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?
Richard Florida chats about Karl Kautsky, Karl Marx, and other urban creative types.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For too long, speculative fiction has been hostile to emancipatory politics. That's finally starting to change.
Automation won’t necessarily lead to either mass unemployment or a utopian workless future. Power and politics impact how automation affects work — which means that automation can create dignified jobs through class struggle.
Over seven decades, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has advanced one of the most radical critiques of capitalist modernity. But in opposing modernity, he has denied a key insight of Marxism: socialism must develop, not reject, capitalism’s dynamism.
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.
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.
Philosopher Henry David Thoreau has developed a reputation as an advocate for self-help in the form of withdrawal from work. But in his writing, he advanced a thoroughgoing critique of work under capitalism and defended the emancipatory potential of labor.
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.
Austerity policies originated with efforts by economic elites to crush working-class power and redistribute income upward after World War I. That history demonstrates the need for democratic control over economic policy to defend workers’ interests.
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.
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.
In response to radical demands to defund and disband the police, liberal reformers are pushing the “Camden model.” Don’t fall for it. Camden relies on mass surveillance to pacify its population — all to benefit business interests.
Slavery in America, Brazil, and Cuba relied on capitalist markets, which supplied credit and demand for slave-made goods. The Reckoning, Robin Blackburn’s monumental history, offers a dizzying account of the politics behind this system’s rise and fall.
In South Africa, the political class is scapegoating immigrants to distract from their failure to root out the country’s massive inequality. But just like everywhere else, immigrants aren’t the problem — economic elites and their political handmaidens are.