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Seth Ackerman is an editor at Jacobin.
For many in the United States, life is bleak — so bleak that some look to China and see an alternative, decently functioning society that doesn’t allow its citizens to fall below a “kill line.”
Europe’s GDP is keeping pace with America’s just fine. Why do we constantly hear the opposite?
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.
In the popular imagination, Jimmy Carter is associated with an idealistic “human rights agenda” for US foreign policy. In reality, by the end of his term in office, he was paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism.
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.
In 1967, Milton Friedman launched a counterrevolution in economics that overturned the Keynesian theory of inflation. Three years later, economist James Tobin issued a powerful theoretical rebuttal — but in the economics mainstream, it’s been all but forgotten.
The end of Roe v. Wade has shaken up the decades-long bargain between the GOP and the antiabortion movement. As the movement radicalizes, the party faces a dilemma: Should it stand by a cause that threatens to become a disastrously unpopular albatross?
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.
A fabricated story about the causes of 1970s inflation — repeated in high school textbooks and the New York Times — plays a surprisingly important role in shaping economics today. It may well have helped spur the Fed’s ongoing campaign to engineer a recession.
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.
The US invasion of Iraq was a crime, a calculated act of aggression that left immense destruction in its wake with almost no redeeming benefits to anyone — including its villainous architects.