Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is an evocative exploration of the contrasting dimensions of modernity. The film probes the potential horrors cast by advancing technology alongside the exhilarating heights of human achievement.
Before Marx, there was Auguste Blanqui.
Instead of allowing the Right to dominate discussions of patriotism, socialists should emulate past successful left projects that wed national belonging to an inclusive, progressive politics.
Without solid data, discussions about class and class consciousness are often just guesswork. Empirical Marxist studies of class structure and class consciousness are invaluable for a robust socialist politics, and we need more of it.
On Bloomsday, we’re celebrating James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s one of the greatest novels ever, and it calls forth a world where every named and unnamed minor character gets to be the hero. What could be more socialist?
The countries with the world’s best welfare states deliver universal benefits that emancipate people from the whims of the labor market. And those welfare states were won through class struggle.
Richard Florida chats about Karl Kautsky, Karl Marx, and other urban creative types.
Set to win 18 seats in parliament, the Workers’ Party of Belgium is the fastest-growing force on the European left. Newly elected leader Raoul Hedebouw tells Jacobin how his comrades built an explicitly Marxist party with mass appeal.
Abundance is the precondition of socialism, but socialism is also the precondition of abundance.
No one should be surprised that Zohran Mamdani supports democratic control over the economy, the end goal of socialism. But he won because he combined socialist politics with practical solutions to the cost-of-living crisis facing working people.
For a few days in July 1877, workers took over St Louis and a communist party ruled the Midwestern city. The often forgotten St Louis Commune was a landmark event that showed the US isn't immune to Paris Commune–style eruptions of class consciousness.
Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring is a gripping account of Europe’s 1848 revolutions. The questions raised by those movements and their ultimate defeat are still vitally important for socialist politics in our own time.
Wolfgang Streeck’s new book Taking Back Control? argues that the neoliberal era of free trade and trickle-down rhetoric lies in the past. He spoke to Jacobin about the political shocks this might bring.
Wilhelm Liebknecht took part in Germany’s failed revolution of 1848 and became a close ally of Karl Marx in exile. He went on to lead the Social Democratic Party, which defied state repression to become the world’s most formidable working-class movement.
For too long, speculative fiction has been hostile to emancipatory politics. That's finally starting to change.
In Spain, a center-left coalition government faces opposition not just from right-wingers and business leaders but from parts of the judiciary and police. For Pablo Iglesias, it’s time the Left pushed back against right-wing dominance in the state machine.
Too much writing about Rosa Luxemburg nowadays focuses on her personal letters and relationships at the expense of her ideas. It’s good to humanize our heroes, but we risk belittling the significance of a revolutionary thinker whose understanding of socialism should be a touchstone for today’s left.
In 1877, one million workers went on strike and fought police and federal troops in cities across America. The monikers “Great Upheaval” and “Great Railroad Strike” undersell what verged on a second Civil War — this time pitting labor against capital.
In 1872, Friedrich Engels wrote The Housing Question, tying the working class’s perpetual housing crisis to the free market in Victorian England. The century and a half of housing crises since have proved Engels correct.
David Graeber’s intellectual legacy is enormous and wide-ranging, but his recent writings on antisemitism deeply moved me. He knew that antisemitism was far from dead — and he also knew that only a democratic left could stop it.