Melissa Naschek is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Bourgeois economics treats capitalism as simply a market economy. Vivek Chibber traces how markets and private ownership worked under feudalism and under capitalism, and argues that socialism could use markets without restoring class society.
Milton Friedman argued that capitalism was democracy’s natural home. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
The storming of the Bastille was the opening act in a century-long upheaval that broke with the premodern world and finally put ordinary people in charge of their nation’s destiny. That’s the legacy of the French Revolution.
The surge at the border under Joe Biden was a political failure, and one that MAGA weaponized with brutal efficiency. The Left has to offer its own solutions.
For most of the 20th century, class predicted voting behavior better than anything else. The recent process of class dealignment has proved disastrous for left politics — and to reverse it, we must have clarity on who counts as working-class.
Capitalism’s recurring crises have long fueled predictions of its inevitable demise. Vivek Chibber explains why breakdown isn’t guaranteed — and why political agency, not historical laws, will determine whether we get socialism or barbarism.
Central planners had a rational vision: replace the anarchy of the market with conscious coordination. Vivek Chibber explains why calculation and incentive problems undermined that vision, but a different sort of socialism can still flourish.
Krystal Ball, Vivek Chibber, and Matt Karp discuss how class politics stalled after the Bernie Sanders campaigns — and why a new political opening is finally emerging.
With its vast logistics empire deploying robotics, surveillance, and AI to block worker power at every turn, Amazon now sits atop the throne of American capitalism. Organizing it will define the future of the labor movement.
Under capitalism, technological “progress” like AI systematically deskills workers, deepens managerial control, and turns the labor process into a site of conflict rather than liberation. This is by design.
Artificial intelligence is unlikely to produce permanent mass unemployment, Vivek Chibber argues. But without class struggle from below and state action, automation will deepen inequality and leave workers to bear its costs.
Iranians have been trying to complete their democratic revolution for over a century. Every time the US gets involved, it sets that project back by decades.
In Europe, labor unions and socialist parties marched together and won massive reforms. In the United States, they were divided. Vivek Chibber explains how that split still shapes US politics today.
For 40 years, social democratic parties radically improved life for workers. The labor movement and worker militancy made it possible.
Why was the revolutionary road out of capitalism abandoned for an evolutionary one? Vivek Chibber explores how socialist parties moved from revolution to reform, but why real progress will always mean a conflict with capital.
Neoliberalism didn’t win an intellectual argument — it won power. Vivek Chibber unpacks how employers and political elites in the 1970s and ’80s turned economic turmoil into an opportunity to reshape society on their terms.
Despite what you may have heard, colonial plunder didn’t give rise to capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber discusses why the “colonialism-created-capitalism” argument fails, and why Marxism provides a better account of its emergence.
We live in an age of populism, on the Right and on the Left. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber explains both populism’s potential and limitations for putting class and economics back into politics.
Some argue that the continued existence of the middle class refutes Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber explains why this is wrong.
Vivek Chibber on how we should understand capitalism's middle strata — and why so many professionals are moving toward anti-capitalist politics.