The 1964 film Seven Up! asked 14 British seven-year-olds about their hopes of being the “shop steward and the executive of the year 2000.” Revisiting them every seven years for more than half a century, director Michael Apted made his interviewees into familiar faces — and shone a light on changing notions of class in Britain.
If you feel a burning hatred toward our unjust social order, writes China Mieville, don’t run from it. Such hate for a system that immiserates vast swaths of humanity is just and necessary.
On the politics of identity.
With powerful class movements behind it, technology can promise emancipation from work, not more misery.
Jane McAlevey believes in the potential of working people to unite across divisions, develop their collective potentials into a creative social force, and change the world. Her new book offers concrete tactics and practices for how workers can win more battles — and prepare for the larger wars to come.
Noam Chomsky talks to Jacobin about why working-class politics can secure universal health care, climate justice, and an end to nuclear weapons — if we’re willing to fight for them.
Between world wars and a crippling civil war, the Russian Revolution fought to change history.
We spoke to some of the Democratic Socialists of America members deciding the future of the country’s largest socialist organization this weekend.
This week, French writer Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In an interview, she explains how her class background and the reality of class divides shape her writing.
Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts provides a dynamic framework for building union power.
Britain’s Conservative Party used Brexit to cut a swathe through Labour’s electoral heartlands. But don’t be fooled by their last-minute populist makeover: the Tories are the same as ever — they’re not the party of the working class.
The 1978 film Blue Collar, starring Richard Pryor, is far from pleasant. But its riveting portrait of the brutality of life and work for American autoworkers still makes for essential viewing today.
Erik Olin Wright on class, socialism, and the meaning of Marxism.
At the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos this week, elites will try to address problems from climate change to the threat of worldwide recession. But these elites’ endless thirst for profit created these problems — and will doom their efforts to fail.
The Social Democrats have collapsed. Die Linke is divided. Will the German left ever be able to contend for power?
In 1932, Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant workers united in a communist-led rebellion. That instant of radical solidarity holds lessons for Irish politics today.
A bill to legalize abortion narrowly failed in the Argentinian Senate. But feminist movements have already effected a social revolution in South America.
The late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm recounts the origins of International Workers' Day. "The priests have their festivals," announced a 1891 May Day broadsheet, "the Moderates have their festivals. The First of May is the Festival of the workers of the entire world."
To understand the rank-and-file strategy for socialists in the labor movement, you have to understand the role and interests of the trade union bureaucracy.