Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show tells the story of one of the most compelling and successful social movements of the past century, ACT UP. We talked to Schulman about the "New York Crimes," the messy joy of political commitment, and how ACT UP changed history.
Maida Springer isn’t a household name even among trade unionists and labor historians. But she was a lifelong union member and organizer who was committed to using unions to improve black people’s lives in the United States and Africa.
Stanley Aronowitz died this week at 88. He hated work, loved life, and brought his overflowing, exuberant approach to social problems to picket lines, classrooms, and vacation. A fighting left needs more people like him.
The working-class son of Haitian immigrants, David Alexis cut his teeth organizing fellow Uber drivers. Now he’s running to unseat the “Joe Manchin of New York” and fight for immigrants’ rights, workers’ rights, and a Green New Deal from Albany.
When Joe Biden was inaugurated a year ago, many expected his presidency to emulate the reforming ambition of FDR’s New Deal. But that ignores what made the New Deal possible: a climate of militant agitation and a populist president willing to align himself with it.
The question of what to do about the Democrats is a perpetual quandary for leftists. In the 1970s, the New Politics movement tried to move the party in a more progressive direction. Perhaps the movement deserves more credit than many socialists have given it.
Proposals for market-based solutions to the housing crisis have precedents in the elite-driven housing policy of the 20th century. Those policies favored business interests at the expense of poor and working-class people while worsening racial divides.
In the neoliberal era, Democrats adopted an elitist approach that emphasized education as the key to individual success. Only the revival of an inclusive social democratic politics can reverse economic inequality and defeat reactionary populism.
Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1913. Far from being a face of respectability politics, she was a defiant and seasoned working-class organizer who despised the cringing submission that Jim Crow induced and who doggedly fought oppression in all its forms.
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.
John Brophy earned the moniker “Mr. CIO” in the 1930s for his excellent organizing for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He was steadfast and never flashy, which is perhaps why he’s been forgotten. It’s also what makes him a model for our times.
The bipartisan obsession with schooling as an investment in “human capital” in the US since the 1970s has fostered a highly unequal society. We need wide-ranging redistribution to tackle inequality — and to defend public education against right-wing backlash.
From the struggle for civil rights to opposing apartheid in South Africa and the war against Cuba, Harry Belafonte was a fighter for justice both at home and abroad.
Political rights are not enough. Economic rights — the right to home, food, health care, a union, and a safe and stable planet — should be our rallying cry for a just country and world.
The 1960s saw massive student uprisings for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Here are five lessons from the ’60s for Palestine solidarity protesters today.
In the mid-20th century, union leader Harry Van Arsdale Jr became obsessed with a simple idea: fewer working hours would mean a need for more workers, and therefore more jobs. He considered it the solution to unemployment, and his union fought to realize it.
Jonathan Eig’s new Martin Luther King biography stirs exhilaration and visceral pain at the unexpected triumphs and vicious violence that King and the freedom movement endured. But it largely leaves out a key piece of King’s legacy: his commitment to labor.
Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has uncovered a tradition of African American radicalism that was — and is — a crucial part of the American left’s history. He talks to Jacobin about the need to connect struggles against racism and class oppression.
The left-wing podcast Know Your Enemy engages seriously with conservative thinkers. A deep-pocketed conservative foundation tried to destroy the podcast with a serious lawsuit. Which side is serious about the free exchange of ideas?
The US is remarkable for its extreme relationship to drugs, marked by a love affair with psychoactive substances of all kinds and also draconian efforts to curtail drug use. That relationship has roots in America’s particularly virulent strain of capitalism.