Meagan Day is an associate editor and former staff writer at Jacobin. She is the coauthor of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
In the past week, two separate and very painful videos have circulated showing Donald Trump and Joe Biden the presidential nominees of the two major US political parties in action. Watching them, there’s only one conclusion we can reach: we’re so screwed.
The GOP’s proposed coronavirus relief legislation is grotesque — an insult to the working class and a threat to the lives and livelihoods of millions. The fact that Senate Republicans felt at liberty to propose it is a telltale sign of political rot.
Like American Apparel before it, Everlane began as a clothing company for Millennials built on a supposedly ethical business model. But by now the lesson should be clear: when push comes to shove, businesses will always subordinate ethics to profit.
The antislavery movement of the mid-nineteenth century fused moral appeals against the sin of slavery with demands that spoke to the material interests of ordinary Northerners. Matt Karp, author of “The Mass Politics of Antislavery,” explains how that movement led to emancipation — and what lessons it offers to those trying to forge a political revolution today.
Since the clean sweep victory for the Democratic Socialists of America’s slate of New York legislative candidates, the local political establishment has been in a state of shock. Slowly it’s beginning to dawn on them that there is such a thing as “politics” — and that right now they’re losing at it, badly.
José Garza, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is set to become Austin, Texas’s next district attorney after a movement-based campaign promising to end the drug war and radically downsize the carceral state. He says the Left is finally making its mark in Texas politics.
Michael Brooks’s quiet acts of interpersonal graciousness were inseparable from his loftiest political aspirations. His untimely death leaves an enormous hole in our lives and on the Left that will never be filled.
In Portland, Oregon, a coalition of parents, childcare workers, socialists, unions, and progressive organizations has collected tens of thousands of signatures to put a universal preschool measure on the ballot — all in five weeks, and in the middle of a pandemic.
Republicans would have a tough time convincing the country that reopening the economy is safe when it’s actually extremely dangerous. But as bills pile up and fears of eviction grow, desperate Americans may come to see a premature reopening as the least bad option and head back to work — the outcome that the Right wanted all along.
In 2018, Amazon beat back Seattle’s attempts to tax the corporation. Last week, socialist city council member Kshama Sawant and a working-class movement helped win a veto-proof majority for a new “Amazon tax.” Now it’s time to defend this victory.
Doctors for Bernie formed during Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign to unite physicians and other health care workers supporting the movement. The campaign may be over, but they’re not going anywhere until we win Medicare for All.
Nikil Saval went from being an editor at the leftist literary magazine n+1, to a volunteer for Bernie Sanders, to a successful democratic-socialist primary candidate in for Pennsylvania State Senate. In an interview with Jacobin, he talks about the race and his plans for governing as a leftist in the state capitol.
Disgraced opioid tycoon Jonathan Sackler died last week, two decades into a nationwide addiction epidemic that he helped create — and from which he pocketed billions. His life of spreading addiction was a monument to the brutal pathologies of capitalism.
A new study finds that unions don’t just increase wages and benefits for workers on the job — union membership is also linked to diminished racist attitudes among white workers. If we want to defeat racism, building strong, democratic unions is essential.
Jackie Fielder, a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate for California’s State Senate, is refusing to take money from police unions, real-estate interests, and the fossil fuel industry. For her, the connection between capital and police violence is clear: “Our communities face intense repression from the state because it is profitable.”
Adults with underlying health problems are at increased risk of getting seriously ill or dying if they contract the coronavirus. These are also often the very same people who are least likely to have insurance.
If federal unemployment benefits are not extended when they expire next month, millions of households will be facing both steep rent and unemployment with no assistance. And that means mass evictions.
Incoming LA teachers’ union president Cecily Myart-Cruz was a leader of the city’s landmark 2019 strike. Now she explains why it’s important to get police out of schools and what the labor movement can do about it.
A new paper finds that for white Americans, socioeconomic status is a major determining factor in susceptibility to fatal police violence, while for black Americans, class is critical but not decisive. The findings underscore the need to build a movement that stands against both racist police brutality and brutal class stratification.
Capitalism runs on economic coercion, presenting most people with the choice to work or starve. But many workers, from prisoners to college athletes, face other types of coercion that exact a heavy cost for anyone who dares to tell the boss “no.”