Democratic Governance Depends on Stable, Affordable Housing
A population that cannot afford to stay in one place cannot build civic associations, and a society without civic associations cannot resist concentrated power.
20581 Article(s) by: Benjamin Case
Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
Squeezing Water From the Rubble in Syria
Reporting from Yarmouk — the devastated Palestinian refugee district on the edge of Damascus — Jacobin follows the Palestinian House, a grassroots reconstruction initiative, as it leads efforts to dig wells and restore water in a camp abandoned by the state.
In Media MergerMania 2025, We All Lose
Whoever comes out on top of the scramble to gobble up Warner Bros. Discovery, media consumers will lose out as a smaller and smaller number of rich people determine what our media looks like.
RIP Rob Reiner — a Mensch Who Made the Films We All Love
Rob Reiner and his wife were killed yesterday. While Donald Trump tweets out a disgraceful, mocking memorial, we’re celebrating a man who made a decade of great cinema as well as a liberal mensch who stood in stark contrast to the inhuman cruelty of MAGA.
Aber Kawas’s Pro-Worker, Pro-Palestine Campaign
Aber Kawas is a Palestinian American community organizer and socialist running for New York assembly. We talked to her about her family history with ICE, the Palestine movement’s turn to electoral politics, and advancing an affordability agenda.
Trump Wants Puerto Rico to Be the US’s Aircraft Carrier
Donald Trump is aiming to restore US supremacy in the western hemisphere through presidential will, military power, and emergency authority, unconstrained by Congress or international law — a strategic reorientation that runs through Puerto Rico.
The American People Don’t Want a Bigger Military Budget
Only one in ten American voters want a bigger military budget. Congress keeps approving massive spending increases anyway, as it did when it voted for a nearly $1 trillion military budget last week.
America Can’t Build Homes Anymore
Cities stopped building not by accident but by design. Our housing system is constructed on scarcity, speculation, and private veto power.
What Zohran Can Learn From the Sewer Socialists
From Milwaukee’s sewer socialists to La Guardia’s New Deal metropolis, urban reformers changed their cities by forging alliances beyond local power.
When the Leaning Tower Leaned Left
In the 1970s, the Italian Communist Party was again on the rise in Tuscany. Then it all toppled over.
Politics Is Something We Do
The hard part is over. The harder part is about to start.
Issue 60: Dossier
Everything you need to take over your city.
Issue 60: Letters + Internet Speaks
Keeping up with our constituents.
Ezra Klein on Abundance and the Left
“When the state can’t deliver, people stop believing in collective solutions altogether.”
Paint the Town Red
Jacobin contributor Paul Heideman’s reading list on municipal socialism explores how workers’ movements, from Milwaukee to Liverpool, built power at the local level — and how they were defeated.
A Poet in Practice
Aimé Césaire’s time as the mayor of Martinique’s capital city was characterized by his practical, progressive politics — but also by his poet’s eye for beauty.
The German Take on Gotham
Fritz Lang’s masterful visual depiction of class stratification in Metropolis remains unrivaled by its would-be inheritors.
Stand-In Cities
New York isn’t what it used to be.
Bernie’s Fireside Chats
Before there was a YouTube, and even before there was an internet, there was public-access television. Low-budget, talky, unglamorous, and unfiltered, it was the perfect venue for the political rise of none other than Bernie Sanders.
The Life and Death of Paris’s Red Belt
How discontent over housing, and not workplace struggle, made Paris’s suburbs hotbeds of communism.