Micah Uetricht is the editor of Jacobin. He is the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity and coauthor of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
As inspiring as the Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s were, they failed to democratize the Middle East. The primary cause had little to do with the region’s cultural or religious characteristics and everything to do with the profound weakening of the Middle East’s working-class power under neoliberalism.
Workers in the United States have lost control of perhaps the most important aspect of their lives: their time. Getting that time back is crucial — for workers’ well-being, for democracy, and for weakening the tyrannical power of the boss.
Labor organizer and strategist Jane McAlevey saw the disaster of the 2000 Florida recount close up. This time, she says, the labor movement will be crucial in the fight to “force the Democratic Party to do something that we don’t think that they’re going to do on their own.”
Auto work is typically remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered, however, is how absolutely brutal and violent life on the auto factory floor was — and still is.
A deep commitment to democracy is at the heart of the socialist project. Anticommunists have historically claimed they oppose states like the Soviet Union out of a concern for democracy. But those anticommunists’ real project has nothing to do with democracy — and everything to do with smashing the Left.
Joe Biden’s choice of running mate Kamala Harris reveals a bleak truth: nothing the Left has done, from two Bernie Sanders campaigns to the biggest uprising in US history against police brutality, influenced his thinking at all. Big-money donors, on the other hand, did.
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.
After we put out a call for remembrances of Michael Brooks, we received deeply emotional emails from his viewers and listeners all around the world about how he changed their politics — and often their lives.
After putting out a call for his listeners and viewers to share their reflections on our comrade and friend Michael Brooks after his shocking and untimely death this week, we were flooded with emails. Here are a few of them.
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.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, calls to cut police budgets have spread like wildfire. In an interview with Jacobin, two Chicago city council members explain why they’re calling to defund the police and why the city’s mayor Lori Lightfoot can’t credibly call herself a “progressive.”
The brutality we have repeatedly seen meted out by American police all over the country isn’t a bug of our political-economic system — it’s a feature.
There is only one morally justifiable response to tonight’s attack on US military bases, no matter what: the United States cannot escalate the conflict with Iran.
With Kamala Harris out of the race and Elizabeth Warren’s numbers dropping, recent weeks haven’t been kind to candidates who have equivocated on Medicare for All. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate whose support for M4A is solid and unchanging — a stance that’s not only morally correct but politically smart.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised to end business as usual in Chicago. Instead, she’s antagonizing teachers, refusing to fully fund public schools, and giving the rich whatever they want. That agenda didn’t end well for Rahm Emanuel. It won’t for Lightfoot, either.
Cathy Kunkel is an energy analyst, environmental and community activist, and member of the Democratic Socialists of America running for Congress in West Virginia’s second district. She explains her history of organizing and argues that “red-state” voters will get on board with an agenda that includes Medicare for All and a just transition for fossil fuel workers.
Make no mistake: the Working Families Party’s opaque presidential endorsement process signaled a rejection of not only Bernie Sanders but the movement emerging around him.
Bernie Sanders’s embrace of the New Deal legacy is an opportunity to dispel some pernicious historical myths about the New Deal’s relationship with socialism and its attitude toward the struggle for racial equality.
Heidi Sloan is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America running for Congress in Texas’s twenty-fifth district, challenging Republican incumbent and very rich used car salesman Rep. Roger Williams. Sloan sat down with Jacobin to talk about her story, how she came to socialism, fighting for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and which supervillain she would most like to interrogate as a member of the House of Representatives.
Socialists have historically played a key role in the US labor movement as part of a broader current of militant rank-and-file workers. The recent teachers’ strike wave shows that to rebuild unions, we have to build that militant current.