Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, 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.
After four years of having a xenophobic reality TV host in the White House, the desire to just “go back to normal” is understandable. But a return to normalcy would be disastrous, shoring up the plutocratic status quo that gave us Trump in the first place.
Judith Jarvis Thomson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Her justly famous essay in defense of abortion rights is a model for how to combine philosophical rigor with political engagement in the real world.
The argument that we shouldn’t cancel student debt because it’s unfair to those who have paid off their loans doesn’t hold up. Don’t overthink it: we should cancel all student debt and make public universities, community colleges, and vocation schools tuition-free.
According to centrists, the “blue wave” didn’t materialize because of the Left. That’s nonsense — and in at least one crucial swing state, Joe Biden rode to victory because of the organizing of progressives and leftists.
It’s good that Donald Trump lost. But the Left now needs to pivot immediately to opposition to the Joe Biden administration.
More than 31 million adults who live in the United States are legally prohibited from voting in today’s election. That’s an obscene human rights violation.
Walmart is the largest private-sector employer in the United States, and it’s an important source of low-cost groceries for consumers around the country. It also pays poverty wages, busts unions, and drives economic inequality. Luckily, there is an economically viable route to solving those ills: bring the megacorporation under public ownership.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is surprisingly good for an Aaron Sorkin production. But the artistic liberties he takes with the historical facts, particularly around downplaying or leaving vague the protagonists’ radical politics, tell you a lot about Sorkin’s own blind spots.
Socialists should be making well-thought-out proposals for a better future and building the class power to bring that program into reality. The idea that our purpose is simply “shifting the Overton window” by spouting the most radical-sounding slogans is an unhelpful distraction.
The Right wants you to believe that a coddled, overly sensitive left is propping up cancel culture. But punitive, hyper-surveillant ways of interacting online are built into the structure of privately owned social media companies, and they’re practiced across the political spectrum. The Left must insist on a better way.
Michael Brooks, who would have turned 37 years old today, wanted the Left to do better. In the last year of his life, he’d started to write a book about what that might look like.
Michael Brooks was one of the funniest, most intellectually curious human beings I’ve ever known. He was also deeply committed to creating a better world.
On Tax Day, here’s a guide to arguing with libertarians about redistribution.
Should Yale, bearing a slave trader’s name, be renamed? Yes. Since Ivy League schools are engines of class inequality, we should first nationalize all the Ivies. Then Yale University can become UConn New Haven.
We absolutely need to defund the police and put the money in social services. To attack inequality and invest in poor and working-class neighborhoods of color, we need a massive increase in public spending. That means wresting resources from the rich.
It’s a common refrain that socialists are naïve, unrealistic dreamers. But precisely the opposite is true: we know that power corrupts, so we want to democratize all spheres of society.
My vision of democratic socialism wouldn’t be Utopia. But here’s the case it would be better than the status quo during both normal times and these times of crisis.
Criticisms of capitalism’s failures have more power if we can actually imagine an alternative. Here’s what a viable socialist society could look like.
A telltale sign of a broken society is when medical workers are forced to beg for supplies on GoFundMe and parents have to write compelling stories to convince random people to pay for their kid’s cancer treatment. Instead of crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe, we need a generous welfare state that ensures everyone’s basic needs are met.
Jordan Peterson is one of the most famous public intellectuals in the world. But his pronouncements in favor of capitalism and hierarchy collapse at the slightest bit of scrutiny.