Republican senator Mike Lee ignited a controversy last week when he insisted that it’s a good thing the US isn’t a democracy. His comments were appalling — but they remind us that what democracy we do have in the US is thanks to the countless bottom-up struggles against elites like him since the country’s founding.
Guatemalan indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchú helped set the tone and forge the climate that convicted the rabidly anti-communist general Efraín Rios Montt and condemned many others guilty of genocide during the country’s brutal civil war.
France’s neoliberal golden boy is now flirting with religious identity politics.
After decades of polluting the political landscape with authoritarianism and race-baiting, is Rudy Giuliani's career finally over?
Rather than accept that its foreign policy objectives in Syria have failed, the United States is continuing to dig its heels in. And as the recent earthquake shows, the Syrian people — not Bashar al-Assad’s government — are the ones paying the price.
Max Stirner is mainly remembered as the “nihilist” thinker derided by Karl Marx. But, a newly translated article by German socialist Hermann Duncker argues, Stirner’s philosophy of self-liberation has important lessons for the working-class movement.
In the early 1900s, the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order fought for multiracial democracy and Yiddish culture, building solidarity across ethnic and racial lines — until it was destroyed by the Red Scare.
Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has called for a union of Latin American countries. Drawing on the revolutionary vision of Simón Bolívar, it aims for regional integration as a bulwark against foreign interference. Could it work?
Analytic philosophy, the hegemonic branch of the discipline in the US, often thinks of itself as above history and politics. But its rise, and its enduring influence, are owed to McCarthyism, which purged radicals from postwar philosophy.
During Jair Bolsonaro’s term as president, he faced a liberal establishment that acted as a bulwark against his worst excesses. If his son Flávio beats Lula in the presidential election, he will encounter much less resistance from state institutions.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. It’s also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism.
With Leon Wofsy’s death last month, we lost a scientist and organizer who spent his near-century on earth fighting against racism and war and for free speech — and embarrassing Ronald Reagan to his face at the height of his attacks on student activism in California.
Michael Bloomberg is spending orders of magnitude more on his presidential campaign than any other candidate in US history. The Left must push for campaign finance reforms that can stop billionaires like him from buying their way onto the political stage.
We can't equate the horrendous treatment of animals with the oppression of people.
Democracy in Africa won't come from political elites. It will come from below, in the streets and through popular movements.
Laws across the United States are targeting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israeli apartheid. The Supreme Court is refusing to hear a challenge to those laws, even though they’re in clear violation of Americans’ First Amendment rights.
From its beginnings, deportation has been a tool used to threaten, suppress, and break dissent. ICE’s targeting of political enemies like Mahmoud Khalil is no exception.
Journalist Gideon Levy is one of the most articulate critics of Israeli war and apartheid. He spoke to Jacobin about the grim pro-war mood in Israel and the need for international pressure to end its apartheid system.
Enver Hoxha’s Albania is mostly famous for its bureaucratic paranoia, symbolized by its hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers. His wife Nexhmije was one of the ruling party’s leading figures — and to her dying day defended the brutal measures taken in the name of socialism.
Israel’s far-right government has made its oppression of the Palestinians more blatant than ever. German politicians still won’t budge in their uncritical support for Israel, but public opinion in Germany is shifting in the opposite direction.