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.
A new study shows that disparities in pulmonary health between the rich and poor have been widening for six decades, setting the stage for vastly unequal, devastating outcomes during the pandemic. The rich quite literally breathe easier than the rest of us.
Pathological hoarding, now recognized as a mental disorder, is a fitting malady for an economic system predicated on the compulsive accumulation of profits — achieved, in practice, by flooding the world with stuff.
Novelist Rachel Kushner, author of The Hard Crowd and The Flamethrowers, speaks to Jacobin about bourgeois novels, Italian Marxism, Palestinian resistance, the George Floyd uprising, and Bernie Sanders.
The center has no convincing way to account for unemployment and low wages. Workers are compelled to choose between the solutions provided by the Right and the Left — and unionization can make all the difference in how they choose.
Two bandmates saw their sons both overdose on fentanyl in the space of a few years. The synthetic opioid crisis is more out of control than many realize, and the coronavirus pandemic has only made it worse.
To win over German workers and replace their socialist loyalties with fascism, the Third Reich made a Nazi version of May Day a national holiday. But the real International Workers’ Day is the one that lives on today.
For the Left, it’s easy to hate the media, with its entrenched centrist biases and loyalty to the status quo. But a world without high-quality news is a world where meaningful democracy is impossible. That’s the message of media scholar Victor Pickard, who argues for a transformation of our media system away from the model of commercial news and toward a “public option.”
The New York Times’ Amazon union election coverage is a tale as old as time: When workers vote to back a union, employers blame outside agitators. When workers reject a union after a massive anti-union campaign by the boss, it was the workers’ own free choice.
The COVID-19 crisis has been a case study in the destructiveness of predatory financial institutions like private equity and hedge funds. From private-equity-owned hospitals that cut staff to the bone to the growing investor interest in disaster-driven industries like insurance, the pandemic has been a gold mine for some of the finance industry’s most rapacious and socially useless segments.
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.