Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
Polish economists like Oskar Lange and Michał Kalecki produced highly creative models of how a socialist system could work, balancing equality and efficiency. But Poland’s Communist government neglected their ideas, sowing the seeds of its eventual demise.
Many colleges and universities around the country have insisted on reopening in-person classes and putting the burden of preventing coronavirus on individual college students. The administrators behind these decisions seem to care little for the obvious devastation this is wreaking among students.
The outrageous shooting of an unarmed black man in Kenosha shows the difference between elected officials’ kind words and actual progress. The movement against police violence will be fighting for a long time.
The lunacy on display at last night’s Republican National Convention is what keeps frightened liberal voters satisfied with the meager crumbs of progress offered by the Democrats — and the meagerness of those crumbs is what keeps working-class whites inside an increasingly lunatic GOP.
Barack Obama swept into office with a progressive mandate, but his legislating was tepid, often conservative. One key reason: his administration had no plans — or even interest in — overcoming the massive capital strikes they were up against.
Yesterday, Trump’s USPS chairman, Robert Duncan, confirmed he had served on two Republican super PACs — at the same time new documents showed that the GOP takeover of the United States Postal Service coincided with a significant slowdown in mail delivery just months before the November election.
Last week’s coup in Mali came after weeks of protest against an unpopular, autocratic ruler, but the intentions of the junta leaders remain unclear. The country now badly needs to address deep-rooted problems of the Malian state that have been neglected for much too long.
The Polish Communists were savagely persecuted by Stalin in the 1930s, before he raised their party to power after 1945. Despite attempts at reform, their regime could never transcend its origins as a Soviet satellite state.
Jess Scarane is challenging incumbent Chris Coons for a Senate seat in Delaware. In an interview with Jacobin, the thirty-five-year-old candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and her local Sunrise Movement hub talks about her vision of a better society, Coons’s use of “Republican talking points against the policies that we need,” and why a return to the status quo before the coronavirus is nowhere near good enough.
José Carlos Mariátegui was Latin America’s most original revolutionary thinker, who combined Marxist analyses with the vernacular of regional popular movements. Ninety years after his premature death, his work is strikingly relevant.
The explosion that devastated Beirut was an indictment of the parties that have misruled Lebanon for decades. Now, however, those parties are using the disaster as a pretext to deepen neoliberal policies, with French leader Emmanuel Macron and the IMF egging them on.
A new book by an Israeli scholar dissects the extraordinary hold that the country’s military — and militaristic ways of thinking — have on Israeli society, and the ideological myths that keep the project afloat.
New research finds that strong unions are pretty effective at making politicians pay attention to the interests of ordinary people. In order to pursue a real pro-worker agenda in government, we need an emboldened labor movement.
Progressives are being told by the Democratic Party to shut up until after the election. Meanwhile, corporate Democrats are trumpeting how far right they are — a message that could demoralize Democratic voters and depress turnout.
Poland’s Solidarity trade union was one of the most impressive workers’ movements in postwar Europe. It rocked the foundations of an autocratic regime, but it took a wrong turn as the Eastern Bloc started to crumble.
In Australia, as elsewhere, the 1930s saw the emergence of an armed, proto-fascist right who were united by their hatred of working-class politics.
The coronavirus pandemic has preyed on weaknesses created by decades of austerity, confirming what socialists have consistently argued: privatization was a disaster.
The rise of casual work has multiplied uncertainty, lowered wages, undermined conditions, and handed power to employers.
When the Italian government introduced a temporary ban on layoffs for the period of the coronavirus crisis, the employers’ federation reacted furiously. Firms have already received billions of euros in subsidies to help pay their workers’ wages — but what they can’t tolerate is any limit on their power to hire and fire at will.
Barbara Kopple won Oscars for her gripping documentaries, like Harlan County, USA, on the struggles of the labor movement. She sat down with Jacobin to discuss that and her more recent work, as well.