
Socialists Should Support Sex Workers’ Rights
The criminalization of sex work is an attack on the lives and livelihoods of working-class people. Socialists should support decriminalization.

The criminalization of sex work is an attack on the lives and livelihoods of working-class people. Socialists should support decriminalization.

The polls are all over the place, but Bernie Sanders has a trick up his sleeve: no other candidate in the Democratic primary boasts such a deeply devoted support base. Come the general election, that deep enthusiasm for Sanders will be crucial for beating Donald Trump.

The Democratic presidential candidates’ debate last night was overcrowded, light on substance, and somehow both hyperpartisan and boring as hell. Is this what we have to keep suffering through for the rest of the primary?

The lunacy on display at last night's Republican National Convention is what keeps frightened liberal voters satisfied with the meager crumbs of progress offered by the Democrats — and the meagerness of those crumbs is what keeps working-class whites inside an increasingly lunatic GOP.

Mike Pence spent the vice presidential debate lying, rule-breaking, and selling the Trump agenda, but he did so unburdened by Donald Trump’s chaotic personal behavior — and the political establishment on both sides of the aisle swooned.

After a $200 million propaganda blitz, California voters passed the Uber- and Lyft-backed Proposition 22 on Tuesday, permanently excluding online “platform” workers from labor protections. Unsurprisingly, the companies are now talking about extending such legislation nationally.

It hasn’t taken long for Joe Biden to get down to the business of preparing to assume the presidency — by drawing staff from hawkish think tanks financed by arms companies.

In praising the pro-corporate Washington hacks Joe Biden has chosen to staff his administration, liberal groups are betraying their missions in order to try to gain influence — despite that appeasement strategy rarely working in American history.

Democrats and Beltway pundits helped Mitch McConnell undermine Bernie Sanders’s push for direct aid to millions of Americans facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy through $2,000 checks. Even for a party that is constantly disappointing, Democrats’ complete capitulation to McConnell and austerity ideology was shockingly pathetic.

Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin today that we've been given a choice between a return to the old exploitative normality and a post-COVID corporate "Great Reset" that promises to be even worse. We need a real alternative, a socialist reset that can win justice for all and save the planet from climate apocalypse.

Eight Democrats joined with Republicans yesterday to prevent Bernie Sanders from moving to add a $15 minimum wage to the COVID relief bill. History will not absolve them.

In his first 100 days as president, Joe Biden has proven unusually willing to associate his administration with the labor movement's agenda. Unions have a greater opening to win an expansive pro-worker agenda than they have in decades. But we haven't seen real change yet.

To strengthen workers’ collective bargaining rights, the Biden administration looks poised to recommend a host of modest reforms to existing programs and policies. But the working class will remain disempowered unless it organizes itself on a mass scale.

Joe Biden can probably beat Donald Trump for a second time. But the Democratic Party he is the titular head of has no new ideas, no sense of dynamism, and isn’t even pretending they’re serious about achieving a better world.

The Democratic establishment has been working overtime to ensure Joe Biden has a clear path to run for reelection. Yet even some establishment voices are raising concerns that putting up Biden again might be a gift to Donald Trump.

Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic reports from the RNC that, after claiming the high ground following Donald Trump’s near assassination, the GOP spent night two accusing Democrats of unleashing violent migrants to rape, murder, and sex-traffic their way across the US.

Ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, seven unions — whose members constitute almost half of all American union members — have demanded an end to US military aid to Israel. The labor movement’s calls to end the genocide in Gaza are growing.

The United States is largely acting like it’s business as usual in the Middle East and Iran right now. But Israel’s assassinations of top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah have brought us to the precipice of an absolutely disastrous war throughout the region.

UAW president Shawn Fain’s speech was the best part of the DNC. It featured a direct focus on workers otherwise absent from party rhetoric, and sidestepped the culture wars to identify the “one true enemy” of corporate power.

Shawn Fain used his speech at the DNC to escalate pressure on Stellantis, which the UAW says is reneging on wins secured after last year’s auto strike. The union is preparing to strike the company once again if it doesn’t reverse course.