Don’t Mention the War
With a vacuous social vision, economics confronts the “return of the social question” woefully unprepared.
20417 Article(s) by: Julia Goodman
Reading Material
Introducing the Jacobin books section.
Art Class
In his new book, Ben Davis’s arguments too often take the form of smug, self-righteous dismissals that convey only disapproval.
The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk
In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by the privileged, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers supported the war effort. That memory is wrong.
Libya and Its Contexts
The Libyan campaign not only caused extensive death and human rights violations, but it may usher in decades of more war.
This Labor Day, Thank a Teacher
Teacher unions offer our best shot at revitalizing the labor movement.
Vonnegut and Labor
Can literature be a force in the fight for economic justice?
Property and Theft
The overthrow of all intellectual property leaves unanswered the question of how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists.
Outside the New China
The exploitative relationship between city and countryside pervades Chinese life. Nowhere is inequality in access to public goods clearer than in the country’s urban education system.
Beyond Windsor
Queer theory fought the marriage equality movement and lost. What comes next will require scholars to come out of their journals and into the streets.
She Came to Riot
The memory of riot grrrl deepens the divide between cultural and material feminism, hobbling critiques of inequality by mistaking self-improvement for revolution.
Silent Majority Music
To put it most unkindly, trap music is adult contemporary for the prosumer age.
Against Tipping
So long as the karmic tip jar clouds our perceptions, the insane injustice of an underpaid labor force reimbursed through only the guilty feelings of their coworkers will persist.
Degendering Value
Gendered conceptions of credit and reward are written into the structures of intellectual property law.
Locked Out
With roots in the laws of seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, intellectual property protections go back to the beginnings of capitalism itself.
The Fantastic Failure of The Lone Ranger
At least Verbinski tries to bring intelligent, politically-savvy revisionist westerns back into style.
Edward Snowden and the American Condition
Law and lawyers can’t save us from the creeping police state – but politics might.
Good Wars, Real or Imagined
How many times must we witness the collapse of good intentions into horror and failure?
Capitalism vs. Democracy
Pitting public power against unbridled accumulation, DC’s living wage legislation is an attempt to rectify injustice in the market. And capitalists can’t stand it.