Desmond Tutu Never Sold Out the Liberation Struggle
The late anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu was no neoliberal sellout. His legacy was always to advocate structural reforms in South Africa.
20401 Article(s) by: Frances Abele
Frances Abele CM is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy Emerita at Carleton University. She is a research fellow at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and the Broadbent Institute. Much of her work focuses on indigenous-Canada relations.
There’s Absolutely No Reason We Shouldn’t Be Cutting Child Poverty
We often hear that if you increase benefits for low-income parents, they’ll just squander it on drugs and alcohol. But the best research shows that’s elitist nonsense — giving money to poor people is exactly what we need to be doing.
To Beat the Right, We Have to Understand Their Arguments
Since the French Revolution, the Right has deployed a common set of arguments to resist the drive to democratize economic and political power. The Left will only win if we analyze their rhetoric — and counter it.
The Jewish Socialist Who Tried to Kill Hitler
From spreading anti-fascist writings to acting as an undercover agent in Nazi Germany, Jewish socialist Hilda Monte became one of the most formidable operatives of the resistance. She even participated in an abortive plot to kill Hitler himself.
The Autobiography of a Salvadoran Socialist Revolutionary
Roger Blandino Nerio was a guerrilla leader with the leftist FMLN during El Salvador’s bloody civil war. As these selections from his memoir reveal, he was, like many guerrillas, an ordinary person spurred by conscience and history to extraordinary action.
The Right Wants to Make Disabled Veterans Into the New “Welfare Queens”
Conservatives have long worked to dismantle the American welfare state. They’ve been so successful that some are even turning their sights on a formerly sacrosanct group: combat veterans returned from war.
France’s Presidential Election Is a One-Sided Culture War
Emmanuel Macron has often warned that France shouldn’t imitate US-style culture wars. But ahead of April’s election, the liberal president and his far-right challengers are all obsessing about what they call an “Islamo-leftist” threat to French national identity.
Meet the Communist Running Austria’s Second Largest City
This fall, the Communist Party won the local elections in Austria’s second largest city, Graz, for the first time in history. New mayor Elke Kahr told Jacobin what a proudly Marxist party can hope to achieve from city hall.
Public Broadband Internet Isn’t a Luxury — It’s a Necessity
Everybody needs high-speed internet. But private corporations will never provide it. The solution: treat internet infrastructure as a public utility, funded by the public and built by union workers.
Did Steven Spielberg Just Ruin West Side Story?
Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s 1961 adaptation of the Broadway musical West Side Story embraced fantasy and ended up making a Hollywood classic. But Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s remake brings the larger-than-life story of doomed lovers down to earth — and sinks.
What Herbert Marcuse Got Right — and Wrong
Socialists today should learn from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: in particular, its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings about commodified liberation. But they should leave behind its moralism and despair about change.
For Emmanuel Macron, Liberalism Means Letting Armed Police Do Whatever They Like
The policing of protests in France has become so nakedly repressive that even the United Nations has denounced its excesses. But a new protocol shows that Emmanuel Macron’s administration has chosen to turn violent police tactics into the norm.
For Republicans, There Will Be No “Return to Normal”
Rightward Republican Party radicalization is well-positioned for continuing political success, even as it promises to bring political and economic instability for the country and the world with it.
What Happened to the Friendly Neighborhood (Working-Class) Spider-Man?
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy introduced us to a working-class kid from Queens struggling to both save his city and pay the rent. But now under Disney, the Peter Parker of Spider-Man: No Way Home has wealthy new benefactors rewriting just what it means to be a superhero.
New York’s Winter Rent Strike Inspired Generations
On this day in 1907, 10,000 New York families led by socialist teenager Pauline Newman — the “East Side Joan of Arc” — began a historic rent strike.
How Strange It Feels to Watch Your Country Die
I woke up one morning to find my parents whispering and nothing on TV but Swan Lake. Then I heard someone say the words “the Soviet Union fell apart,” and suddenly my whole world changed.
How the Russian Left Survived in a Post-Soviet World
After the demise of the USSR on December 26, 1991, the Russian left had to find its place in a society transformed beyond recognition. In the face of huge challenges, its activists have led important struggles against the system established by Yeltsin and Putin.
We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History
Thirty years ago today, the Soviet Union collapsed. Twentieth-century communism should be understood in all its complexity, as revolution and regime, a spur to anti-colonialism and an alternative form of social democracy.
Eugene Debs on “Jesus, the Supreme Leader”
In a 1914 essay, Eugene V. Debs pronounced Jesus “the world’s supreme revolutionary leader” and “as real and persuasive a historic character as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, or Karl Marx.” We reprint the essay here in full as our Christmas gift to you.
It’s a Wonderful Life vs. the FBI
Amid Cold War paranoia, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI set its sights on a potential source of communist subversion: Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life.