William G. Martin teaches at SUNY-Binghamton and is co-author of After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment (2016) and a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier; he covers local justice matters at www.justtalk.blog
Joe Biden’s rationale for his own presidency was that he could bring oligarchs and working people together and hammer out a compromise that worked for both. The apparent death of his legislative agenda proves what a laughable fantasy that was.
The late anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu was no neoliberal sellout. His legacy was always to advocate structural reforms in South Africa.
We often hear that if you increase benefits for low-income parents, they’ll just squander it on drugs and alcohol. But the best research shows that’s elitist nonsense — giving money to poor people is exactly what we need to be doing.
Since the French Revolution, the Right has deployed a common set of arguments to resist the drive to democratize economic and political power. The Left will only win if we analyze their rhetoric — and counter it.
From spreading anti-fascist writings to acting as an undercover agent in Nazi Germany, Jewish socialist Hilda Monte became one of the most formidable operatives of the resistance. She even participated in an abortive plot to kill Hitler himself.
Roger Blandino Nerio was a guerrilla leader with the leftist FMLN during El Salvador’s bloody civil war. As these selections from his memoir reveal, he was, like many guerrillas, an ordinary person spurred by conscience and history to extraordinary action.
Conservatives have long worked to dismantle the American welfare state. They’ve been so successful that some are even turning their sights on a formerly sacrosanct group: combat veterans returned from war.
Emmanuel Macron has often warned that France shouldn’t imitate US-style culture wars. But ahead of April’s election, the liberal president and his far-right challengers are all obsessing about what they call an “Islamo-leftist” threat to French national identity.
This fall, the Communist Party won the local elections in Austria’s second largest city, Graz, for the first time in history. New mayor Elke Kahr told Jacobin what a proudly Marxist party can hope to achieve from city hall.
Everybody needs high-speed internet. But private corporations will never provide it. The solution: treat internet infrastructure as a public utility, funded by the public and built by union workers.
Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s 1961 adaptation of the Broadway musical West Side Story embraced fantasy and ended up making a Hollywood classic. But Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s remake brings the larger-than-life story of doomed lovers down to earth — and sinks.
Socialists today should learn from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: in particular, its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings about commodified liberation. But they should leave behind its moralism and despair about change.
The policing of protests in France has become so nakedly repressive that even the United Nations has denounced its excesses. But a new protocol shows that Emmanuel Macron’s administration has chosen to turn violent police tactics into the norm.
Rightward Republican Party radicalization is well-positioned for continuing political success, even as it promises to bring political and economic instability for the country and the world with it.
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy introduced us to a working-class kid from Queens struggling to both save his city and pay the rent. But now under Disney, the Peter Parker of Spider-Man: No Way Home has wealthy new benefactors rewriting just what it means to be a superhero.
On this day in 1907, 10,000 New York families led by socialist teenager Pauline Newman — the “East Side Joan of Arc” — began a historic rent strike.
I woke up one morning to find my parents whispering and nothing on TV but Swan Lake. Then I heard someone say the words “the Soviet Union fell apart,” and suddenly my whole world changed.
After the demise of the USSR on December 26, 1991, the Russian left had to find its place in a society transformed beyond recognition. In the face of huge challenges, its activists have led important struggles against the system established by Yeltsin and Putin.
Thirty years ago today, the Soviet Union collapsed. Twentieth-century communism should be understood in all its complexity, as revolution and regime, a spur to anti-colonialism and an alternative form of social democracy.
In a 1914 essay, Eugene V. Debs pronounced Jesus “the world’s supreme revolutionary leader” and “as real and persuasive a historic character as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, or Karl Marx.” We reprint the essay here in full as our Christmas gift to you.