Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin. She is the coauthor of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
Battered by poverty and coronavirus, South Texas should have been deep blue turf for Joe Biden. It wasn’t. But in the Rio Grande Valley, the story is less about growing conservatism than about the rise of nonvoting — and despair.
The demand to cancel student debt is vital, but it would be politically dangerous to let it get detached from a broader left vision for higher education. We should unite it with another key working class demand: tuition-free public college and trade school.
Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Red Pill, follows the mental unraveling of a liberal Brooklyn-dwelling “creative” as he finds himself being drawn into the world of the alt-right. In an interview with Jacobin, Kunzru reflects on the nature of the alt-right’s appeal and the dilemmas it poses for the Left.
We always knew mental illness was exacerbated by the stress of economic hardship. But new research confirms that the more a boss is exploiting a worker, the worse it is for that worker’s mental health.
As Joe Biden staffs his incoming administration, battle lines have been drawn between progressives and centrists. But the real winner has been corporate America, whose lobbyists and consultants have been getting the bulk of the plum jobs.
Even if the new bipartisan relief proposal does pass, it will be inadequate, forcing millions of Americans to rely on the generosity of family and strangers this winter. Millions of Americans are suffering, and our political leaders don’t care.
Joe Biden’s choice to install two former BlackRock execs in his cabinet is a major signal of his deference to Wall Street and the superrich. But it’s also a sign of the times: the world’s largest asset management company is revolutionizing finance by investing in capitalism itself.
We don’t have a labor party in the US, but as of earlier this month, we do have a Labor Caucus in Congress. We talked to Wisconsin representative Mark Pocan about the caucus’s plans.
A trillion dollars could maintain wages at pre-crisis levels for all workers in America, enabling people to stay home and stop the spread of the virus, for four months. Instead, it’s gone into the personal piggy banks of a handful of billionaire owners and investors.
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.
Joe Biden represents something now rare in American politics: he’s a dyed-in-the-wool true believer in austerity and deficit reduction. To climb out of our current economic hole, we’ll need massive public investment and income support — but if current patterns hold, Biden will opt for austerity and half-measures instead.
In the United States of 2020, millions are desperate for help, and they’re forced to compete for scraps from Twitter philanthropists.
If Joe Biden managed to pull off a victory despite his lackluster campaign, it’s in part because the electorate felt the urgent need for a president who would focus on the coronavirus crisis instead of railing against a series of cultural bogeymen. No wonder: most people care more about their material conditions than the partisan culture wars.
Nothing is certain yet, but we may be gearing up for what amounts to a Biden-McConnell coalition government. The Left will be up against a split government composed of two parties bent on pushing austerity and war.
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.”
There’s a real danger that the Right will steal the election by halting the vote count. But US elections can be stolen in more prosaic ways — like the Electoral College. If there’s a discrepancy between the Electoral College and the popular vote, the Left should make it clear that the result is illegitimate.
The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma falls into the common trap of conflating the far left and far right, grouping both under the umbrella of “extremism.” In reality, the politics advanced by the socialist left represents a countervailing force to right-wing conspiracism and reaction.
Americans want a universal public health plan, but the idea has no champion in this presidential election. Instead, we have Donald Trump’s scorched-earth campaign against the ACA, and Joe Biden moving further and further away from even a universally available public option.
The politically complacent ’90s produced a surprisingly large number of mainstream American rom-coms about fighting the Man. You’ve Got Mail gave us a new fantasy, fully neoliberalized: What if the Man is Mr Right?
Workers at Meow Wolf, the multimedia immersive arts and entertainment company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, are voting today on whether to unionize. The Meow Wolf Workers Collective says they’re trying to keep pace with the growth of what was once a loose artist collective and is now a multimillion-dollar business.