
Class Rules Everything Around Me
The socialist emphasis on the centrality of class isn't about ignoring racial inequalities, but about crafting a politics capable of ending them.

The socialist emphasis on the centrality of class isn't about ignoring racial inequalities, but about crafting a politics capable of ending them.

A new rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is banning excessive credit card late fees. In retaliation, the greedy banking industry is threatening to punish debtors by increasing already exorbitant interest rates.

It’s a mark of the influence of Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign that the American political landscape before he ran looks unrecognizable now. Most of the hundreds of socialists who now hold power across the country were directly inspired by it.

Finance’s dominance over the economy isn’t a deviant evolution of a “good” industrial capitalism. Finance and industry are interdependent — meaning solving problems like inequality and climate change will require a far-reaching democratization of the economy.

The generic drug industry is pushing back against a government effort to lower the cost of lifesaving medications, even though the plan is built around letting them make more generic drugs.

In 2023, Pfizer made more than $27 billion in revenue and paid zero federal income tax. Like many other large US companies, it took advantage of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, which widened existing loopholes and set off a tax-avoidance bonanza.

The generational warfare promoted by centrists and the Right, who have long been desperate to cut and privatize Social Security, is a fool’s solution to what ails the system. Taxing the rich is the answer.

The uptick in high-profile strikes in recent years has been heartening. But sustaining and expanding the gains won by that militancy will require careful strategizing and deep political engagement that starts with but goes beyond the shop floor.

Days after the Biden administration announced a rule mandating flight cancelation automatic refunds, four lawmakers overseeing aviation policy in Congress began pushing legislation to reverse it. All of them take substantial airline industry donations.

Airlines have made considerable money holding on to consumer refunds for canceled or delayed flights. New language including a refund guarantee in a must-pass Federal Aviation Administration funding bill could change that.

Each year, Congress mandates the US military disclose how many civilian deaths it was responsible for globally. In its latest report, the Pentagon refused to acknowledge any — following a long history of failures to own up to documented killings of civilians.

American consumers are paying more and more at both grocery stores and fast-food chains. These retailers are disingenuously blaming the price hikes on inflation while they put their massive profits toward stock buybacks and fat dividends.

A major Democratic donor and Microsoft board member is pressuring Kamala Harris to dismiss the government’s top antitrust regulator, who has launched an aggressive crackdown on corporate power since taking office.

Joe Biden and his political machine damaged the Democratic Party by delaying his withdrawal. The Democrats can still recover from this crisis — but only if they don’t repeat their past mistakes.

Right-wing commentators are saying Kamala Harris’s endorsement of “equity” is tantamount to Marxism. This is nonsense: Democrats’ narrow advocacy of equity has little to do with the socialist goal of meeting everyone’s basic needs.

UAW Region 9a leader Brandon Mancilla says in an interview with Jacobin that he and his union are not impressed with Republicans’ supposed pro-worker turn — and he explains what a real progressive, working-class agenda would look like.

Kamala Harris once championed Medicare for All, calling the US’s current system “inhumane.” As the 2024 election approaches, questions about Harris’s stance on health care have a new urgency.

Donald Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency, which is dominated by the most reactionary and stupid representatives of the tech industry, has made it a partisan issue. But it might turn out to be a misstep.

How many of the fundamental 2010s problems — the ones that launched Occupy Wall Street and fueled Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in the first place — have been addressed by today’s Democrats? None.

United Teachers Los Angeles’s transformation into a strike-ready, progressive union offers lessons for how today’s labor upsurge can produce durable, transformative union power, writes former UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl.