Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Morehouse College, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.
The end of Roe v. Wade is a disaster that voting alone can’t solve. We need an abortion rights movement that organizes beyond individual elections and fights for reproductive freedom as part of a federal universal health plan.
Even among Marx-friendly economists, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor. But its technical validity is less important than the core message: workers are exploited because the value they create is undemocratically taken by capitalists.
The Biden administration has been floating the possibility of a means-tested cancellation of $10,000 of student debt. There’s no reason not to cancel every penny instead.
Meghan McCain’s new book, Bad Republican, is a testament to how little you have to know about politics to have a career as a pundit if your last name is “McCain.”
Across the country, millions of parents are desperately searching for baby formula. Why are we letting the private sector alone handle such a vital good?
The Supreme Court’s leaked ruling overturning Roe v. Wade is an antidemocratic abomination. The Democrats’ response so far has been a bad joke.
Centrist pundit Andrew Sullivan thinks Karl Marx was “one of the most repellent anti-Semites and racists of the 19th century.” That’s nonsense — Marx’s political project was all about expanding human freedom and fighting oppression in every form.
Instead of counting on an allegedly benevolent billionaire like Elon Musk to guard free speech online by buying companies like Twitter, we should just take our digital public square out of rich people’s hands and into public ownership.
I was told not to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I did anyway — and I talked for an hour to millions of listeners about democratic socialism.
Today is 4/20, so we’re indulging in some speculation: What if we didn’t just legalize marijuana but put the cannabis industry under public ownership — and hired the victims of prohibition to run it?
It’s Tax Day, so ponder this: in social democratic countries like Sweden, the government does your taxes for you. Just add it to the list of nice things we should have in the US.
Right before he died, Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen wrote a short book called Why Not Socialism? It’s a perfect introduction to the case for moving beyond a capitalist economy.
The Left’s opposition to wars allegedly fought for democracy or human rights isn’t tantamount to “isolationism.” Opposing war has always been at the heart of socialist internationalism.
Socialist philosopher G. A. Cohen was a brilliant thinker who subjected Marxism to the same scrutiny he would any other ideology. If you want to see Marxism at its most nondogmatic and precise, you should read G. A. Cohen.
The new magazine Compact claims to fight for a “strong social democratic state” that also defends “familial and religious” community against “libertine” corruption. That combination of right-wing morals and left-wing economics is never going to happen — and it shouldn’t.
A growing chorus of voices is calling for Joe Biden to establish a no-fly zone — an action that would risk the future of human civilization.
By viciously attacking transgender kids and their families, Texas governor Greg Abbott and his conservative admirers have proven that they’re talking nonsense when they claim to care about shielding families from the overreach of government bureaucrats.
Last night, Joe Biden sounded like he was about to declare World War III. He won’t, thankfully — but he also won’t do much for working people.
Instead of celebrating Stephen Breyer’s retirement, we should be weakening the Supreme Court’s power. Popular majorities should determine the course of our society — not nine unelected lawyers.
When socialists talk about creating a more equal society, we don’t mean a society where everyone has an exactly equal share of everything. We mean a society where power has been equalized by extending democracy into the economy.