Cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th century, separating poor farmers and landless cowboys from vital resources for their struggling cattle herds. So the cowboys formed fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.
Black sharecroppers organizing a union were slaughtered en masse 103 years ago this week in the Elaine Massacre. It was one of the US’s worst episodes of racist violence — and a reminder that Jim Crow was about keeping the masses divided and labor brutalized.
Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar sits down with Jacobin to discuss freedom and democracy — and why socialists need to reclaim those words from the Right.
The common picture we get of the US South is one of resolute conservatism. But the region has a radical history, too — as seen in Atlanta’s role as a center of opposition to apartheid South Africa.
After independence, Kenya’s political class understood that defeating socialism at home was the best way of securing Western support. Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first president, led a vicious campaign to take power by defeating his rivals on the Left.
Endless war . . . it’s good work, if you can get it.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone chronicled the growing loneliness and isolation of wealthy societies. Twenty years later, the problem is far worse than he could have imagined.
To understand today’s protests in Iran, we need to look at the history of the Islamic Republic since 1979. Iran has a tradition of popular mobilization with few parallels in the modern world, and that tradition underpins the current wave of discontent.
The mine workers’ union’s conservative, corrupt leadership leadership was ousted by reformers 50 years ago this month. Today’s union reformers can learn from both their successes and their failures.
A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War. This is only partly true: reactionaries did not just fear democracy, they feared the economic redistribution former slaves associated with it.
The bare minimum requirement of being a party of workers is to actually support measures that would improve those workers’ lives. By that metric, the GOP has failed over and over again.
Netflix’s new feel-good Bayard Rustin biopic, Rustin, claims the civil rights hero has been forgotten because of his sexuality. But it was his fiery and provocative class politics that makes him both controversial and prophetic today.
At the end of last year, Joe Biden signed a $1.7 trillion budget bill that gives $1.1 trillion to the Pentagon, police, and prisons, including a whopping $860 billion for the military alone. So much for Build Back Better.
The United Packinghouse Workers of America was a beacon of “civil rights unionism.” And in the aftermath of Emmett Till’s grotesque lynching in 1955, the union spearheaded a mass campaign on Till’s behalf in the North and South.
Inside the fight against JROTC, a Pentagon program that targets working-class teenagers at public schools.
The foreign policy establishment is responding to Trump-era brutalities by demanding more, not less, aggression and empire.
From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists, leftists have regarded Lincoln as a prolabor hero who played a crucial role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as part of the great radical democratic tradition.
Republicans hate Social Security and Medicare, but the programs’ universal structure makes them too risky to take on. We need more programs like that.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine one year ago today hoping to capture it in a few days — then spent the last year turning its southeast into a bloodbath. Even if the current military stalemate is broken, the divides created by the war won’t heal soon.
This summer could see 350,000 UPS workers walk off the job, the United States’ largest strike in the 21st century thus far. The Teamsters are getting ready. Here’s a look at how.