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.
It’s easy to mock the “banana discourse” that’s materialized on left-wing Twitter in the last week. But there are important issues here about how production and consumption would work under a feasible and desirable form of socialism.
The left-wing podcast Know Your Enemy engages seriously with conservative thinkers. A deep-pocketed conservative foundation tried to destroy the podcast with a serious lawsuit. Which side is serious about the free exchange of ideas?
In this previously unpublished conversation, Jacobin’s Ben Burgis and the late socialist podcaster Michael Brooks, who died three years ago today, talk about their shared love for The Sopranos.
Like many socialists around the world, G. A. Cohen invested the Soviet Union with his hopes for a more just and equal society. In time, he grew disillusioned with the USSR — but he never stopped fighting for a better world.
Leading left-wing politicians including Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and, most recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have already endorsed Joe Biden — even though primary voters haven’t yet had their say and most Democrats in polls don’t even want him to run.
Many critics of socialism claim that our nature as humans is too flawed and selfish for socialism to work. They’re getting things exactly backward. We need socialism to protect against human cruelty and encourage human kindness.
President Biden said he won’t expand the Supreme Court because doing so would “politicize” the court in an unhealthy way. But it’s a political institution by its nature — and a disturbingly undemocratic one.
The National Review frets that “populist” paleoconservatives are vessels of Marxist influence on the Right. That’s nonsense.
Democrats for DeSantis? Seems hard to justify. William Cooper’s recent contrarian case for Ron DeSantis in the Orlando Sentinel is an unwittingly perfect satire of contemporary American liberalism’s technocratic obsessions.
A new documentary called Israelism tells the story of young American Jews coming to question the narrative they were taught about “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Cornel West has a compelling message. Instead of running a third-party campaign most voters won’t notice, he should grab the spotlight by challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.
Many commentators see the eccentric Robert F. Kennedy Jr as an “antiestablishment” alternative to Biden. But he doesn’t even support single-payer health care, the brightest line dividing the centrist Democratic Party from its base.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thinks young people should earn the right to vote by joining the army, like in the sci-fi classic Starship Troopers. It’s a political nonstarter, but it says a lot about how conservatives see the world.
The Right never seems to stop talking about “Marxism” and its wily tricks. But for all their denunciations, conservative pundits really just keep proving they don’t even know the basics of Karl Marx’s thought.
It’s Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday today. The fact that this monster is celebrated instead of in jail tells you that he’s part of a much bigger problem — and that problem is America’s global empire.
Hollywood is often portrayed as a haven of elitist liberalism. To the extent that’s true, it’s partly because the Hollywood blacklist made it so difficult to produce working-class movies like the 1954 classic Salt of the Earth.
Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar want schools to abolish “school lunch debt” and feed all children at school free of charge. In a decent society, that would be uncontroversial — yet every Republican and many Democrats haven’t signed on.
In a recent interview, Bernie Sanders was forced to defend his position that billionaires shouldn’t exist to an exasperated Chris Wallace. Sanders is absolutely right: a humane system wouldn’t produce such dramatic disparities in the distribution of resources.
Tucker Carlson likes to posture as a bold populist truth-teller. But when push comes to shove, he sides with the ruling class and bosses, not workers.
Bernie Sanders is calling for a reduction in the workweek to 32 hours, at full-time pay. He’s absolutely right. Gains in productivity should serve the working class.