
Why Elites Love Identity Politics
The Democratic Party at every level spent years embracing identity politics that mostly served the interests of professionals, argues Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber. We need a return to class.

The Democratic Party at every level spent years embracing identity politics that mostly served the interests of professionals, argues Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber. We need a return to class.

Establishment Democrats spent a full year complaining the Left forced them to be “woke.” But then a left populist, Graham Platner, threatened to win in Maine, so they went right back to trying to cancel someone over old internet posts.

The Biden administration has made some prolabor gestures and moves toward more state direction of investment. But the policies, emphasizing subsidies to business, will do little to reverse working-class disorganization or meaningfully address climate change.

Gentrification isn’t a cultural phenomenon — it’s a class offensive by powerful capitalists.

Remembering the life and legacy of the great historian Judith Stein.

There are many subtleties to capitalist domination over the state. When the mega-rich literally assume office, those subtleties go out the window.

The “professional managerial class” is a staple of recent cultural commentary, but there's no empirical evidence for its existence. The PMC catch-all clouds our understanding of the middle classes and the capital-labor divide.

With Bernie Sanders now out of the race, commentators from left and right are finding fault with the campaign itself, arguing that there was too much class politics or not enough. But the problem wasn’t Bernie’s campaign strategy — it was the full force of the Democratic establishment that so effectively consolidated against him.

Elite feminism at times substitutes a culture of contempt for a culture of care. If we are truly devoted to gender equality, we must ditch the assumption that all men enjoy similar privilege.

Working-class American men are getting lonelier and sicker, and their lives are getting shorter. It’s not just a sad state of affairs; it’s a full-blown crisis that demands policy solutions.
We should engage with and update the revolutionary Marxist tradition — not reject it.

In the 1970s and early ’80s, NYC’s racially and ethnically diverse working-class neighborhoods nurtured groundbreaking rap, salsa, and punk music. Real estate speculation did away with the social conditions that made those scenes possible.

The New York gubernatorial race has much to tell us about the future of working-class politics in the US.

The analysis of capitalism that Karl Marx presented in the three volumes of Capital remains vital to understanding our social world. A renowned Marxian economist talked to Jacobin to break down the key points of Marx’s economic theory.

Vivek Chibber describes how four decades of neoliberalism have distorted the radical left, but also how the Left is finally starting to rebuild a truly socialist politics — and what it will take to advance further.

100 years ago today Scottish socialist John Maclean, accused of sedition for his revolutionary organising, delivered an iconic defence of socialism from the dock.

Barbara Ehrenreich on why we need socialist feminism to fight patriarchy.

Gabriel Boric’s presidential victory and a new constitution are the crowning achievements of Chile’s broad socialist movement. Now comes the hard part: fulfilling a vision of working-class prosperity that stretches back to Salvador Allende and beyond.

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.

Both Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have made cynical but shrewdly strategic appeals to building trades unions and their members. The Left needs a plan to win those workers back.