
Why Anticapitalist Conservatism Fails
Critiques of capitalism from the Right aren't always completely wrong. But they can't help pulling back far short of liberation.

Critiques of capitalism from the Right aren't always completely wrong. But they can't help pulling back far short of liberation.

Chapo Trap House’s Matt Christman on pulling angry young men away from the alt right, consumption choices as politics, the grotesqueries of American life, and his commitment to “optimism of the will and all that shit.”

Contemporary liberals are temperamentally conservative — and what they want to conserve is a morally bankrupt political order.

Don’t cry in your champagne. Here’s the best of Jacobin from a remarkable year.

Means of Production, the film collective from Detroit that made Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s hit campaign ad, is about to launch a left streaming platform — Netflix for socialists.

Dave Rubin prides himself on challenging dogmas and slaying sacred cows. But his constant invocations of "reason and logic" can't hide the fact that he trots out the same tired, intellectually lazy anecdotes about triggered college students — and that he refuses to actually debate living, breathing leftists.

We don't like plenty of what Joe Rogan has to say — but Bernie Sanders won his support without compromising any of his values. He has nothing to apologize for.

He introduced Bernie to Joe Rogan. His show Secular Talk dominates YouTube. He even helped get AOC elected. So why doesn’t the media know who Kyle Kulinski is?

Michael Brooks, who would have turned 37 years old today, wanted the Left to do better. In the last year of his life, he’d started to write a book about what that might look like.

Conservative pundits are more likely to caricature Karl Marx’s writings and beliefs than offer serious rebuttals to his many ideas. Why? Because Marx’s trenchant insights expose deep inconsistencies in cherished right-wing doctrines.

Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Red Pill, follows the mental unraveling of a liberal Brooklyn-dwelling “creative” as he finds himself being drawn into the world of the alt-right. In an interview with Jacobin, Kunzru reflects on the nature of the alt-right’s appeal and the dilemmas it poses for the Left.

At the very heart of our capitalist economic system is something grotesque: labor exploitation. That’s immoral — and we need some form of workplace democracy to undo it.

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.

David Austin Walsh, a historian of American conservatism, talks to Jacobin about J. D. Vance, Project 2025, and the New Right’s political theory.

It’s easy to laugh at people eating “horse paste.” But the widespread willingness to take off-label treatments and drugs formulated for animals stems from problems in our privatized health care system, from domestic pharma prices to global vaccine inequality.

Conservative thinkers like Roger Scruton defend traditional hierarchies as natural and inescapable. But our social order is the product of human decisions — and it can be remade to benefit the many rather than the few.

British politicians increasingly seek to silence criticism of wars abroad by emphasizing the need to “respect our boys.” But, veteran Joe Glenton tells Jacobin, many recruits who’ve seen the British army from the inside aren’t happy about being used to launder its image.

A recent gathering of right-wing politicians and intellectuals underscores conservatism’s increasing illiberalism — and suggests the GOP might move even further toward authoritarianism and phony economic populism.

Workers in Canada’s trucking industry have suffered during the pandemic. The “Freedom Convoy,” a right-wing, pro-business social movement, purports itself to be the people’s champion of liberty — yet it couldn't care less about the hardships and burdens of its fellow workers.

Centrist pundit Andrew Sullivan thinks Karl Marx was “one of the most repellent anti-Semites and racists of the 19th century.” That’s nonsense — Marx’s political project was all about expanding human freedom and fighting oppression in every form.