
The Left Must Stand With the Ukrainian People and Against Putin’s War
Socialists’ first task in Vladimir Putin’s appalling war on Ukraine: provide unconditional solidarity with its victims.
Owen Hatherley is Jacobin’s culture editor and the author of several books, including Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London.
Socialists’ first task in Vladimir Putin’s appalling war on Ukraine: provide unconditional solidarity with its victims.
The 1980s BBC series The History Man was a venomous takedown of academic pseudo-radicals. How does it stand up today?
There’s a reason why urban housing developments and suburban subdivisions can seem threatening and unwelcoming to outsiders: they’re planned that way, in order to “design out crime.”
Lee “Scratch” Perry, who died last week at the age of 85, wasn’t just a sonic genius — he was also a politicized producer whose work was full of demands for justice.
Pulp’s 1995 hit “Common People” isn’t just a Britpop classic — it’s a more honest and brutal analysis of class than you’ll hear in the media today.
Svetlana Kana Radević was one of the great architects of socialist Yugoslavia — her emphasis on public space showed what architecture can achieve when liberated from the constraints of the property market.
During the Vietnam War, the city of Vinh was almost destroyed by US bombing. Socialists around the world helped rebuild it. Today, Vinh’s architecture stands as a monument to that internationalist solidarity.
The architect, planner, and landowner Clough Williams-Ellis dedicated his estate to an experiment in “propaganda for architecture.” How did it become best known as the cutest of all the fictional dystopias?
In the 1920s and ’30s, German publisher Willi Münzenberg built a network of magazines, newspapers, and film studios that terrified big business interests. It became the largest left-wing media operation in history.
This year’s Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture, went to French architects who rejected the demolition of public housing. Instead, the architects insisted on renovating and expanding public units to make working-class residents’ homes more modern, humane, and attractive.
In the twentieth century, socialists and communists used municipal power in Paris to build some of Europe’s most ambitious social housing projects — housing that was not only beautiful but made for and by the city’s working class.
Going to the movies feels fundamentally different from simply streaming videos: it’s a collective experience, and often inspires discussion and argument. In 2021, when the pandemic finally recedes, we should build socialist film clubs.
America’s experiment with public housing was far less successful than Europe’s — but this hasn’t made it any less influential.
David Cronenberg’s first three films track the progress of epidemics “from the perspective of the disease.” What they reveal is a North American society already on the brink of disaster.
British television has increasingly become an arm of the Conservative Party — yet many on the Left nostalgically remember an earlier, more open media landscape. Was the BBC ever ours?
British politics have become a strange form of World War II cosplay, where the European Union are the Nazis, 1945 is a betrayal, and Boris Johnson is the newWinston Churchill.
To solve the housing crisis, we may have to go back to the future.
The architect Philip Johnson had some good qualities. He was also talentless, a fascist, and a liar.
In the late sixties, radical architects expressed their scorn in satirical utopias, where the world’s landmarks and landscapes are eaten up by the power of capital.
When eco-socialism in one city becomes a gated community.