Social democracy transformed the 20th century, giving working people a share of wealth and power their grandparents could scarcely imagine. But the movement that set out to overcome capitalism ultimately struggled to defend what it had won within it.
Is Trump Crashing the Dollar Empire?
Economist Mona Ali on how the United States wields the world’s most powerful currency to shore up empire and its own ruling class — and how Trump’s careless moves might blow it all up.
Texas Wasn’t Always a Right-Wing Evangelical Powerhouse
The Christian right hasn’t always dominated Texas politics. While it claims to represent a deep regional tradition, the state’s modern right-wing evangelicalism is a newer invention — forged in the crucible of elite reaction to populist movements.
Frances Stonor Saunders Exposed the Cultural Cold War
The historian Frances Stonor Saunders died recently at age 60. Her book Who Paid the Piper? pulled back the curtain on postwar CIA funding of Western cultural institutions — despite repeated attempts to censor it, including by her American publisher.
Debating Victor Serge
Mitchell Abidor, author of Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, responds to his critics.
The real choice is not between globalization and deglobalization, free trade and tariff walls, but between empowering capital and empowering workers.
US Imperialism Is Burning the Planet
The United States hasn’t just ignored the threat of climate change at home; it has used its military and financial might to accelerate environmental destruction around the world. In an interview with Jacobin, geographer Matt Huber explains how US imperialism stokes the fires of a burning planet.
AI Hype Is Real. So Is AI Risk.
Bernie Sanders and AI whistleblowers warn that the tech poses grave risks to humanity, while many on the Left call this alarm “criti-hype” — an exaggeration of AI’s power that benefits Big Tech. But AI poses real dangers that we can’t afford to ignore.
Why Black Socialists Opposed Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey built the largest black movement of his era on the promise of redeeming Africa. But he knew almost nothing about the continent, and his organization had nothing to offer black workers on the things that shaped their lives.
Southern Gothic Films Take On the Horrors of the Past
The Criterion Channel’s Southern Gothic collection gathers a century of films about a region that set out to make its slaveholding past look civilized. Instead, it produced a body of work steeped in rot, delusion, and violent religiosity.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire became a campus sensation because it offered a master theory for globalization at a moment when old Marxist categories seemed exhausted. But the capitalist internationalism they saw as permanent has now crashed and burned.
The New Canada-EU Deal Is More of the Devil We Know
Instead of fostering a more democratic path to development, Canada and the EU are strengthening alignment through fossil fuels, weapons production, and customary geopolitical maneuvering.
Does Dollar Supremacy Help Americans?
The primacy of the dollar is considered one of the pillars of American might, conferring exorbitant financial privileges and coercive power. But what maintains the global dollar system is in fact inseparable from what’s driving American domestic decline.
A Portrait of How Workers Build a Strike
Who Moves America chronicles the Teamsters’ 2023 near-strike at UPS. It’s a rare and moving portrait of a massive, diverse group of workers building themselves into a fighting force, who then must wrestle with a different version of victory than they expected.
Ansar Allah’s Red Sea Advance Has Exposed Saudi Weakness
The Ansar Allah movement is fighting to win a civil war in Yemen but is also caught up in the regional escalation caused by the US-Israel conflict with Iran. Ansar Allah is likely to benefit from this instability.