The Problem With Saul Alinsky
If the Left is going to rebuild power in the age of Trump, we shouldn’t look to Saul Alinsky for a roadmap.
If the Left is going to rebuild power in the age of Trump, we shouldn’t look to Saul Alinsky for a roadmap.

Today, Jeremy Corbyn is launching a global Project for Peace and Justice to take forward the causes he championed as Labour leader. He told Jacobin about his hopes for the initiative — and why he refuses to be cowed by the attacks he has endured.

In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was heralded as the millennial successor to Bernie Sanders. Today, some on the Left are starting to have doubts.

The entire labor movement should wake up and pay attention to the lessons from Starbucks workers’ victory this week.

In 1974, after years of grinding war in Vietnam had exhausted most of the antiwar movement, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda came up with a new strategy: an educational and lobbying push targeting Congress to stop funding the war machine.

The Department of Justice keeps changing its story about documents related to the politically connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, offering contradictory reasons for refusing to release the files.

Tension is mounting as Israeli state repression and settler violence are being matched by an upsurge in Palestinian resistance. Palestinian liberation movement leader Khalida Jarrar says the situation is reaching a breaking point.

As great powers abandon even the pretense of law, the undeclared war on Venezuela exposes a world ruled by extortion, collapse, and the redefinition of sovereignty.

The Tim Dillon Show is disorienting and disturbing. It also has a massive audience, to whom it reflects back the disorientation and disturbance of contemporary society in pseudo-personalized form.

The Democratic Party, and the US political system as a whole, is a very strange beast.

Conservative intellectuals have recently levied a “postliberal” critique of the status quo, claiming to defend ordinary people against elites. But the solutions offered are little more than reactionary nonsense dressed up in populist rhetoric.

For years, David Keeling oversaw health and safety operations at companies where workers fell ill and died in extreme heat. If confirmed as the head of OSHA, he could help their campaign to block federal heat protection rules.

Multilevel marketing companies promise that everyone can become a boss and get rich if they hustle hard enough. But they’re actually fraudulent pyramid schemes that, like capitalism writ large, require mass exploitation to enrich the few at the top.

Set to win 18 seats in parliament, the Workers’ Party of Belgium is the fastest-growing force on the European left. Newly elected leader Raoul Hedebouw tells Jacobin how his comrades built an explicitly Marxist party with mass appeal.

Offering a welcome rejoinder to many neoliberal orthodoxies, French economist Thomas Piketty has established himself as a sharp critic of growing inequality. But when he presents these ills just as a result of wrong choices, he ends up erasing the realities of class struggle — leaving him unable to explain how neoliberalism imposes its power.

Angela Merkel has resigned as CDU leader. Her failed promises of "prosperity for all" are leading to the disintegration of the traditional mass parties.
As pressure for economic liberalization grows, what would it take to turn Cuba into a socialist democracy?

Workers at Swedish–Providence Health in the state of Washington went on strike this week after nearly a year worth of negotiations over understaffing went nowhere. Management retaliated by locking out the workers.
In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by the privileged, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers supported the war effort. That memory is wrong.

Joseph Schumpeter saw firsthand the transformative power of democracy in Red Vienna Austria and New Deal America. But as a conservative, he recoiled at workers' challenges to traditional hierarchies — reminding us that the Right has always loathed democracy.