The public history of Manhattan’s Chinatown often exoticizes the neighborhood and its residents. But in its streets and its sweatshops, Chinatown has long been the site of mass struggles by Chinese immigrants.
South Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Arabian Peninsula, gave birth to its most radical government in the 1960s and ’70s. The achievements and failings of Yemeni socialism are a vital case study as Yemen seeks to recover from a catastrophic war.
Bashar al-Assad has left the building. It took fourteen years of bloody conflict.
The EU has been trailing the US economically for decades, and the COVID-19 pandemic only made its situation worse. Does Mario Draghi hold the secret to restoring Europe’s productivity?
Given its powerful oil oligarchs, it’s easy to assume Russia is the quintessential climate denier. Yet the rise of corporate ESG policies in the country suggests Russian capital wants to greenwash just as much as its Western peers.
When he became the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to democratize the USSR without embracing free-market capitalism and end the Cold War without enabling US domination. The world is still haunted by his inability to achieve those goals.
Taiwan leads the world in the production of semiconductor material, the basis of the microchips found in everything from cell phones to medical equipment. Washington and Beijing aren’t happy about it.
Despite the plummeting costs of solar and wind power, renewables have not been profitable enough to attract adequate private investment. To decarbonize, public investment in clean power and reclaiming electricity as a public utility are essential.
South Sudan’s post-independence instability is often blamed on ethnic tensions. But exploitation by international companies and zero-sum competition over resources between local elites are the real causes of ongoing violence in the country.
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.
Taiwan’s indigenous people have long been subject to mistreatment by companies seeking to extract resources from their land and integrate Taiwan into the world capitalist system. Now their resistance takes a new form: an organized political assembly.
The invasion of Ukraine is not simply a product of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist mindset. It corresponds to a project for Russian capitalism that he and his allies have pursued since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Justin Trudeau's Canadian government has eagerly embraced NATO’s new "strategic concept": expansion. The strategy is a return to the Cold War — and a recipe for more frequent military conflict.
There’s a disconnect between Western leaders’ increasingly hawkish public discourse and the quiet consensus among their military experts that any armed encounter with Russia would likely end in a nuclear catastrophe.
From Rockefeller to Nixon, then on to Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, Kissinger’s service tracked the metaphysical evolution of American power. We all live now in the Kissingerian void. What horrors await?
The late socialist writer Mike Davis’s first book was Prisoners of the American Dream, a deep exploration of how the US labor movement became so weakened. Nearly four decades later, Davis revisited the book in an interview with Jacobin.
There is no “end of the working class.”
Donald Trump’s lackluster speech announcing his 2024 presidential campaign epitomized the state of Trumpism since last Tuesday’s “red tide” failed to materialize: exhausted, petty, and obsessed with the past. Don’t count him out yet, though.
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis showed how late 19th-century state violence and neglect created colonial markets and infrastructures, which, combined with shifting weather patterns, led to astonishingly brutal famines across the Global South.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s dizzying history of energy consumption argues that no energy transition has ever occurred: each generation consumes more of past fuels. Not only are his claims ahistorical but they justify an unwarranted pessimism about the future.