Kendra Strauss is director of the Labour Studies Program and associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.
Robert Downey Jr’s documentary tribute to his father, Sr., wants to mimic his dad’s avant-garde filmmaking. But the film lacks coherence, and its subject and filmmaker’s obscene wealth gets in the way of making that case.
In the UK, prices for basic goods are soaring while corporations rake in ever-bigger profits. The solution, Jeremy Corbyn argues, is to bring basic resources like energy, water, railways, and the postal service into democratic public ownership.
Sweden’s left has historically been opposed to joining NATO. But as the war in Ukraine made joining the alliance popular, Sweden’s Social Democrats changed tack, alienating many of their supporters and exposing deep divisions among the Left in the process.
Multiple unions representing Pittsburgh Post-Gazette employees have been on strike since October. Workers say they’ve been without a contract for six years, and many are being denied health care by the company. Jacobin spoke with two workers about the strike.
With the rise of polarization, the hard-core ideological right and left have become more visible to normie voters than ever before. In 2022, American voters made it clear which side’s ultras it finds more unacceptable: the weirdos of the Trumpian right.
The Communist Party USA had its share of bureaucrats, morons, sectarians, and incompetents, writes longtime leftist Michael Myerson. But it also included some of the best, most principled, courageous, and heroic fighters for social justice in US history.
The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have shaken many of the European Union’s dogmas. Yet the EU has repeatedly defied predictions of imminent collapse — posing the need for a serious left-wing program to reform it.
American folk songs record a history of oppression and have often fueled the fire of protest. Folk artist Jake Xerxes Fussell’s music endeavors to sustain these working-class musical traditions while reinterpreting them for the modern age.
Apologists for capitalist globalization claim that global value chains spread prosperity around the world. In reality, they allow firms like Apple to maximize labor exploitation while keeping workers chained to poverty.
Despite growing need and out-of-pocket costs, Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is halving the number of Medicare-subsidized psychology sessions Australians can access each year. It’s an austerity measure that will harm those who need support the most.
For most of Japan’s postwar era, the Socialists were the second force in the country’s political system and the main challenger to conservative rule. But when they ditched their left-wing, anti-militarist principles in the 1990s, they collapsed into minor-party status.
Political movements are not just driven by theories or even material interests but also their myths. Italian historian Furio Jesi was a socialist who examined the power of mythology — and its centrality to the Right’s cultural influence.
Sholem Schwarzbard was an anarchist Yiddish-language poet from Ukraine. In 1926, he assassinated Ukrainian military commander Symon Petliura in revenge for deadly pogroms carried out by Petliura’s armies in the Russian Civil War — and was found not guilty by a jury of his peers.
Scenes of burning cars in Parisian streets have been used to paint France’s Kurds as a riotous minority. Yet their angry protests are fueled by a string of racist killings — and French authorities’ refusal to reveal the full facts of the cases.
Workers nationwide lack a federal guarantee of paid sick leave in the United States. Establishing a federal paid sick leave guarantee would improve the lives of all American workers — railworkers included.
On Christmas Day in 1831, 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in British West Indies history. Their uprising would prove a milestone on the road to emancipation only a few years later.
The conventional understanding of Marxism as doggedly anti-religious is wrong. In fact, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued, Christianity and Marxism have at times inspired in humanity a radical sense of hope to build a more just world.
Logistics workers in rail, trucking, and warehouses labor hard to bring us our packages year-round. But their employers subject them to ruthless harassment, surveillance, and union busting. Their organizing efforts need our solidarity this Christmas.
The 1995 Christmas rom-com While You Were Sleeping stars Sandra Bullock as a union transit worker in Chicago. Over 25 years later, it’s still a delightful working-class holiday watch.