Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
The 1931 Workers’ Olympiad in Vienna was an inspiring example of mass-scale sports, free of corporate influence. These photos from the games show how the workers’ movement promoted collective joy and class pride, even outside the factory gates.
Twenty years ago, protests at the Genoa G8 summit proclaimed that “Another World is Possible.” But today, Italy’s weak and divided left lacks a vision for a real alternative to capitalism.
Much like Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the air traffic controllers, Scott Walker’s assault on public sector unions should be remembered as a turning point in American history that opened the floodgates to new attacks on the working class — and as a harbinger of Trumpism.
Austrian socialist Julius Deutsch was a key figure in Red Vienna’s workers’ sports clubs. Founder of the Schutzbund workers’ militia, Deutsch and his comrades used the class pride built on the sports field to mobilize against rising fascism.
In the 1960s, radical thinker André Gorz developed a novel concept that went beyond the tired reform versus revolution debate. With non-reformist reforms, popular movements can win immediate gains that shift power away from elites — and clear the way for more radical transformations.
McDonald’s has long portrayed itself as a champion of black uplift through black ownership of its franchises. But McDonald’s version of black capitalism, like the idea of black capitalism as a whole, has only ever benefited the few, not the many.
Republicans are cutting off unemployment benefits at a time when huge numbers of workers still desperately need them — and the Democrats aren’t putting up a fight over it.
Here at Jacobin, we don’t just offer you radical political dispatches — we give you practical advice on how to improve your summer. Here are our top beach reads for the sweltering summer months.
Only in a country whose ruling class has grown deeply deluded could a space joy ride like Jeff Bezos’s be seen as cause for public celebration rather than the symptom of moral rot and institutional decay that it so clearly is.
This day in 2011, far-right terrorist Anders Breivik murdered 69 people at the Norwegian Labor Party’s youth camp on Utøya island. A survivor of the attack writes about how he escaped — and the danger that Breivik’s far-right politics still represent today.
A newly published study finds that the amount of medical debt owed by Americans is even larger than previously thought. It’s just further proof of the moral abomination that is for-profit health care.
Even modest rental housing is now out of reach for millions of full-time workers — and the pandemic has made an already bleak situation even worse.
Catapulted to media attention by its stunts, Extinction Rebellion has wasted its platform on a message of individualized guilt and obedience to the powerful. To avert climate disaster, we need economic transformation, not pointless moralism.
Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin that today’s exploding ecological crises open up a realistic prospect of the final exit of humanity itself. Might socialism be our off-ramp, or is it already too late?
Two years ago, our late friend and comrade Michael Brooks wrote an unpublished piece about his family’s experience with food stamps and Trump’s assault on the SNAP program. We publish it today, the anniversary of Michael’s passing, as a tribute to his memory.
Socialists have rightly taken inspiration from the Russian Revolution for generations, but many of the lessons drawn from it are wrong for our own time. To make change today, we need to take democratic socialism seriously as a theory and practice.
Dave Barrett won a reputation as “Canada’s Allende” by carrying out radical reforms in 1970s British Columbia. Lifelong Canadian labor economist Andrew Jackson, who was part of Barrett’s project, recalls a turbulent and instructive time for the Canadian left.
C. L. R. James was one of the twentieth century’s intellectual giants. During a life of intense political engagement, he wrote classic books about the struggle against slavery and the social history of sport, never flinching in his socialist commitment.
The recent ProPublica exposé about billionaires’ almost-nonexistent tax bill was just the latest to reveal how little the ultrarich pay in taxes. We need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.
Democrats must quickly pass their landmark voting rights legislation if they want to prevent Republicans from gerrymandering their way to a hold on power for the next decade.