January

At the start of the year, we were telling you cryptocurrency was a giant ponzi scheme way before it was cool, and we warned you that NFTs were bullshit, too, for good measure. We gleaned what we could from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, and you were probably shocked to find out her sex-trafficker-for-the-ultrarich ex-boyfriend was closely tied to political elites from both sides of the aisle. Who says bipartisanship is dead?

Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up uncannily captured the stupidity of our politics today, as did Democrats’ efforts to rehabilitate Dick Cheney. Not content with just battling stupidity, we also fought historical amnesia and jogged everyone’s memory that Sweden’s renowned welfare state was won through decades of class struggle.

February

As tensions rose in Ukraine, we asked sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko to set us straight on the country’s recent political history. In “lighter” news, we put out a whole issue analyzing the Left’s post-2020 stint in political purgatory and the mistakes that were made to hasten class dealignment, called for the expropriation of the thoroughly despicable LA Rams owner Stan Kroenke, and made the case for price controls as inflation ran rampant.

March

We tried to tell you about Joe Biden’s push to privatize Medicare and about the new evidence of Saudi government complicity in September 11, since the rest of the media didn’t seem to care about either one. We also took aim at elite nonsense — like the postmortem whitewashing of Madeleine Albright’s legacy and Jordan Peterson’s “postmodern neomarxism” claptrap — while continuing our coverage of Amazon workers’ fight for better pay and working conditions. As the Ukraine war continued, socialist Volodymyr Artiukh told us why Vladimir Putin’s pretexts for the invasion were based on falsehoods. And we begged people to stop trying to make right-wing social democracy a thing.

April

Ben Burgis went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and told us why every other socialist should, too. Then he told us why every socialist should read the late Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen as well. The successful unionization drive by Amazon workers in Staten Island provided a possible blueprint for worker organizing everywhere, while Starbucks workers’ own successes prompted billionaire CEO Howard Schultz to declare: “Can’t leave union busting alone, the game needs me!” (not an actual quote).

May

As the infant formula shortage caused by corporate greed and government inaction reached a crisis point, Pete Buttigieg decided it was the perfect opportunity to tell people about the superiority of the private sector. The transportation secretary must have been reading Elon Musk’s favorite book. It wasn’t a great month to glorify the business world: Starbucks and Amazon were breaking laws left and right to crush union campaigns, private equity plotted to capitalize on a coming oversupply of ER doctors by slashing wages, the Busch family heiress running for Senate turned out have been crowned the queen of a racist beauty pageant, and PayPal targeted left-wing press outlets. At least Biden’s Medicare privatization plan was finally starting to raise some eyebrows.

June

Times change, and we change with them. The mid-year mark was the occasion for what many were calling the event of the year: the release of our infrastructure print issue in the magazine’s redesigned, fun-sized format.

We also told you why Afro-pessimism was wrong that racism couldn’t be overcome and why Karl Marx was right about worker exploitation. We decided The Wire’s critique of capitalism still holds up twenty years later, and Amazon decided it would still keep up its union-busting efforts, this time in Montreal. And we talked to the left-wing media outlets being throttled by tech’s war on “misinformation.”

July

We got excited about the revival of the pink tide in Latin America, and closer to home, delved into the Bernie-like communication style of Pennsylvania progressive John Fetterman. Who says there’s no class warfare in the United States? Certainly not us, as we remembered the violence and ferocity of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, denounced the approaching plan to fix inflation by putting millions out of work, and looked back on the subtle anti-capitalism of Mad Men. With Putin’s invasion looking increasingly catastrophic for Russia, sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky explained why it was even worse than it seemed. And would you believe it? Starbucks fired another employee who tried to organize her coworkers into a union, so she told us about why she’d still do it all over again if she had the chance.

August

August brought us the comforts of the familiar: Hillary Clinton was back in the news smearing Bernie Sanders as sexist, and Jordan Peterson revealed he was still just as ignorant about Marx as he was three years ago. Time truly is a flat circle. Meanwhile, the summer temperatures also brought profound discomfort for UPS drivers, who didn’t get the air-conditioning from management they desperately needed, but were treated to round-the-clock camera surveillance instead, as one worker told us. We exposed the anti-socialist history of supermarkets, and examined why nothing seems to work anymore in the United States (hint: it’s the austerity, stupid). Finally, we reminded misguided liberals that — all together now — Liz Cheney is not your friend.

September

We couldn’t believe we had to keep saying this, but no, Hillary, electing a fascist prime minister of Italy was not a victory for feminism, even if she is a woman. Speaking of powerful women who aren’t symbols of feminist progress, September saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. We explained the way she’d served to uphold the political status quo and rejected Meghan Markle’s trickle-down celebrity feminism. As an antidote, we mourned the loss of a socialist feminist icon in Barbara Ehrenreich and talked to a Trader Joe’s worker who said she was fired for organizing a union. We also lamented the way real estate speculation had made Lisbon unlivable and stressed the simple solution to the housing crisis: build more of it!

October

Fitting for the month of Halloween, October brought us many real-world horrors. First among them was the spiraling risk of nuclear war over Ukraine and the Blob’s furious rejection of diplomacy to prevent it. Gabor Maté chilled us to the bone with his prognosis of how capitalism was making us physically and mentally unwell, and we were deeply disturbed by left-wing journalist Katie Halper’s firing by the Hill for her criticism of Israeli apartheid. More distress came as a result of comrade Angela Lansbury’s passing and Ishchenko’s account of the post-Soviet class conflict that underlay Putin’s war. We at least had a bit of fun remembering the anti-capitalist horror entertainment of They Live.

November

November brought some surprises, as not only did the Democrats do better than expected in the midterm elections, but more importantly, the night proved shockingly good for the Left. Elon Musk took over Twitter and not only single-handedly busted the myth of tech bro brilliance while the world was watching, but showed us all the need to take critical social media platforms out of the control of all censorious billionaires.

By the end of the month, we were thankful for the strike waves happening all over the world in response to the cost-of-living crisis, including right here in the United States. We were less thankful for the passing of Marxist historian Mike Davis, whose life and career we remembered, for Jeff Bezos’s “generous” (and tax-advantageous) announcement that he was giving his fortune away, and for Biden’s push to crush a potential railworker strike.

December

Christmas can be a lonely time, and we examined the growing friendship recession in wealthy societies. There wasn’t much holiday cheer for railroad workers either, who told us about their anger and betrayal at the inadequate contract forced on them. We called for the Christmas miracle of nationalizing the railroads and urged you to fight for your right to be lazy. It was a good time to reflect on how US history’s been riven with class conflict since its founding. To cap it off, Elon Musk’s Twitter misadventure made a different horrible billionaire the world’s wealthiest man, and we went through the dreary, elite-worshipping filmography of Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.

Toward a Red 2023

There you have it: it’s been a year of struggle, suffering, victories, and defeats. At Jacobin, we’ve tried to not just explain and respond to the bewildering events swirling around us, but to put them in the context of the long history of class struggle, and offer new horizons for how to overcome today’s challenges, ones that go beyond the limits of capitalism.