Through dogged organizing and a class-based message, Bernie Sanders cleaned up among young and nonwhite voters in last week's Iowa caucus. It’s proof that the coalition he’s assembling has the multiracial working class at its center.
The big winner in last weekend’s Swedish elections was the far-right Sweden Democrats, who came in second place nationally. To stop their advance, the Left needs to rebuild its roots in all sections of the working class.
Research shows that the organized working class, and industrial workers in particular, have been the driving force for democracy around the world. The question is whether the erosion of the industrial working class will weaken our prospects for democratic politics.
Kooper Caraway, the 29-year-old new president of South Dakota’s AFL-CIO, grew up in a working-class family and cut his teeth fighting ICE as a high schooler. Now his vision for labor includes union-run housing and childcare: “It’s all about building a working-class culture of solidarity.”
Unlike their European counterparts, the Socialist Party of America stood firm against World War I, refusing to give in to the siren song of nationalism. Here, in honor of Memorial Day, we reprint in full their 1917 antiwar proclamation insisting that "the working class of the United States has no quarrel with the working class of any other country."
Our findings suggest that the 2020 presidential election represented a continued shift in the base of the Democratic Party from one rooted in working-class voters to a coalition that’s highly concentrated in high-income suburbs.
The Biden administration has made some prolabor gestures and moves toward more state direction of investment. But the policies, emphasizing subsidies to business, will do little to reverse working-class disorganization or meaningfully address climate change.
The media doesn’t talk much about working-class America. But when it does, it mainly has one thing to say about it: that it’s entirely white, male, and very right-wing. All those things are lies.
Friedrich Engels was just 22 when he was sent to England to help run the family firm. His father hoped this would draw him away from radical ideas — but in industrial Manchester, young Friedrich instead saw the suffering, and the power, of a growing working class.
Creating a vibrant left ecosystem doesn’t just mean building stronger labor and tenant unions — it means building cultural institutions that prize democracy over privatization and embed themselves in everyday working-class life.
Ines Schwerdtner is the newly elected cochair of German left-wing party Die Linke. In an interview with Jacobin, she explains how she wants to reconnect the party with a working-class base.
Once the left of the Australian Labor Party was committed to working-class politics. To avoid collapse, Labor must return to that legacy — but today’s Labor Left is more committed to neoliberalism and serving US foreign policy.
The women’s suffrage movement is too often remembered as exclusively middle-class and focused solely on votes for women. But socialist and working-class suffragettes played essential roles in the fight for equality.
Democratic Party elites have accepted the loss of vital working-class jobs and written off white workers as bigots. But a new book by Les Leopold shows how we can build a broad working-class movement to fight for the right to a good job.
The only way to stop climate change is to build a mass, working-class movement whose demands both resonate with average people and take on the billionaires who are profiteering from the climate crisis.
The Jina revolution in Iran has seen powerful solidarity between women demanding freedom, oil worker unions, and minorities. Far from the elite reformism of diaspora opposition leaders, the revolt in Iran expresses the radicalism of a diverse working class.
All around the world, the Left has been hemorrhaging working-class support for decades. To think it could achieve long-run success as the champion of affluent cosmopolitanism is whistling past the graveyard.
Agnes MacPhail, elected in 1921 as Canada’s first female MP, championed working-class farmers. Her agrarian socialism has as much to offer the decaying rural areas of North America as it did her hardscrabble constituency a hundred years ago.
The French left made gains in spring’s elections — but it did much better in big cities than in deindustrialized areas. Debates in France Insoumise have highlighted the need to win back the older working class without giving up on political radicalism.
In 1910, Winston Churchill sent troops to the coalfields of South Wales to put an end to a strike. Though the miners were defeated, this episode radicalized the Welsh working class and helped sever ties between conservative Liberals and trade unions.