office.
With its vast logistics empire deploying robotics, surveillance, and AI to block worker power at every turn, Amazon now sits atop the throne of American capitalism. Organizing it will define the future of the labor movement.
Malcolm X died 53 years ago today, just as he was moving toward revolutionary ideas that challenged oppression in all its forms.
Universal programs and economic redistribution, far more than rhetorical moderation and identity-based pandering, are the best bet for winning over workers of all races.
Philadelphia congressional candidate Chris Rabb is candid about his democratic socialist politics, saying, “Socialists need to expose the role of both parties in our crisis and point toward a future where the working class holds power.”
George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead showed a new society devouring the old.
A long tradition in US thought has emphasized the importance of economic security for ensuring individual liberty. But to truly realize equal freedom for all, we need a socialist politics fighting for democratic control over the economy.
The Young Patriots were a group of radical poor white Southern migrants in Chicago who allied with the Black Panthers. Their use of the Confederate flag makes them an enduring object of fascination. A new book recounts the true story.
Though it’s only been a decade since Lin-Manuel Miranda’s magnum opus premiered, the hit musical Hamilton represents a bygone period in American politics.