How Socialism in the Villages Went Wrong

Instead of imposing collectivization from above, Julius Nyerere tried to build a rural socialism based on the values of Tanzania’s villages.

Welcome to Utopia, TX

This small town was envisioned as a socialist paradise. Now it’s Trump country.

Out of the Shtetl and Into the Heartland

What happened when assimilated German Jews tried to settle their Eastern European brethren in rural America?

Marxism and the Agrarian Question

The leading thinkers of Marxism stressed how important it was to govern in partnership with the peasantry. When communist states imposed collectivization by force, the results were disastrous.

India’s Failed Agricultural Revolution

Capitalism spread through India’s countryside without developing it.

Lula and the Ranchers

In Brazil, Lula has wagered that concessions to agribusiness elites are necessary to advance his redistributive project. Yet these very elites may undermine his whole program.

Kevin Costner’s Horizon Is as Bad as You’ve Heard

Supposedly the first of four films, Kevin Costner’s dull and messy Western throwback, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, is almost certainly dead on arrival.

This Land Is Your Land

Country, folk, and bluegrass songs that capture the realities of rural labor.

Southern Strategy Soundtracks

Country music became the sound of Richard Nixon’s coalition in the early 1970s — but it has always been too unruly to be fully co-opted by a reactionary agenda.

The Redneck Menace

White Rural Rage is another attempt to blame the Democratic Party’s decline in rural counties on mean and bigoted white Americans.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Red Roots

Studio Ghibli is not the Japanese Disney but the anti-Disney. Dreamed up by animators with roots in the Japanese communist movement, its films celebrate creative labor and human solidarity against capitalism and war.

An Unusable Past

Nicolas Grospierre’s photographs of collective farm buildings in Israel and the Baltic states reveal these communities’ utopian dreams — and their uncomfortable colonial underpinnings.

We Who Plowed the Prairies

Pastoral visions of farmwork don’t square with the reality of what it means to live in rural areas today.

Country Music Doesn’t Deserve Its Conservative Reputation

Musician Nick Shoulders talks to Jacobin about a genre that has long broadcast the struggles and aspirations of working people.

Talking Rural America With Thomas Frank

Urban elites’ contempt for rural America is centuries old — but so is rural populist resistance.

Vivek Chibber’s Reading List on Agrarian Politics

Peace to the Huts, War on the Palaces!

For thousands of years, organized peasants have challenged rural exploitation — and even toppled governments.

Communing With Nature

After stints in Haight-Ashbury, as many as one million hippies headed for the hills. Some of their communes have persisted into the present.

The UAW Heads South

The South has long remained a nearly impenetrable citadel for labor. Fresh off the success of its Big Three strike, the United Auto Workers wants to storm the castle.

Communist Cowboys

The Eastern Bloc’s “Ostern” filmmaking turned the mythology of the American Western on its head.