George Miller’s Mad Max film series has become synonymous with the postapocalyptic genre. At their core, however, Miller’s films aren’t so much a prediction of the future as an indictment of our capitalist present and the ruthless individualism that maintains it.
In her new novel Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a bleak portrait of a social media–addled world saturated with loneliness and alienation. It’s incredibly accurate. But there must be a way out of the nightmarish social landscape she depicts.
This week, Emmanuel Macron's higher education minister alarmed researchers and students by calling a formal investigation into the alleged “Islamo-leftist” atmosphere in France’s universities. The announced witch hunt is a worrying assault on critical inquiry — and shows the neoliberal government’s willingness to amplify baseless far-right talking points.
As Polish state socialism entered its death spiral, journalist Teresa Torańska interviewed the figures who had first created the regime after 1945. The resulting book gave retired Stalinist statesmen a platform to defend their actions — but also showed why their antidemocratic model of socialism could never have achieved popular support.
There are moments when even the most committed of democrats find themselves despairing of political democracy. But the system has proven again and again to be the last best hope of ordinary people in defending their pursuit of happiness against tyrants of all stripes — both public and private.
On International Women's Day, the good news is that the new COVID-19 relief bill will include a kind-of, sort-of universal child benefit — a policy that feminists have long called for. But the overly complicated, burdensome way the policy is implemented means that on this issue, the Left still has its work cut out for it.
In Wollongong in the 1980s, four young socialist activists founded the Jobs for Women campaign to take on the mighty Port Kembla steelworks, demanding equal employment rights. The solidarity they built achieved a historic victory that reverberated across Australia.
After years of stagnant poll numbers and declining electoral results, Germany's Die Linke party hopes that its new leadership team will return it to the promise of the 2000s. But as its social base in the former East fragments, the left-wing party doesn't just need a different marketing strategy — it needs to rebuild its roots in working-class life.
Tunisia under French colonial rule was deeply undemocratic, with a social order built on formalized racial categories and the near exclusion of women from public life. But women Communists refused to accept a merely subordinate role — and built the only organizations that united Tunisians across the official racial divides.
When sociologist Michael Young coined the term "meritocracy," he was warning against the idea that we should have to compete to prove how talented or hardworking we are. A truly egalitarian society would guarantee a dignified existence for us all — regardless of arbitrary measures of how much we deserve it.
Scott Morrison has responded to scandals over misogyny and sexual assault with token gestures and hollow words that won’t get near the root of the problem. In order to challenge sexism, we have to empower working-class women through economic justice and redistributive policies.
This day in 1945, Nazi Germany finally surrendered. Faced with revisionist attempts to claim the war was a struggle between “twin totalitarianisms,” we should remember the working-class partisans who resisted the fascist violence — and the better world they fought to build.
Last week, the people of Chile voted for sweeping structural reform and an end to neoliberalism. It's one of the Left's biggest victories since the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.
You wouldn't know it from the whitewashed image of her as an angelic, unthreatening icon, but Helen Keller — yes, that Helen Keller — was a socialist.
Denmark’s parliament has condemned campus radicals’ political agenda for “undermining scholarly inquiry.” But the mainstream use of disciplines like economics shows that scholarship has always been political — the powerful just don’t like research that challenges their interests.
The anti-abortion movement has grown increasingly militant in recent years — and increasingly successful. The liberal pushback isn’t cutting it. We need a leftist strategy to defend abortion rights.
The 1931 Workers’ Olympiad in Vienna was an inspiring example of mass-scale sports, free of corporate influence. These photos from the games show how the workers’ movement promoted collective joy and class pride, even outside the factory gates.
Next year’s French election looks like it’ll be dominated by right-wing discourses around identity and immigration. Former Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon tells Jacobin how the Left can put inequality back on the agenda and win.
Far-right parties like Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National claim to protect working people. But for all their populist rhetoric, their economic proposals would slash public services and demolish workers’ rights.
Soviet chess grandmaster Nona Gaprindashvili has announced that she is suing Netflix for belittling her achievements in The Queen’s Gambit. Her career shows we don’t need fictional rags-to-riches stories but welfare states that allow us to realize our true potential.