Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot has worked hard to portray herself as a “progressive” mayor. But her coronavirus response has largely shielded the city’s corporate elite — while rejecting policies pushed by democratic socialists on the city council that would benefit working-class residents.
American folk songs record a history of oppression and have often fueled the fire of protest. Folk artist Jake Xerxes Fussell’s music endeavors to sustain these working-class musical traditions while reinterpreting them for the modern age.
There’s no natural law that says the Democrats have to lose next year’s midterm elections. But if Democrats can’t fundamentally improve the quality of life for working-class voters, there’s good reason to think they will lose.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s deputy mayor for economic justice, Julie Su, speaks to Jacobin about her plans: “For too long, city hall policies have benefited the few but not the many in New York City.”
In Georgia, Republicans have leaned on voter suppression to push their reactionary agenda for years — and now they’re withholding unemployment benefits for pandemic-wracked workers. The only way to stop their pillaging is for poor and working-class Georgians to unite across racial lines, to finally win the economic and social rights they deserve.
Krystal Ball, Vivek Chibber, and Matt Karp discuss how class politics stalled after the Bernie Sanders campaigns — and why a new political opening is finally emerging.
Economist Josh Mason on the future of working-class politics in the United States.
In India, the transformation of Delhi Ridge from a site of working-class politics to a site of breezy recreation shows how a world-class megacity is made under the spell of neoliberalism. Workers are pushed to the side in order to make way for the affluent.
Ahead of her swearing in today, Seattle mayor Katie Wilson talks to Jacobin about the everyday pressures squeezing working-class people and why she’s a democratic socialist.
In 1871, elite British writers were horrified by the threat to the bourgeois social order that the Paris Commune represented. But their working-class counterparts expressed profound sympathy for the Communards and their revolutionary aspirations.
Staughton Lynd, who died earlier this month, played a prominent role in the antiwar movement and documented the radicalism of the 20th-century working class. His work should be read by anyone interested in understanding the history of the Left.
This summer’s French riots were a rebellion against police violence and the targeting of working-class men of color. For France Insoumise MP Danièle Obono, it’s high time the country attacked its problem of entrenched racism.
Despite corporate and elite attempts to wrest football from ordinary people, it remains a site of struggle for community and belonging amid capitalist alienation. The upcoming World Cup will showcase the game and its contradictions.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain has said, “We fight for the good of the entire working class,” and Americans seem to believe him. In massive numbers, they tell pollsters they back the UAW over the Big Three auto companies.
The core of Bolsonarism is hatred of Brazil's organized working class, which today — despite no threat of socialist revolution — is incarnated in the PT and the image of Lula.
The specter of war in the Asia-Pacific is leading to a gloomy cynicism. But the Australian working class has influenced debates on war before — and won peaceful outcomes.
In the Hudson Valley, socialist Sarahana Shrestha has announced her bid for a seat on the New York State Assembly. We spoke with her about her plans to make health care more accessible and to push for a Green New Deal.
Michael Moore has defended the rights and interests of working people for decades. But his new film, Planet of the Humans, embraces bad science on renewable energy and anti-humanist, anti–working class narratives of overpopulation and overconsumption.
After drawing a flurry of attention last fall, Sahra Wagenknecht’s Aufstehen movement has run out of steam. Yet its call for the German left to reconnect with working-class voters remains unanswered — and is the far right is taking advantage.
Mike Gold was a pioneer of proletarian literature and once one of America’s best-known writers. But his refusal to capitulate to McCarthy-era blackmail saw him written out of history.