When our housing system’s primary function is to enrich capitalists rather than provide for humans’ basic needs, it’s no surprise that developers would rather deploy a small army complete with guns, a battering ram, and a tank to remove homeless families from an empty home, as they did earlier this week in Oakland, California.
We’re thankfully beginning to see mass organizing and protest against the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. But we can’t let billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and solutions that further criminalize the poor and increase police power dominate the debate — we need a socialist approach to ending gun violence.
Taiwanese voters are going to the polls tomorrow for presidential elections as protests continue to rage in Hong Kong. But in order to understand Taiwan, we have to understand the power of China — and the looming shadow of US imperialism.
On the eve of the financial crisis, Nicolas Sarkozy boasted that “when there is a strike, nobody even notices anymore.” But as France mounts its longest strike in decades, organized labor is once again showing its power — and its limits.
Mainstream pundits have recently realized what the rest of us have known all along: Bernie Sanders could actually win this thing. Don’t be surprised that every institution invested in the status quo will soon do everything possible to prevent both a Bernie Sanders nomination and a general election victory.
The recent scandal alleging that Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren a woman couldn’t beat Trump captured attention for days. The manufactured narrative shows how the media repeats cynical, bad-faith attacks until they get seen as fact.
A government bid to cut back pensions has pitched France into its longest strike in decades. But as one railworker organizer tells Jacobin, the dispute is about more than retirement insurance — it’s about stopping Emmanuel Macron’s whole agenda.
The new government coalition between the PSOE and Podemos is a historic opportunity for the Spanish left. After years of rising nationalist tensions, Podemos can turn the agenda back to the fight against austerity.
Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on Bernie Sanders show that he’s starting to realize something that still escapes most pundits: Sanders would be his toughest opponent to beat in November.
The catastrophic descent of interwar Europe into fascist rule may not be repeatable in today’s world. But a different form of reactionary politics could still take shape and prove to be just as harmful.
We're still waiting for the full results of the Iowa caucus. In Bolivia, the United States backed a violent coup against Evo Morales for even less.
Polls for Saturday’s Irish general election show growing support for the Greens. But the party’s record shows that it has little interest in transformative climate action — and no will at all to challenge corporate elites.
Before the resurgence of socialist activism in the United States, Jacobin Reading Groups provided a halfway house between passive, primarily intellectual engagement with the socialist project and full-fledged organizational commitment for thousands of people. They played a real role in resurrecting the US left.
In both his campaigns, Trump has run ads aimed at killing black voters’ enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee and lowering their turnout. The strategy is craven, but the ads exploit real disillusionment. Without a sharp break from their history of failing black constituents, Democrats will remain vulnerable to such opportunistic gambits in the future.
The welfare state has always been a site of struggle, with liberals and conservatives offering technocratic or paternalistic visions — and leftists insisting on more democratic, more emancipatory horizons.
Everyone knows that rich people skew our political priorities through big-money donations to candidates. Bernie Sanders’s “democracy vouchers” program would give American voters funds to donate to the candidates of their choice — taking a step towards breaking the stranglehold of the wealthy on political giving.
Jacobin is politically committed. We’re not ashamed of that, and that’s why we need the support of our politically committed readership.
The resounding victory for Bernie Sanders at both the caucuses on the Las Vegas strip and the entire state of Nevada should put the “Bernie Bro” myth to bed once and for all. At the Strip caucuses, the vast majority of voters were people of color, many of whom were immigrants — and they voted decisively for Sanders.
These days, Joe Biden likes to tout his civil rights credentials. But he was central to the racist drive to lock people up and throw the key.
The AMLO government has enacted modest reforms to help struggling renters. But more radical solutions are needed to solve Mexico’s housing crisis. A report from Oaxaca.