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.
In the nail-biting new season of Netflix’s hit series Squid Game, players’ desperate circumstances push them to make fatally risky bets on individual success even when collective action might save them.
A break-in at the country home of Jean-Luc Mélenchon saw his house graffitied with far-right slogans and a swastika. The troubling attack followed past assassination plots against the French left-wing leader — but international media totally ignored it.
At his life’s end, Jean-Marie Le Pen had been expelled from the party that he helped found. Yet this Holocaust denier and former torturer left behind an important legacy: making the far right into a major force in French political life.
The Canadian Auto Workers and its successor union, Unifor, shifted their political strategy dramatically in response to changing political-economic conditions. We need a clear-eyed assessment of this change in orientation and what it’s accomplished.
After nine years in power, Canada’s Justin Trudeau leaves a faltering party to neoliberal entrenchment and surging Conservative polls. His resignation marks the growing crisis of centrist parties unable to adapt to mounting social and political pressures.
In the 2024 election, US Catholics voted in large numbers for Donald Trump. It’s far from inevitable that Catholics find their home on the Right — the church has long promoted radically egalitarian ideas about wealth redistribution and empowering workers.
In the days leading up to Christmas, Amazon workers organizing with the Teamsters at eight facilities across the US launched a coordinated strike against the logistics giant. Here’s a closer look at what the strike accomplished.
The Black Book of Communism has been hugely influential and sold millions of copies since its publication in 1997. Yet some of the dramatic claims made by its editor, Stéphane Courtois, were even rejected by his own contributors when the book came out.
Centrist politicians once based their whole pitch on the claim to possess “electability,” but now they can’t offer a sustainable formula for beating an increasingly militant right. They only develop a sense of urgency for the fight against the Left.
Early US elites drafted the Constitution to check democratic uprisings that threatened the power of the ruling class. The Bill of Rights, a late addition to the Constitution that protected important freedoms, was a concession to these popular struggles.
A new work of labor history charges Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, with retreating from visionary class politics to narrow opportunism. The narrative rests on a simplistic view of labor strategy and omits the union’s major accomplishments.
Irving Howe was the child of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. He helped to forge the democratic socialist tradition in the US and offered a defense of universalist politics.
Donald Trump’s second term won’t bring smaller government as promised. Instead, it will replace regulations with a system of executive grace and favor. The old bailout standard of “too big to fail” will be supplanted by a new one: only the loyal survive.
In a wide-ranging interview, novelist Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake, discusses the aftermath of the revolutionary ’60s, the allure and brutality of American individualism, and why liberals long for naively romantic depictions of radical politics.
At least 10,457 migrants died trying to reach Spain’s territory in 2024. The European Union’s crackdown on Mediterranean crossings has diverted African migrants toward the even more perilous Atlantic route, turning the ocean into a mass grave.
In the latest episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber discusses the Democrats’ long-standing attachment to identity politics and why this form of politics can’t meaningfully fight oppression.
As far back as Aristotle, Western thinkers have been deeply critical of the power that the wealthy hold over society. Historian Guido Alfani sat down with Jacobin to discuss the long history of opposition to elite power in Western politics and religion.
The ghostly emptiness of capitalist realism obscures the potential for collective joy and abundance. Mark Fisher’s writing offers a glimpse of the possibilities that lie beyond the seeming inevitability of the present.
In a wide-ranging interview, the political economist Helen Thompson discusses how the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has transformed the region. With an incoming Trump administration, the stage is now set for hawks to confront an isolated Iran.
After decades of consolidation, just four firms now control at least 97% of the $68 billion frozen potato market. A new spate of antitrust lawsuits accuses them of brazen price-fixing.