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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Talking Rural America With Thomas Frank
Urban elites’ contempt for rural America is centuries old — but so is rural populist resistance.
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.
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.