Meagan Day is a senior editor at Jacobin.
In last night’s debate, Donald Trump failed to condemn white supremacists — even telling the Proud Boys to “stand by” — then refused to promise he would encourage his supporters to refrain from political violence in November. His rhetoric is growing more and more dangerous.
In both his campaigns, Trump has run ads aimed at killing black voters’ enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee and lowering their turnout. The strategy is craven, but the ads exploit real disillusionment. Without a sharp break from their history of failing black constituents, Democrats will remain vulnerable to such opportunistic gambits in the future.
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.
On Jacobin’s tenth anniversary, staff writer Meagan Day reflects on ten Jacobin articles that heavily influenced the way she thinks about politics.
For decades, austerity-minded politicians have bashed universal programs by concern trolling about the danger that a handful of rich people would get them. The urgency of the pandemic is helping people realize just how inconsequential this hang-up is compared to the advantages of universal benefits.
San Antonio teacher Luke Amphlett says his administration punished him for organizing against an unsafe school reopening plan. But a campaign led by teachers, students, and community supporters drew on bonds of solidarity developed through years of organizing — and quickly got Amphlett back to work.
Kooper Caraway, the 29-year-old new president of South Dakota’s AFL-CIO, grew up in a working-class family and cut his teeth fighting ICE as a high schooler. Now his vision for labor includes union-run housing and childcare: “It’s all about building a working-class culture of solidarity.”
Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash are paying expensive campaign consultants to incite social media users to hound their critics. These are online mobs in the service of the elite.
We need high-quality, entertaining class-struggle television. The BBC’s period drama The Mill, which was ahead of its time when it debuted in 2013, shows us how it’s done.
Amazon was recently busted hiring intelligence experts to spy on Amazon workers. The practice is unfortunately common — most major multinational corporations have surveillance divisions which overlap with government intelligence agencies, creating a single, powerful security apparatus at the disposal of both the federal government and private corporations to use against workers.
The progressive congressional candidate talks to Jacobin about the smear campaign he’s endured, the limitations of a Joe Biden presidency plus Richard Neal chairmanship, his record on policing, his personal relationship to the opioid crisis, and democratic socialism.
Instability is a permanent feature of capitalism, but the coronavirus pandemic has introduced a whole new level of volatility. Amid the turmoil, the American right is dreaming more feverishly than ever of apocalypse and heroism.
Sanitation workers for Metro Services Group in New Orleans are currently in week sixteen of a strike. They say their working conditions are abysmal, deeply unsafe in the middle of a pandemic — and that they’re paid only $10.25 an hour.
On the one-hundredth anniversary of American women’s right to vote, let’s remember the working-class socialist suffragists who struggled for the franchise. And let’s devote the next hundred years to realizing their vision.
New research finds that strong unions are pretty effective at making politicians pay attention to the interests of ordinary people. In order to pursue a real pro-worker agenda in government, we need an emboldened labor movement.
Philosopher Richard Dien Winfield has spent his career studying concepts like truth, justice, and freedom. Now he wants to put these principles into practice by bringing an agenda of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and full employment to the nation’s capital.
A new report shows that union health plans, while better than employer-sponsored health care, pale in comparison to Medicare for All. The labor movement should take notice: union members would be better off with M4A than the health plans they have to fight so hard to protect.
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.
Gay identity became possible thanks to capitalism’s emancipatory side: its liberation of the individual from material dependence on the family. But that sexual freedom wasn’t automatic — it required decades of militant struggle. Today, we need more such struggles to combat the oppressive aspects of capitalism, which keep gay and straight people alike from living fully free lives.
Federal unemployment has dried up, rent is past due, evictions are proceeding, the cupboards are bare, and the Senate has adjourned without passing a new coronavirus relief package. Their abandonment of the working class is shameless, but hardly shocking.