This electoral cycle, the Right has been talking nonstop about “the border,” painting an apocalyptic picture of an immigrant invasion threatening to plunge America into chaos. In the process, they’re revealing themselves as scapegoating pseudo-populists.
Ronald Reagan successfully dismantled the New Deal order and pulled liberals rightward. Reagan transformed the Democratic Party — and he was aided by Democrats like Joe Biden.
In the early 1980s, Jon Melrod worked in a Wisconsin auto plant and published a shop-floor newspaper, Fighting Times. When the company sued him and his coworkers for denouncing a “scab of the month” in the paper, the rank and filers fought back — and won.
Thomas Frank’s brilliant new book The People, No focuses on the long elite tradition of anti-populism. But it is really an urgent plea to liberals and radicals alike to embrace a left populism and universalism — or keep on losing.
By the time Chile’s workers rose up to rally around Salvador Allende, Latin America had become a key arena in US planners’ “mortal struggle to determine the shape of the future world.” Henry Kissinger was obsessed with toppling the socialist president.
Cristóbal Andrade is a car mechanic and socialist elected to Chile’s Constitutional Convention. Jacobin asked him why he attends sessions dressed as a dinosaur.
Repeatedly imprisoned for the cause, Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the leading figures in the struggle for women’s suffrage in Britain. What many don’t know is that Pankhurst also played an important role in the early history of British communism.
From our first interview immediately after he won his state assembly election in 2020 through profiles, op-eds, interviews, and speeches, Jacobin has closely covered Zohran Mamdani’s political career rooted in the socialist movement since its start.
Nobody wants to join a boring movement. Socialists can’t change the world if we aren’t providing people with a good time.
Donald Trump’s authoritarianism has been enabled by long-standing antidemocratic features of the US state — the same features that have time and again blocked pro-worker policies. The Left needs a serious program aimed at democratizing our political system.
Forty years after his murder in New York City, we remember John Lennon’s record of political engagement as a champion of the anti-war movement and a self-styled “instinctive socialist” — which brought him into conflict with Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover.
Today brought mass strikes against Emmanuel Macron’s “retirement reform” in France. Increasing both the pension age and the number of years workers have to work, the planned measure will see more French people die before they get any retirement at all.
Pro-Putin pollsters maintain that most Russians support the “special military operation” against Ukraine. But artificial efforts to stir public enthusiasm can’t hide the disastrous effects the war is having on ordinary Russians.
Or, why is there still socialism in the United States?
Clara Zetkin was one of the leading figures in German Marxism during the early 20th century, yet her political legacy is largely forgotten today. Zetkin deserves to be remembered, especially for her advocacy of the revolutionary emancipation of women.
In his new book, Ben Davis’s arguments too often take the form of smug, self-righteous dismissals that convey only disapproval.
Cornel West talks to Jacobin about what the Bernie Sanders campaign represented, what its failure means, and why Democrats think they can win over black and brown voters with just “symbolic decorative changes.”
By fighting him tooth and nail for seven years, Chicagoans have established that Rahm Emanuel is garbage. No matter what he does next, that stench isn't coming off.
Electoral work is important. But the point isn't just to win office — it's to build movements and challenge capitalism.