Jacobin

The world is running out of time to kick our fossil fuel addiction and stave off the most destructive effects of climate change. To keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, climate scientist Kevin Anderson calculates that we need to cut emissions by 8 percent every year, starting now — which means replacing oil and gas with clean electricity, fast.

A top private prison company profiting from President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is claiming immunity from lawsuits alleging forced labor at its detention centers. To do so, the company is using a controversial legal doctrine best known for shielding cops from police brutality claims. The prison contractor, GEO Group, is one of the world’s largest prison companies and a longtime Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor.

Two years ago, the summer that he turned seventy, my father worked for his younger brother’s thriving contracting company. Week after sweltering week, Dad tore down ceiling tile, crushed ductwork, and carried heavy industrial air conditioners and other HVAC equipment out of an old school. The building itself was basically a brick oven, and the other laborers were less than half his age.

Of all the schemes devised by the rich and powerful to rip off workers and escape democratic accountability, private equity might be the most brazen and destructive. Born out of the conservative backlash of the 1980s, it was pitched as a way to save moribund Western economies and wrestle capitalism free of the hands of a complacent postwar managerial class.

In the opening paragraphs of William Morris’s utopian science fiction novel News From Nowhere, readers are confronted with a scene that will be as painfully familiar to many socialists in 2026 as it no doubt was when the work was first published in 1890.

The very title of A NEW Democratic Party: The Comeback of the Left reflects the optimism and enthusiasm generated by Avi Lewis’s successful bid to become leader of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party (NDP). Lewis’s policy statements throughout the campaign expressed a clear-minded, even courageous, vision to effectively refound the NDP as a vehicle for a transformative democratic socialism.

In its decision in Louisiana v. Callais last month, the US Supreme Court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, clearing the way for districts with a high proportion of racial minorities to be gerrymandered out of existence. In response to this ruling, Republicans have been racing to redraw electoral maps around the country; Democrats have been attempting to do the same, though they notably failed in Virginia, where the state supreme court struck down voter-approved maps.

Every revolution, once it has reached its zenith, looks back and measures its achievements against the standards set by those that came before. On the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, it’s the opportune time to look back at the influence the English Revolution of the 1640s had on it. The foundations for such historical connections were laid in the earliest years of colonial New England. The Pilgrims were refugees fleeing religious persecution by the Stuart monarchy.

The central questions confronting the United Auto Workers (UAW) are no mystery: Can the union organize the nonunion auto industry, particularly across the South? Can it bargain contracts that reverse decades of concessions? Can it rebuild the kind of shop-floor power that once made the UAW the country’s most influential industrial union?

In early June, hundreds of labor activists gathered at the Rutgers Labor Education Center for a conference marking the creation of the Tony Mazzocchi Labor Archive. Mazzocchi died in 2002, but his name is still legendary among older labor, occupational health, and environmental activists. And as the conference revealed, he remains a source of inspiration to those who strive for a working-class alternative to the political duopoly.