On July 17, the Trudeau government cut the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) by 40 percent. The CRB is the Liberal Party’s main COVID-19 benefit for unemployed workers who lack sufficient hours to qualify for employment insurance. The cut will change the CRB from $500 per week to $300 in advance of the program’s termination on [...]

A thesis: Amazon’s warehouse zones are “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization. So even if you’re building a tenant union or a political party, this is a major social space. It has a broader importance.” This comes courtesy of organizer and geographer Spencer Cox, quoted in the New York Times. The author [...]

Following over a year of demobilization owing to Algeria’s COVID-19 restrictions, this February the Hirak (“movement”) returned to the streets to mark two years since the mass uprising which ended president Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s twenty-year rule. Alongside ongoing weekly demonstrations and strikes, last month the Hirak organized a mass boycott of national elections held by the [...]

After months of casual indifference to conditions in Cuba, the Biden administration reacted with purposeful swiftness to support street protests on the island. “We stand with the Cuban people,” President Biden pronounced. A talking point was born. “The Biden-Harris administration stands by the Cuban people,” secretary of state Antony Blinken followed. Senate Foreign Relations Committee [...]

The Milwaukee Bucks won the 2020-21 NBA championship, and I couldn’t be happier for my former team’s success. It’s especially gratifying to me because this is their first championship since 1971, when I played for the Bucks and we won the NBA championship. Although winning is exciting, fulfilling, and pretty much everything you imagine it [...]

Prior to last week, the federal government paid out monthly checks mostly to elderly and disabled people through the Social Security (SS) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs. As of last week, it now pays out monthly checks to about 88 percent of children through the Child Tax Credit (CTC) program. Using the 2019 CPS [...]

It’s another summer of climate dread. Earlier this month, Lytton, British Columbia hit 121 degrees Fahrenheit — the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada. In Oregon, the Bootleg “megafire” — one of eighty fires currently raging in the West — is still only 30 percent contained after two weeks. The size of Los Angeles, it [...]

As the Summer Olympics kicks off in Tokyo, it’s worth thinking back ninety years, to when the alternative sports culture promoted by the international workers’ movement reached one of its historic high points. From July 19 to 26, 1931, the Socialist Workers’ Sports International (SASI) held the second Workers’ Olympiad in “Red” Vienna — a [...]

Twenty years ago, as the G8 summit began in Genoa, the Italian left thought that the future was only just beginning. The slogan “Another world is possible” was taken up by young political novices and older militants who had fought a thousand lost battles; it heralded a radical transformation, finally within reach. Already in 1999, [...]

In the summer of 2018, author Dan Kaufman published The Fall of Wisconsin — a lucid, disturbing account of how a right-wing offensive successfully stormed the ramparts of one of America’s most historically progressive and pro-labor states. Later that year, Republican governor Scott Walker was finally defeated in his bid for reelection, but the state’s [...]

Today, corporate control over sports is rampant — and is extending its grip on public space in general. Recent Olympic Games and soccer World Cups have seen host countries suspend constitutionally guaranteed democratic rights in order to suppress criticism of these showpiece events and the brands that use them as a platform. Faced with mockery [...]

For well over a century, radicals have debated whether systemic change might come through reform or revolution. Strategists — particularly within the socialist tradition — have disagreed on whether gradual steps might incrementally bring about a new society, or whether a sharp break with the existing political and economic order is required. During the New [...]

The federal government’s unemployment assistance program became a “lifeline” for Susan Hardy when the pandemic made it impossible to find work as an oil and gas title researcher, a job she held as a contractor. Hardy, seventy-one, has six grandchildren living with her and relied on the $724 a week she received in benefits to [...]

We offer you a steady stream of reading material here at Jacobin, but most of it probably couldn’t be considered beach material. Rather than remedy that by serializing Bhaskar Sunkara’s unpublished thriller novel about who really assassinated Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, we offer you here our staff’s and contributors’ picks for best [...]

Tom Lehrer famously remarked that satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In a similar vein, I’ve increasingly found it difficult to come up with creative new ways of writing about the depredations of American inequality and the billionaire class that has been able to enrich itself so obscenely while [...]

I step out to the water’s edge. The sparse vegetation opens onto a small beach of large, flat rocks. The sun is shining a little more generously. It’s almost like arriving at a destination you didn’t really know was there. A feeling of relief and calm spreads through my body. To my right, a group [...]

As a Canadian, I sometimes find it difficult to wrap my head around phrases like “medical debt.” My country’s health care system is not without its share of problems, but one of the lasting achievements of Medicare has been to sever the whole idea of going to the doctor from anything involving your wallet. When [...]

What does spending the week toiling away at a full-time job get you in the way of a place to rest, relax, and spend your downtime? In the popular consciousness, the idea persists that full-time work usually comes with at least a bare minimum of comfort and even a bit of disposable income. For millions [...]

Ahead of the United Nations’ COP26 conference on climate change this fall, climate activists are raising the alarm for the planet’s future. Extinction Rebellion (XR) is one group sure to have an aesthetically punchy presence — bound to be followed by the usual liberal media praise and right-wing mockery of its stunts. XR has, in [...]

The latest data make it clear that, even after the (very uneven) spread of vaccination, we cannot afford to relax and return to the old normal. Not only is the pandemic not over (infection numbers are rising again, new lockdowns are awaiting us), other catastrophes are on the horizon. At the end of June 2021, [...]

When you turn thirteen or fourteen years old, all kinds of things you used to accept as normal become potentially embarrassing. I know I was around that age when I started to notice the anxious look on my mother’s face when she passed our family’s SNAP card — the acronym stands for Supplemental Nutritional Assistance [...]

Radicals have lived under the political shadow of the Russian Revolution for more than a hundred years. Inspired by the example of 1917, generation after generation of socialists sought to learn and implement what they took to be the core political lessons of the Bolsheviks. Though millions of activists gave everything to this project and [...]

I abandoned academic work in 1979 to take a job with the British Columbia NDP caucus, partly because academic jobs seemed to be drying up, and partly because I wanted to engage more actively in politics. As a member of the small research group of the NDP caucus, I worked quite closely with a remarkable [...]

C. L. R. James was one of the great political and intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Born in Trinidad, James spent much of his life in Britain and the United States. His long career as a writer and activist brought him into contact with everyone from Paul Robeson and Richard Wright to Eric Williams [...]

Last month, ProPublica highlighted the gross inequities of the US tax system with an exposé that drew on the leaked tax returns of the country’s billionaires. It showed that the wealth of the twenty-five richest Americans grew by a combined $401 billion from 2014 to 2018, but that they paid only 3.4 percent of that [...]

You wouldn’t know it by watching Congress take long summer vacations and slowly mull infrastructure legislation, but Democrats are facing a fast-approaching deadline that could decide the party’s political fate for the next decade. By August 16, the US Census Bureau is scheduled to release data gathered in the 2020 census to the states, enabling [...]

The Tokyo “2020” Olympics are still, somehow, happening this year. They are happening despite the fact that roughly only 20 percent of the Tokyo population is fully vaccinated days before the opening ceremony; despite a COVID outbreak of more than fifty Olympics-related visitors, including in the Olympic Village itself; despite reports of sexual violence at [...]

From July 18 to 22, 2001, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the streets of Genoa, northwest Italy, to protest the G8 summit. Twenty years later, the summit is mostly famous for the police violence against the demonstrators. On July 20, twenty-three-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by carabinieri, during violent scenes of [...]

At the Frito-Lay production plant in Topeka, Kansas, workers are subjected to something called “suicides,” shifts in which they come in for eight hours, are forced to work four more hours, and then are called in four hours early, leaving them only eight hours off between shifts. This is how the company forces overtime to [...]

Forty-two years ago today, the capital of Nicaragua, Managua, was liberated by Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) forces. It was a landmark event in the history of Latin America and a major victory for socialist and progressive forces. The Nicaraguan Revolution ousted the government of hated dictator Tachito Somoza and fought on a program of [...]

Last month, as Democratic voters in New York City puzzled pundits by nominating the moderate Eric Adams for mayor while simultaneously voting in what will likely be a historically progressive City Council, comptroller, and public advocate, upstate Democrats went to the polls, too. In the state’s second and third largest cities, Buffalo and Rochester, voters delivered [...]

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with President Joe Biden inside the White House on Thursday, July 15, a puppet replica of her stood outside, body bags laid at its feet. The body bags were meant to symbolize global deaths from COVID-19 since India and South Africa first proposed the idea of a vaccine patent [...]

The Olympics are upon us again. It’s a beautiful thing to watch the world’s best athletes come together in the ultimate showcase in human athletic achievement. Sports are powerful, and there’s no greater display of that awesome power than the Olympic games. But ​​with that power comes great responsibility, “and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) [...]

The catastrophic floods in western Germany and Belgium have already claimed at least 185 lives. TV and social media are dominated by images of victims and first responders in shock. Entire communities like Schuld, a village on a bend of the river Ahr, were devastated within minutes. In Blessem, near Cologne, water poured into a [...]

On January 29, 1911, a coalition of Mexican revolutionaries and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a US-based anti-capitalist labor union, crossed the border between California and the Mexican state of Baja California to launch what would come to be known as the Baja Insurrection. Many of the Mexicans belonged to the [...]

I found Summer of Soul tremendously moving — both exhilarating and enraging. Your results may vary, but there’s no way you can find it any less than incredibly interesting. The film’s parenthetical subtitle, (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), refers to the incendiary 1970 song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by jazz [...]

Last month, a harrowing video emerged of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a 46-year-old man. He pleads and writhes for six long minutes before suffocating to death. Despite the striking coincidence in circumstance, the victim was not George Floyd. He was Stanislav Tomáš, the most recent Romani victim of police brutality in [...]

“They always blame the United States,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on the Senate floor this week. “The embargo, the first thing they blame, it’s the embargo. ‘The embargo is causing all this.’” Not long after the UN General Assembly voted for the twenty-ninth straight year to condemn the six-decade-long US embargo on Cuba — [...]

Mark Colville knew he would go to prison. When he and six others took wire cutters to the fence at the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia, home to a Trident nuclear submarine, the night of April 4, 2018, they weren’t trying to evade the law. They intended to break it. It was the [...]

Last week, Joe Biden tweeted, “Let me be clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation.” It would be too much to expect this rather dim politician to understand, much less endorse, the classic Marxist analysis of profit originating in the exploitation of workers — they produce more in value for their employer than they’re [...]

It seems pretty clear now, looking back over Pixar’s quarter-century of feature filmmaking, just how influential the studio has been in shaping our current media moment. When Pixar started with the first Toy Story (1995), the model was still movies making cash by putting butts in seats (plus selling DVDs and merch afterward), whereas now [...]

On November 20, Anastasia Kryvasheyeva was attending class at Minsk State Linguistic University when she began receiving Telegram messages telling her that the KGB were arresting her friends. Twenty-year-old Kryvasheyeva stared at her phone as it was deluged with messages from friends who had officers from the State Security Committee — abbreviated to KGB in [...]

In response to the rapidly spreading Delta variant of COVID-19, much of Australia is once again in lockdown. The current outbreak was concentrated initially in Sydney and the mistakes made by New South Wales’s (NSW) Coalition government have refocused attention on the worst aspects of Australia’s COVID-19 response. As lockdowns spread to other states, it’s [...]