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Seth Ackerman is an editor at Jacobin.
Bernie Sanders says it over and over again: 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Centrist critics swear this is false. Once we sort through the noise, we see Bernie is right on the money.
Israel has made no secret of it: it has embarked on a genocidal plan to “create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” And Joe Biden is its accomplice.
Addicted to territorial aggrandizement and encircled by enemies of its own making, Israel has freed itself of all moral constraints.
Workers spend their whole lives producing wealth for society, only to be told that being provided for in old age is impossible. It’s not a rollback ordinary people should accept.
A debate between Seth Ackerman and Aaron Benanav on the prognosis for capitalism: Is it experiencing the kind of long-run stagnation that many Marxists have long regarded as its destiny? And what does the answer mean for socialist political strategy today?
Robert Brenner’s theory of the post-1973 global economy — which depicts a long era of “stagnation” caused by chronic industrial overcapacity — is logically dubious and doesn’t fit the facts. But the theory’s biggest problem is its politics.
YIMBYs are right that the US needs a major expansion of its housing supply. Unfortunately, eliminating restrictions on private housing development won’t do much to get us there.
On July 14, 1789, the people of Paris rose up to take history into their own hands. Because of the power of the Jacobin idea, and because enough of them lived on to fight another day, the revolution changed the world. We are all its beneficiaries.
Over the past year, the sources of inflation have shifted dramatically: rather than rapid income growth, the main driver now is a lull in productivity growth — a problem the Fed’s interest rate hikes can’t do anything to solve and that is probably temporary anyway.
The tendency of some modern-day Marxists to pit reform against revolution is diametrically opposed to the vision of Karl Marx himself.
Since Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, some commentators have been waking up to the need for a socialization of deposit-taking banking. They’re right — but the same logic leads to a more radical conclusion: a fully socialized capital market, with no private banks.
After stripping out mismeasured housing prices, core inflation had its biggest 12-month drop since the massive disinflation of the early 1980s. Larry Summers continues to be wrong about inflation.
In the 2002–3 run-up to war, mainstream media outlets systematically suppressed evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They couldn’t have gotten away with it in the age of Twitter.
Wage growth has been experiencing a historic slowdown. If that trend holds up, inflation is on track to get within half a percentage point of the Fed’s 2% target level by this time next year. But will inflation hawks be willing to take yes for an answer?
Last week’s inflation data prompted an outpouring of alarmism and calls for the Fed to squeeze the economy even harder. Here’s why the doomsaying is wrong.
During the ’50s-to-’70s debate on inflation, left Keynesians like Joan Robinson, who strongly supported trade unionism, saw it as a key cause of high inflation, while Milton Friedman and the monetarists, who hated unions, insisted they weren’t to blame for it.
We tend to associate the inflation problem with the 1970s. But it was years earlier, in the era of Sputnik and Elvis, that the world first woke up to the reality of chronically rising prices. We’re still coping with that episode’s wrongheaded “lessons” today.
The “wage-price spiral” was the distinctively destructive form that inflation took in the 20th century. It’s unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon.
In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes built a new theory of inflation that sought to reckon with the proletariat’s recent and explosive entry onto the stage of history.
With price growth trending down over the past year despite a strong labor market, it’s looking more and more like Larry Summers was wrong about inflation after all. It’s time to revisit the great inflation debate of 2021–2022.