There was an energized left bloc at the 2021 convention of Canada’s New Democratic Party. Svend Robinson, a veteran leader of the NDP’s left wing, spoke to Jacobin about the role NDP members can play in challenging the party’s centrist timidity and popularizing socialist ideas.
Ronald Suny’s Stalin: Passage to Revolution traces Joseph Stalin’s trajectory from his boyhood in Georgia to the Russian Revolution in 1917. In an interview, Suny explains the specificities of the Georgian socialist movement, Stalin’s role in the revolution, and why Stalinism was “bloody, ruthless,” and “the nadir of the Soviet experiment.”
The Soviet experience of Nazi invasion inspired many powerful works of cinema. In contrast with Hollywood’s approach to World War II, Soviet filmmakers avoided triumphalist images of warfare, depicting the conflict as a brutal necessity that should never be repeated.
Last month, a Czech police officer kneeled on the neck of Romani man Stanislav Tomáš until he stopped breathing. Fifty years since the first World Romani Congress, Europe’s Romani people urgently need a new movement against discrimination and deprivation.
As his fellow West German radicals began to embrace violence in the 1970s, legendary filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder decided to celebrate another path for emancipation: class struggle in the workplace.
PayPal has announced a partnership with the Anti-Defamation League to defund extremist and hate movements. The problem is that, for the ADL, that often means groups fighting against Israeli apartheid.
As Austria turned toward Nazism, the Jewish socialist actress Stella Kadmon brought anti-fascist resistance to the stage.
Hammam Chott is famed in UK media as the Tunis cemetery where Jeremy Corbyn supposedly laid a wreath to terrorists. But “wreathgate” was a lie — and it erased the real crime that happened here on October 1, 1985, when Israeli jets murdered 60 people.
Far-right pundit Éric Zemmour says he is running for the French presidency in order to stand up to elites. Yet far from a grassroots endeavor, his campaign has been driven by some of France’s biggest corporate media.
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.
The history of the Palestinian novel cannot be separated from the broader political context of the struggle for liberation. As the emancipatory horizon in Palestine has diminished since the early 1980s, literature has shared in the sense of defeat.
The German government’s reluctance to join an anti-Russian bandwagon owes at least as much to commercial interests as to historical guilt. But calls for Berlin to play a stronger role in NATO should be emphatically resisted.
A revolutionary upsurge after 1918 could have democratized German politics. Instead, the brutal repression used to contain that upsurge strengthened the authoritarian right, divided the German workers’ movement, and facilitated the rise of Hitler.
After 1945, the Soviets soon replaced Germans as the State Department’s main enemy in Europe. Washington’s ever closer ties with Bonn drew on the logic of the Cold War — but also on the private networking organizations where business and political elites met.
This week, 27 foreign policy experts called for a no-fly zone in Ukraine that would lead to the shooting down of Russian planes — an idea that could lead to a nuclear holocaust. Their message is being bankrolled by arms manufacturers and fossil fuel interests.
In times of war, stocks in weapons companies have always been a safe investment. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown that wars are also a big opportunity for crypto bros — another group of disaster capitalists profiting off other people’s misfortune.
As Vladimir Putin prosecutes his brutal war in Ukraine, Western governments and tech companies have apparently decided the best way to fight Putin is to join him — engaging in censorship and propagandizing reminiscent of the autocrat’s own repressive actions.
Some liberals have signed on to a worrying number of anti–civil liberties measures in recent years. The Right wants to rebrand as the new champion of freedom. This is absurd: no one is pushing authoritarianism harder than conservatives.
Critics have taken the Left to task for its skeptical view of offensive military aid for Ukraine. They are quick to forget the fraught record of liberal interventionism around the world.
The world needs new security arrangements to keep the peace. American "leadership" — the global dominance sought by the US national security establishment — is no substitute for those arrangements.