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.