Portside

In the election of 1920, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, polled nearly a million votes without ever hitting the campaign trail. Debs was behind bars in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, serving a 10-year sentence for sedition. It was a not a bum rap. Debs had defiantly disobeyed a law he deemed unjust, the Sedition Act of 1918.

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Economic models do not, and never can, fully reflect the extraordinary complexity of human markets. The point is to create useful abstractions to provide decision-makers with a sense of the budgetary and economic impacts of a given policy proposal.

Unite All Workers for Democracy, the reform caucus in the United Auto Workers, just won sweeping victories in leadership elections. Now they’re looking to transform the UAW, one of the largest unions in the country, into a democratic fighting machine.

A newly Democratic state government votes to restore some democracy in the workplace.

Larry Cohen argues that the labor movement should seek power not solely in individual workplaces but in entire industries, while Eric Blanc writes that the priority should be unionizing workplaces.

How unions can fight back.

Today, on Presidents’ Day, we rightly celebrate Abraham Lincoln for helping end slavery. But we shouldn’t forget the unstoppable force that also brought down the Slave Power: the several million slaves who left the plantation, many of whom joined the Union Army.