Issue 60: Misery Index
Crunching the numbers on the class war.
20936 Article(s) by: Enver Motala
Enver Motala is an associate of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg and of the Centre for Integrated Post-School Education and Training at the Nelson Mandela University.
The Oligarch Upstairs
Some of the most over-the-top apartments in New York City are owned — and left empty — by überwealthy foreign nationals.
When the Rich Say “We’re Leaving”
Every time we want to change society to benefit average people, we have to deal with ultrawealthy crybabies.
Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism
Despite what you may have heard, colonial plunder didn’t give rise to capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber discusses why the “colonialism-created-capitalism” argument fails, and why Marxism provides a better account of its emergence.
Making a May Day 2028 General Strike a Reality
In the wake of the historic stand-up strike two years ago, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain called on the labor movement to prepare to strike together on May 1, 2028. What will it take to make a successful general strike a reality?
Sortition Can Help Cure What Ails Our Democracy
Americans are frustrated with our increasingly oligarchic political system. Selecting an assortment of lawmaking deliberative bodies through random lotteries could help fix it, by empowering ordinary people rather than unaccountable politicians.
Threatened With Jail for Offering Blankets to Migrants
Twenty-four aid workers in Greece are being tried on trumped-up smuggling charges after they gave blankets and water to migrants. Some have been in pretrial detention for months in a case highlighting the EU’s authoritarian clampdown on migrant rescue.
American Socialists Aren’t Tired of Winning
More than 100 democratic socialist elected officials, staffers, and organizers from across the US met in New Orleans for the How We Win conference last weekend. The gathering demonstrated American socialists’ growing influence and confidence.
Google Paid to Fete Key Lawmakers at a Secret Summit
Google recently paid state lawmakers upward of $2,000 as “gifts” to cover their attendance at a secret all-inclusive summit with “educational” sessions discussing artificial intelligence and other issues that many of these officials will soon be voting on.
Labor Isn’t a Special Interest. It Promotes the Common Good.
Decades of data shows that nonworkers, including retirees and students, make up one of labor’s most consistently pro-union constituencies. The movement has more allies than it realizes, and harnessing them could reshape its strategic horizon.
Far-Right Billionaire Vincent Bolloré Returns to Africa
Billionaire Vincent Bolloré is known for his use of his media empire to promote Islamophobic pundits in France. Now the corporation he controls is buying up TV broadcasting and film across Africa.
The Hague Group’s Insurgent Multilateralism
The US claims to uphold a rules-based global order while letting Israel commit brutal crimes with impunity. Into that breach has stepped a coalition of states, the Hague Group, willing to act on the basic principles of morality abandoned by the old system.
What Incels Learned From Feminism
Confusing marginality with insight leaves movements vulnerable to reactionary mimicry. A renewed engagement with Karl Marx’s structural account of exploitation can give feminism a path out of standpoint theory’s dead end.
In Jersey City, Socialists Beat the Democratic Machine
Democratic socialists Jake Ephros and Joel Brooks triumphed in their runoff elections for the Jersey City Council in New Jersey last week. Jacobin followed them at the tail end of their victorious campaigns.
The Secret Plot to Raise Meat Prices
Analytics firm Agri Stats has quietly enabled major meat processors to coordinate price hikes and suppress wages for decades. Despite outcry over algorithmic price-setting, the companies are settling lawsuits over it without paying substantial penalties.
Netflix Must Be Stopped
For years, Big Tech’s growing dominance over Hollywood has meant lower-quality movies and TV shows. Now, with Netflix and Paramount Skydance fighting over Warner Bros. Discovery, audiences are left with little say in the matter.
Greece’s Broken Democracy Is a Warning for Europe
European authorities promote Greece as a postcrisis success story. Yet Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s right-wing government relies on spyware and the opaque use of EU subsidies — and is now overseeing a brutal cost-of-living crisis.
Critique Is Easy. What’s Your Plan for Power?
The way to help Zohran Mamdani overcome establishment and billionaire opposition to his agenda has to involve organizing bigger and deeper, rather than simply criticizing him harder.
Netflix Won’t Give Wake Up Dead Man the Release It Deserves
Wake Up Dead Man is another crowd-pleasing entry in writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out murder mystery franchise. It’s the kind of movie that should be crushing it with audiences on the big screen. But Netflix would rather you see it on their streamer.
Emirati CEO Asked Jeffrey Epstein for Elon Musk Connection
Two years before hosting a meeting with Elon Musk in Dubai, Emirati logistics CEO Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem asked Jeffrey Epstein to connect him with the Tesla head, newly released emails show. It’s not the only time Musk has come up in the Epstein files.