Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has uncovered a tradition of African American radicalism that was — and is — a crucial part of the American left’s history. He talks to Jacobin about the need to connect struggles against racism and class oppression.
The Red Scare and the fall of the IWW. A new history examines the lost promise and fierce persecution of the IWW.
The discipline emerged from Black struggle. Now the College Board wants it to be taught with barely any mention of Black Lives Matter.
The second season of The White Lotus, HBO’s propulsive satire, had sex on the brain more than anything else. But it never lost sight of the razor-sharp class critique that also animated season one.
You wouldn’t know it from the widespread glorification of America’s “founding fathers,” but the years around American independence were shot through with class conflict between elites and working people. And most of the founding fathers were on the wrong side.
Even the best structural reforms will not succeed without aggressive organizing.
Cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th century, separating poor farmers and landless cowboys from vital resources for their struggling cattle herds. So the cowboys formed fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.
While industrial capitalism got rid of the landlord class, capitalism still had economic rent, but instead of being paid to the landlord class, it is now paid to the banks in the form of interest.
Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common feature of collective life. The consequences are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.
When objectivity is impossible, and other media mishugas
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