As COVID-19 rips through American prisons, incarcerated people have braved violent repression to demand a humane response to their suffering. In an interview with Jacobin, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Heather Ann Thompson explains the current wave of prisoner protest — and what it could signal about the future of American politics.
Since the 2003 war against Iraq, a massive 70 percent of the country’s health care infrastructure has been destroyed. As hospitals are besieged by victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, a state enfeebled by two decades of conflict is again at a breaking point.
Many states are racing to reopen their economies, even though the daily number of new confirmed coronavirus cases is holding steady nationwide. Without a comprehensive nationwide plan, if workers go back to their jobs now, we will likely see more cases — and more deaths.
Across France, workers are insisting that they be allowed to make masks and ventilators rather than continue with business as usual. Their initiatives show that when workers, not stock prices, decide what’s being made, production can serve the needs of society as a whole.
We don’t hear about them very often, but the estimated 800 US military bases around the globe have played an essential role in turning the whole world into a bloody battlefield. Any effort to roll back US empire has to include dismantling the machinery of US military bases.
German and Dutch leaders’ harsh rejection of economic aid for Italy has shown the hollowness of EU solidarity. Even proposed Eurobonds would merely kick the crisis down the road — failing to challenge structural imbalances that systematically hurt the Eurozone’s Southern periphery.
On Monday, Italy began to ease COVID-19 restrictions, with more than 4 million returning to work. But some, like delivery workers, never stopped working — nor organizing for labor rights in an industry deemed "essential" and putting workers at serious health risk.
As the war in Afghanistan slowly grinds to an end, many in the foreign policy establishment want to tell you it was a “good war gone bad.” That’s false. The war in Afghanistan never should have been waged in the first place.
Abe Shinzo’s government was slow to respond to COVID-19, lagging behind neighbors like South Korea. The public health crisis has been worsened by the recklessness of Abe’s foreign policy, which relies upon an erratic US sponsor whose bases are a vector for spreading the disease.
Across the Global South, the coronavirus crisis has highlighted how IMF “structural adjustment” policies have undermined public health care. But the devastation wrought by the economic shutdown also owes to a longer-term ill: an exploitative global trade regime where the poorest countries finance the rich.
Thirty years ago today, Yemen united as one country in a mood of optimism about the future. Those hopes were to be cruelly disappointed, thanks to the destructive, self-serving record and rivalry of Yemen's political elites.
Professional Democrats used to paint Donald Trump’s border wall as the symbol of everything that was grotesque about him. But now that Joe Biden has come out in favor of it, they’ve offered barely a whisper of protest.
Liberals are right to condemn Donald Trump for his disastrous mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and his undisguised contempt for democracy. But Trump is no aberration: his rise was only possible because of a Republican and Democratic political consensus that has ravaged American politics and society for a generation.
John Bolton's absurd, self-aggrandizing new book reveals a shocking secret: Donald Trump knows next to nothing about Africa. The continent is better off without his ignorant meddling.
Western analysts often regard the Gulf as a strange anomaly among capitalist states. In fact, it has the same underlying dynamics as capitalist countries elsewhere, and it is powerfully shaping the politics of the Middle East.
The 1975 “dismissal” of Gough Whitlam by the Queen’s representative, Sir John Kerr, is one of the defining moments in Australia’s modern history. It also forms part of a Cold War history that saw left-wing governments around the globe punished for daring to break with US hegemony.
Michael Brooks’s ability to understand and analyze the similarities among authoritarians across the globe meant that he had little time for narratives that sought to portray non-Western culture as the source of barbarism and authoritarian rule.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has missed its first deadline for annexing part of the West Bank, but this Trump-backed scheme for land theft is still firmly on the table. The goal of Netanyahu and his US sponsors is simple: they want to liquidate Palestinian national aspirations.
On Sunday night, Spain’s former king Juan Carlos fled the country in order to evade prosecution over mass-scale money laundering. Once hailed as a leader of the transition away from dictatorship, the monarch’s corrupt dealings show how Spain's powerful business interests continue to stand above democratic scrutiny.
For over two decades, Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan has been held in the Turkish prison on İmralı Island. In this op-ed for Jacobin, he calls for a “democratic nation project” able to unite citizens of different ethnic backgrounds and cultural traditions.