Adrian Rivera-Reyes is a cancer biologist and democratic socialist running for Philadelphia’s city council today. In an interview, he talks about growing up in Puerto Rico under US colonialism, organizing a union with his coworkers at UPenn, and bringing activist pressure to city hall.
It’s eighty years today since the notorious Vichy regime took power in France under Nazi domination. Vichy-style fascism wasn’t simply a German plant on French soil — it drew on powerful reactionary currents in French politics and society.
The Booker Prize shortlisting of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is the latest sign of rising interest in Fascist Italy’s colonial war in Ethiopia. The genocidal violence perpetrated against Ethiopians in 1935–6 was soon turned back onto European soil — and united Italian anti-fascists with the Africans resisting colonial aggression.
A century ago this month, the new Soviet government summoned anti-colonial revolutionaries from across Asia to a gathering in Baku. The Baku Congress proved to be a watershed in the fight against European colonial domination and the rise of the Global South.
Owen Jones’s This Land promises to tell the story of the movement behind Jeremy Corbyn and his ultimate failure. While it offers important comments on the obstacles Labour faced, its strategic proposals are less convincing — watering down some of the principles that allowed for Corbyn's initial victory.
We can’t talk about the rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump, reactionary and bizarre conspiracy theories like QAnon, and the increasingly pervasive sense of nihilism across global politics without talking about neoliberalism.
Since 1963, the Indonesian state has occupied West Papua against the will of its people with the full backing of Australia and the US. Despite decades of brutal repression, Papuans are still rising up to demand their national liberation, at home, in Indonesia and internationally.
Far-right intellectuals like Steve Bannon claim to speak for a working class put upon by out-of-touch liberal elites. But their anti-modernist, hierarchical vision of the world doesn’t offer workers what they really need: more money in their pockets, and more power at the workplace.
Paul Robeson’s artistic achievements have stood the test of time. So has his commitment to socialist internationalism and the struggle against racism and colonialism wherever it emerges.
Henry Reynolds has demolished the apologetic arguments of conservative intellectuals, showing that the British colonization of Australia was a crime even by the standards of its time. Reynolds makes a powerful argument for recognizing Aboriginal sovereignty.
Maida Springer isn’t a household name even among trade unionists and labor historians. But she was a lifelong union member and organizer who was committed to using unions to improve black people’s lives in the United States and Africa.
Too often, the militant, radical history of Mexican American workers is omitted or forgotten. But from resisting racist exclusion to building CIO unions in the 1930s, Mexican American workers have been central to left-wing politics in the United States.
The intellectual godfathers of neoliberalism knew they needed to attach a philosophy of high-minded ideals to the vicious free-market system they wanted to spread around the globe. They found such a philosophy by perverting the idea of human rights.
Writer Kim Stanley Robinson talks to Jacobin about Ministry of the Future and his other books, climate change, and why he thinks the Left should reclaim science as a tool of socialist progress.
Last week, Blaise Compaoré was jailed for his role in the murder of Burkina Faso's revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara — but real justice can only be won by a movement that fights to bring Sankara’s socialist vision back to life.
Today marks 150 years since the first French edition of Capital. This wasn’t just a translation but a “completely revised” work — showing how Karl Marx’s research continually renewed his critical perspective on capitalist development.
Throughout the early to mid-20th century, black communist women led mass campaigns to build collective power, joining the fight for black liberation with the struggle for economic equality. Their goal: the overthrow of capitalism.
Socialist leader Marceau Pivert played a central role in the turbulent history of French politics during the 1930s. Pivert’s inside-outside strategy toward the established workers’ movement is an important case study in how to win mass support for socialism.
Anti-Muslim racism has become a central theme for right-wing demagogues in Europe and the US. Islamophobia isn’t just a bad set of ideas: it’s a product of imperialism and the destructive wars waged by the US and its allies in the Middle East.
Karl Marx famously wrote that “the workers have no country” — but he immediately added that they had to become “the leading class in the nation.” For over a century, the Left has struggled to reconcile the two ideas.