Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
In the 1950s, France engaged in an ambitious effort to modernize its empire by embracing local customs and promoting limited home rule. Revolutionary Warfare by Terrence Peterson outlines this failed attempt to create a modern ideology for colonialism.
While running his coal company Bluestone, Governor Jim Justice ushered the mines of West Virginia deep into the grasp of global financial capital — at the expense of West Virginians. Why should Swiss bankers get paid before West Virginia teachers?
After 12 months, there’s no end in sight to Israel’s relentless onslaught against Gaza, now extended to Lebanon. Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how Israel and the US are working together to destroy all constraints on violence against civilians.
When video games went mainstream, the Pentagon realized their potential as a promotional tool, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on war-based games. Now the wheel has come full circle as they use game-style interfaces for real-life tools of war.
Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah has been engaged in a limited war with Israel, which Netanyahu’s government escalated last month in a series of attacks on Lebanese society. Jacobin spoke to Lebanon scholar Joseph Daher about the dilemma the party faces.
Republican endorsements, running to the right on foreign policy, an unambitious agenda of incremental change less important than how bad the other guy is. Where have we seen this before?
After 1945, France produced an extraordinary wave of social theorists whose influence is still felt today. In his final work, Fredric Jameson discussed the excitement of watching this wave rise and fall and the conditions that made it possible.
Last week, Amazon warehouse workers in San Francisco organizing with the Teamsters marched on the boss to demand union recognition. It’s one of many organizing efforts targeting the logistics giant that are gaining ground across the country.
The release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 offers a timely lens into the US military’s entanglement with the entertainment industries. The practice has a long history, stretching back to Top Gun, Rambo, and the anti-communist films of the McCarthyist period.
Born 125 years ago this year, political philosopher Leo Strauss became a patron saint of US conservatism. Strauss was one of the sharpest enemies of equality — and his work is an education in the antidemocratic spirit of the Right.
Western hegemony is in decline, and the Left has to reckon with a new international balance of power. Peter Mertens, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, spoke to us about what the “mutinies” in the Global South mean for socialist strategy.
A decade ago, Germany’s renewable energy transition was seen as a model for the rest of the world. Today much of the working class has turned against all things green. What happened?
In Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, two cofounders of the LA Tenants Union offer an account of housing, tenancy, the connections between labor and renters’ organizing, and what the authors call the “centuries-long war on tenants.”
Democratic forces in Myanmar have been fighting for more than three years against a military junta. Unions are a crucial part of the resistance movement, and the government has cracked down on them with deadly force.
The recent longshore workers’ strike provoked pearl-clutching in the media about runaway salaries. But the notion of six-figure pay for blue-collar workers becomes less scandalous when we compare worker pay and purchasing power today to those in 1960.
As the deep problems with the United States’ antimajoritarian institutions become clearer by the day, a growing chorus of voices is taking aim at our country’s exceptionally undemocratic Constitution.
A new battleground poll from Jacobin and the Center for Working-Class Politics / YouGov breaks down support by social class. Kamala Harris leads narrowly in Pennsylvania, but Donald Trump leads among both unionized and manual workers.
The problem with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent grilling on Palestine by CBS News’s Tony Dokoupil isn’t that it was rude. It’s that Dokoupil’s questioning betrays a fundamental lack of concern for Palestinians’ basic humanity, shared across mainstream media.
When it comes to the economy, Democrats are now the party of the status quo, while Donald Trump’s GOP is making a misleading but radical-sounding pitch to upend the existing order in workers’ favor. It’s a fundamental role reversal in US politics.
Kamala Harris recently called Iran a “destabilizing, dangerous force” in the Middle East. The appropriate context for understanding this remark is the US’s own decades-long history of destabilizing Iran.