The outcomes of class conflicts throughout history have been influenced by how workers and rulers respond to pandemics. As we emerge from this pandemic, the fight for fairer work regimes is our urgent task.
Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story was published a decade ago, and it offers a portrait of a near-future, dystopian United States that might suddenly be upon us. It’s perfect reading for the pandemic lockdown.
Emmanuel Macron's first term has seen him wage war on yellow vest protesters, trade unions, and France's Muslims, undermining his image as a shiny progressive. Yet as the 2022 presidential election draws closer, the broad left is divided — and faces a tough challenge to avoid another runoff between Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen.
Since 2011, Arab labor organizations and left parties have been central to movements for democracy and social justice in the Middle East. Frequently overlooked in Western media coverage, from Egypt and Tunisia to Algeria and Sudan, they’ve carried on this fight against tremendous odds.
American federalism is often touted as a source of local democratic engagement, political innovation, and responsive public policy. But in practice, the American states have served not as “laboratories of democracy” but as laboratories of autocracy and inequality.
Today Portugal votes in snap elections, as prime minister António Costa seeks to end his center-left government’s reliance on far-left parties. If he succeeds, it will commit Portugal even further to a failed low-wage, low-investment model.
Economic crises have reshaped the modern world. Economic historian Adam Tooze tells Jacobin how the coronavirus pandemic will upend global politics and commerce for decades to come.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot? Of course not. Here’s a roundup of our best writing from 2021.
For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we’re all suffering for it.
Effective states can enforce discipline on elites. The United States is not one of them.
Class struggle will shape how this crisis plays out, and the world that’s created in its wake.
The mass inequality of America’s first Gilded Age thrived on identity-based partisanship, helping extinguish the fires of class rage. In 2021, we’re headed down the same path.
Before we hand over billions and possibly trillions of dollars to corporations that have proven time and again that they value profits above all else, we should take a pause. There is time to put people first.
The approach that delivered electoral success for the UK’s Tories over the last decade is starting to run out of road. But for now, the Conservatives are lucky to have an ineffectual Labour opposition that’s afraid to criticize their pandemic response.
The United States is facing an unprecedented economic, political, and social breakdown. With the Right discredited and the Democrats out of ideas, now is the time for socialists to think big.
Under capitalism, housing is a commodity, which means it principally exists to make rich people richer rather than meet human needs. That gap between making money and making profit distorts a whole range of life outcomes for average people — and real estate agents play a critical role in that process.
More than three months since they began, the daily anti-corruption protests against Boyko Borissov’s administration are still headline news in Bulgaria. But the rival corruption allegations leveled by both the Left and Right also highlight the lack of real political alternatives — with the country’s harsh social inequality and rising poverty levels drawing no similar political attention.
Today, protests in forty towns and cities across the Netherlands are highlighting the role of Dutch-based firms like Shell in fueling climate crisis. Workers are at the forefront of the struggle — offering hope for a mass environmental movement that goes beyond the middle class.
After losing to Sinn Féin in February’s general election, Ireland’s conservative parties have exploited the pandemic to regain their footing and strike a coalition deal with the Greens. The new government won’t deliver the change Irish society needs, but Ireland’s left-wing forces still have a real opening in the coming years.
In 2020, faced with a raging pandemic on one hand and the hopeless politics of a Democratic Party that kneecapped Bernie Sanders and propped up Joe Biden on the other, voters will probably, like they did in 2016, choose to stay at home.