The small wars waged by European empires generated arguments for the legitimacy of state violence that remain in use today. Lauren Benton’s new book, They Called it Peace, finds that the era of gunboat policing anticipated the age of the predator drone.
The 1937 Little Steel strike is often dismissed as a failure and relegated to a footnote. But it was a courageous organizing effort and a crucial moment in US labor history — revealing the limits of the New Deal order and the deepest dynamics of capitalism.
The South has long been the Achilles heel of the American labor movement. The United Auto Workers are trying to make inroads — including with a heated contract fight between workers and bosses at the multinational corporation Daimler Truck North America.
Nothing Joe Biden has done to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutality against the people of Gaza has worked. Biden has proven too weak, indecisive, and indulgent of Israel to even induce Netanyahu into making small tweaks to his behavior.
Today, Yanis Varoufakis was banned not just from visiting Germany but from participating in video conferences about politics hosted in Germany. Here’s the plea for humanity and justice in Palestine that got him banned.
The small handful of ultrawealthy winners are firmly ensconced in their positions of privilege in power. Yet so many of them seem haunted by the possibility that maybe they don’t deserve it.
Ken Loach’s longtime screenwriter Paul Laverty talks to Jacobin about their final collaboration on The Old Oak, which follows Syrian refugees and ex-miners in Northeast England, and why the working class remains the last hope for justice in the world.
In 2023, Pfizer made more than $27 billion in revenue and paid zero federal income tax. Like many other large US companies, it took advantage of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, which widened existing loopholes and set off a tax-avoidance bonanza.
We know the rich are getting richer, but what exactly are they doing with all those riches? Sociologist Ashley Mears examined one site of elite consumption: the world of VIP clubs and its rituals of garish waste and exploitation of women.
San Francisco’s groundbreaking Union at Home legislation encourages tenants to organize in their buildings the way employees organize at work. Housing activists in Berkeley are hoping their city will follow suit — but landlords are pushing back.
Netflix’s new series Ripley, the latest iteration of Patricia Highsmith’s murderous con man from The Talented Mr Ripley, is an arty, inert snooze. Its flat portrayal of the title character doesn’t come close to the novels or other fantastic adaptations.
Today post-1945 Italy is often presented as an age of anti-fascist hegemony. But Cold War Italy was no paradise for the Left — and neorealist filmmakers and writers had to resist Church censorship and right-wing hegemony over the country’s culture.
Some Christian churches have moved on to their next lives.
Right-wing populism’s disdain for the opinions of experts can be mistaken for the Left’s scorn for technocracy. But democratic principles and mass politics are the real antidote to the appropriation of power by experts.
Twelve Eastern Oregon counties are considering leaving the state for Idaho, where they hope to secure Republican representation. The movement cites cultural differences, but the true divisions are rooted in rural America’s faltering agricultural economy.
Both Amazon and Walmart invest massively in highly invasive technological surveillance of their warehouse workforce — surveillance that then enables the hyperexploitation both companies’ workers are subject to.
In an interview with Jacobin, filmmaker and academic Ariella Aïsha Azoulay traces how Western powers’ exploitation of Zionism led not just to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine but to the demise of Jewish communities across the Middle East.
If you’re a US ally looking at Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria and Ecuador’s raid on its Mexican consulate, you’re probably thinking, “I can get away with something similar because the most powerful country in the world will let me do it.”
In 1930s Alabama, Communist Party members fought brutal repression to organize black and white workers in the Jim Crow South. Their efforts remain a source of inspiration for those fighting racism and exploitation today.