Jacobin
Articles about Jacobin
AutoZone Workers Won a Union. Then the Company Fired Them
Speaking with members of the newly formed AutoZone Workers Union, you would never guess that one of them had just been fired — and that another would be the next morning. That’s what happened to Nathan DuCongé and then David Valencia after they won their union election. On a Zoom call with Jacobin, though, their joy was contagious. DuCongé and his coworkers were all smiles and banter as they talked about their union campaign, how it feels to win, and the unexpected boost they received from filmmaker Boots Riley.
Robert Kramer Is the New Left’s Great, Forgotten Filmmaker
When Robert Kramer’s 1968 film The Edge reached Los Angeles, its ad in the Free Press posed a provocative question: “Should we kill the President?” And while Lyndon Johnson survived that film’s alienated would-be assassin, Kramer’s next film left little question as to where he stood. Ice, shot in early 1969 and released in late 1970, imagined an armed leftist insurrection in New York City, taking the jolting documentary-like style of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) and bringing its war home to the Big Apple.
Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers
It seems every week a new piece about the decline and fall of the American reading habit goes viral. The idea that we’re entering a literary apocalypse that threatens to destabilize our democracy is perhaps overstated, but nobody is denying the book-reading trend is grim. In the most recent international assessment of adult skills, conducted in 2023, 28 percent of American adults scored at or below the lowest level of literacy — up from 19 percent just six years earlier.
The Philips Curve Is a Tool for Waging Class War on Workers
For nearly three-quarters of a century, central banks and policymakers have relied on the Phillips curve: the idea that inflation can be kept in check by disciplining worker power and putting restraints on employment levels. In 2026, does that theory, and the depoliticization of monetary policy that accompanies it, still make sense? Perhaps the real question isn’t whether every inflation spike has the same cause and cure, but whether central banks should use higher unemployment as their default tool to stabilize prices at all.
The Strange Resurrection of Lonesome Dove
On TikTok, there are dozens and dozens of videos of men and women, many of them young, staring into the camera to talk earnestly about an eight-hundred-page novel that was published forty-one years ago. “I didn’t see the western phase of my life coming, but I’m glad we’re here,” one woman says. “I want to talk about Lonesome Dove. . . . ” And this is what they do. They rhapsodize over characters who “feel like they are a part of your life.” They celebrate the “absolute journey” and the “incredible” prose.
How Much Liberty Should We Limit?
In the political culture of the United States, individual liberty is frequently thought of as possessing intrinsic and overriding importance. The political right and the political left in the United States have long competed to be seen as the true champions of individual freedom, and each has tried to advance its own goals under the banner of liberty.
La France Insoumise Won’t Cede God to the Far Right
In the video, a lanky, crisply-dressed Muslim man of Malian descent walks through a cathedral to the heady sounds of organ music. Several seconds later, he is pictured shaking hands with the most important figure in the Catholic Church: Pope Leo XIV. Off camera, the two exchange gifts and a few words.
The War in Ukraine Is Spiraling Out of Control
War is in the air in Europe. Over the four years and counting that it’s raged, the Ukraine war has often been compared to the two world wars, being the largest land war the continent’s seen since the second of those and having surpassed the length of the first this past June. But unlike those disastrous conflicts, the fighting in Ukraine has not become a true continent-wide affair that’s dragged the rest of Europe’s powers into the fray — so far.
Greek Life Endures by Offering a Simulacrum of Solidarity
Four thousand two hundred and twenty-nine dollars. That was the cost of joining the University of Alabama’s Delta Delta Delta Panhellenic sorority, affectionately known as “Tridelt” to its members, for the 2025 fall semester. The spring semester will run you another $4,005, and if you’d like to live in the 44,294-square-foot sorority house that sleeps seventy-eight, add another $2,886 in the fall and $2,490 in the spring.
The Gospel According to J. D. Vance
J. D. Vance is the vice president of the United States of America, and in that position, he is president of the United States Senate. He is the highest-ranking Roman Catholic member of the executive branch. He has a law degree from one of the best law schools in the country. He’s a Marine Corps veteran, a former venture capitalist, and a former senator from Ohio. And he’s the author of a much-discussed memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was made into a movie. J. D. Vance is, by any sane measure, one of the elites in this country.
Germany’s Far Right Is Attacking Bauhaus Again
A hundred years since the opening of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany, there may be no centenary. This December 4, the winner of the election in the surrounding state of Saxony-Anhalt, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), does not intend to throw a big party for the Bauhaus Foundation, but to shut it down.
Online Pornography Created the Model for Platform Capitalism
Online pornography is often seen as a corner of the web that doesn’t bear much analysis. And yet it can hardly be ignored. Firstly, that’s because of the sheer size of the adult-content industry — a sector that in itself is worth around $97 billion annually worldwide and that, at peak times, commands 10 percent of all internet traffic. But more than that, a discussion of its inner workings sheds light on the mechanisms that govern the special kind of attention economy and platform capitalism that we are all wrapped up in.
Shawn Fain’s Slate Has Swept the UAW Elections
Shawn Fain and the United UAW slate are headed toward a sweeping victory in the union’s internal elections for its International Executive Board. The results will not be finalized for some time, but the unofficial results are unequivocal: United Auto Workers members are overwhelmingly backing Fain and the militant direction he is taking the union.
Eric Hobsbawm, Historian of Defeat
Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm published his best-selling history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes. The book presented a man coming to terms with the fate of the political project to which he had committed his adult life while trying to understand the twentieth century as a historical epoch.
Abdul El-Sayed Isn’t Backing Down on Medicare for All
The discourse around Abdul El-Sayed’s position on Medicare for All is mostly confused. Reading most of the reporting on the matter would lead one to believe that El-Sayed initially supported Medicare for All but now merely supports a “public option.” This is not really true under conventional meanings of the phrase “public option.” El-Sayed seems to be inviting this understanding for rhetorical effect, but all he has really done is drop his opposition to a type of duplicative insurance that nobody would ever want to buy.
Anwar Shaikh’s Analysis of Capitalism Is Vital for the Left
Most economists assume that when workers with similar skills earn very different pay, something must be blocking normal competition. But for Howard Botwinick, capitalist competition itself creates those gaps. His book Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity under Capitalist Competition, first published in 1993 and reissued in 2017, shows how the everyday workings of capitalism split the working class into better- and worse-paid groups — no monopoly power required.
Pedro Sánchez Makes His Last Gamble
Less than two weeks after a wave of housing protests broke out across Spain, on Monday center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called an early general election. Upending the country’s political agenda in just days, the protests created an opportunity for an embattled Sánchez to go to the polls on more favorable terms. He is now framing the election as a choice between his defense of the social majority and right-wing parties aligned with speculators and vulture funds.
Trump’s Politicized Deportations Are Becoming the Global Norm
Given all the headlines about the US government trying to deport one or another migrant over their foreign policy views, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a uniquely Trumpian innovation. Sadly, as the recent developments out of Latvia show, it’s far from it.
Where Are the Democratic Socialists of America Going?
The history of the American left is marked by imposing peaks and valleys. Over the last century and a half, organizations have sprung up and, often within a decade of their founding, become major institutions of US politics. They have typically declined nearly as quickly, with few sustaining their positions in American society longer than a decade or so.
Under Trump Pressure, Bolivia Arrests Its Own Attorney General
Early last week, the Trump administration’s State Department announced visa restrictions on a group of Latin American officials it accused of corruption and of “undermining democratically-selected governments.” Of the twenty-one people it targeted in Bolivia, Washington chose to name only one: Bolivia’s sitting attorney general, Roger Mariaca.
Marx Believed Meaningful Work Was Central to the Good Life
Not too long ago, a wave of books written by left-wing and liberal commentators appeared celebrating a future in which work would be a thing of the past. The increased productivity of technology would free humans from drudgery and allow them to focus on cultural pursuits and spend more time making friends or finding love, these polemics alleged.
In France, High Schoolers are Beaten, Choked, and Gassed
For over a week, high school students and teachers in France have been protesting the state’s abandonment of the education system. The government response: send in police to subdue them.
Anwar Shaikh (1945–2026)
With the passing of Anwar Shaikh, the left intellectual community has lost one of its most dynamic and brilliant members. Anwar was not just a leading light among heterodox economists; he was the most brilliant Marxist economist of his generation and arguably the most important since Karl Marx himself. He did more than perhaps any other contemporary economist to revive the classical tradition in political economy, associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Marx.
Tech Workers’ Leverage Over Employers Is Shifting
Not long ago, tech companies courted their workers. Engineers were scarce enough that anyone who felt mistreated could quit and land somewhere else within weeks, so employers kept them around with generous perks and wide latitude on the job, and many firms took pains to look like the progressive institutions their staff expected them to be.
Mark Carney Isn’t the “Leader of the Free World.” Lula Is
The headlines say it all: “Meet the New Leader of the Free World. No, It’s Not Donald Trump.” “Canada’s Carney Claims Mantle of ‘Leader of the Free World.’” “How Mark Carney Became Leader of the Free World by Standing Up to Trump.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is not just incredibly popular at home but, increasingly, around the world. Now there is even talk of him winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
Could AI Fix Climate Change? Probably Not Under Capitalism
“There’s no question that in four or five years’ time, we’re going to use a lot more fossil fuel,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “But also, in the next decade in front of us, at no time in history are we better prepared to move to sustainable energy,” he added. “If you want to turn a corner on climate change, if you want a future that’s sustainable, lean into AI.”
High School Protests Have French Establishment on the Ropes
It only took a spark to set France ablaze. Protests broke out as the new school year had barely begun, as lycéens (high schoolers, aged roughly fifteen to eighteen) voiced their anger at what they see as neglect and contempt from the government. This deep-rooted discontent recalls earlier episodes. As the movement tries to spread to universities, the authorities’ only answer is repression, and accusations against La France Insoumise (LFI).
What Comes After Hyperpolitics?
Before the end of this year, the United States will have broken two political records. According to the organizers’ own estimates, No Kings Day on March 28 was the largest single-day protest in recent American history. At the same time, no US president has so successfully enriched himself in office as Donald Trump has — 2026 is set to be the most lucrative year of his career so far.
Andy Burnham’s Labour Allows the Left to Breathe, a Little
“For too long, politics has not been working for people across Britain. We need to do better, and we will.” Such was Andy Burnham’s welcome to this year’s Labour Party conference. Gemma Bolton, a left-wing member of the party’s National Executive Committee, more simply summed up the change after years of purges, suspensions and rigged candidate selections: “Isn’t it nice you can breathe again?”
Interest Rate Increases Are About Disciplining Labor
Using its favored policy in the face of inflation, the Federal Reserve Board, under its new chairman, Kevin Warsh, pushed up short-term interest rates in September. This action may have some impact on the rate of inflation, but probably not much. Raising interest rates may curtail inflation under some circumstances, but the major factors bringing about the current, continuing inflation are unlikely to be much affected by the Fed’s recent interest rate increases.
What Makes Somebody a Marxist?
Karl Marx famously declared that he was not a Marxist. But his theoretical work spawned many branches of research, political movements, and heated debate. Can we identify a set of unifying ideas that make up Marxism?
The European Green Party Attacks Solidarity With Palestine
There has been a virulent backlash in the British media against the Green Party of England and Wales since delegates at the party conference voted for a motion that brands Zionism as a racist ideology and supports the formation of a single democratic state in Palestine. As we have come to expect when British pundits and politicians are discussing Israel, nobody has seen fit to ask any Palestinians what they think about Zionism and what it has meant for them in practice.
Was Karl Kautsky Right About Ultra-Imperialism?
Six weeks after the outbreak of World War I, as Europe’s great empires sent millions to their deaths, Karl Kautsky published an essay predicting something almost impossible to believe. In an article for Die Neue Zeit called “Der Imperialismus,” better known under the English title “Ultra-Imperialism,” Kautsky argued that the leading powers were, despite all evidence to the contrary, moving toward not endless conflict but peaceful cooperation.
As Trump’s Coalition Breaks, Can the Left Pick Up the Pieces?
Donald Trump won in 2024 by casting billionaires and blue-collar workers as allies against a liberal professional elite. As working-class voters lose faith in him, the Left has a chance to consolidate support around economic populism.
“The Spanish People Will Remember Who Betrayed Them”
Echoing the outrage of housing protesters, Minister Pablo Bustinduy admonished Spanish politicians for betraying the working class in favor of rentiers. The legislature’s rejection of two vital housing decrees led PM Pedro Sánchez to call snap elections.
No, Digger Is Not a Misunderstood Masterpiece
You may have heard already that Digger, the new film cowritten and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (The Revenant, Birdman) and starring Tom Cruise, is an expensive box-office bomb that got many annihilating reviews. One of the better ones sums it up perfectly: “It’s like being trapped inside a tuba for two hours.” Bad news travels fast.
Lula Is in Danger of Losing Brazil’s Presidency
The first round of Brazil’s elections dealt a heavy blow to the Workers’ Party (PT) and, more broadly, to the cause of democracy in Latin America. In 2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva finished some six million votes ahead of Jair Bolsonaro in the first round, a margin that narrowed to about two million in the runoff. This time, Flávio Bolsonaro finished 2.2 million votes ahead of Lula, a lead of three percentage points.
Richie Floyd: Bernie’s 2016 Campaign Changed My Life
Bernie Sanders changed my life. And it happened overnight. Just over ten years ago, I was working as a hardware engineer. I grew up working class in the deeply conservative Florida Panhandle, where the Democratic Party had next to no foothold. The neoliberal ideas leading the conversation in the Democratic and Republican parties left me feeling disillusioned and unmoored from both the Left and the Right. I didn’t believe politics as it existed could have much of a positive impact on my life.
Thomas Piketty’s Utopian Socialism
In June, the policy world held its collective breath as the World Inequality Lab, the outfit headed by Thomas Piketty, released a report meant to serve as a capstone to years of extensive research on the elusive goal of leveling global incomes.
Being Against Capitalism Isn’t Enough
We live in a time when everything is political — except politics. We routinely treat everyday choices about culture, consumption, and personal identity as expressions of moral allegiance, parsing them for hidden meanings and assigning them to partisan camps. We infer entire worldviews from what people watch, buy, joke about, or post online.
Spain’s New Protest Movement Is Putting Class Center Stage
Fifteen years isn’t enough for a generation, but it seems it is the right amount of time for a “political cycle.” In Spain, activists and progressive academics have in recent years often spoken of the exhaustion of the political cycle that began with the Indignados protests, known as 15-M (so named after May 15, 2011, the first day of protest), and continued with the foundation of Podemos and its rapid growth, until the formation of the first broad-left coalition government.
Getting Fired from Mother Jones Made Michael Moore
Before Paul Berman became a liberal hawk, he was a New Left veteran who edited a book called Quotations from the Anarchists. In 1986, his long-standing anxiety about the authoritarian left may have produced a casualty: Michael Moore’s magazine career.
Reckoning With the Failures of Tech Worker Organizing
In early 2022, a group of Twitter employees were quietly trying to unionize the company. They called themselves the “Starlings” after the birds whose synchronized flight patterns offer one another safety and warmth. The workers mapped out their coworkers and assessed their pro- or antiunion sentiments, held one-on-one conversations, and tried to stay off of management’s radar while they built toward a majority.
Trump’s Politically Driven Deportations Are Quietly Rising
Donald Trump’s approval on immigration is so deathly low, and his ongoing deportation raids so unpopular even in red states, that you’d be forgiven for thinking his administration has pumped the brakes on the issue. Instead the White House is advancing a radical agenda that is increasingly targeted not at criminals or even law-abiding undocumented people but at legal immigrants.
The West Is Only Helping Putin Consolidate Support
At the “We Shall Not Be Moved” event in New York on September 21, Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a programmatic speech that attacked the United States’ staggering trillion-dollar war budget. He described the war industry draining the life out of society as a global and not just American problem. This is why, he said, progressives should oppose Donald Trump’s war in Iran, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the United Arab Emirates’ proxy war in Sudan.
Congress Must Investigate War Profiteers Once Again
In April, President Donald Trump requested a $445 billion increase to the defense budget, meaning the United States will be spending around $1.5 trillion on the military. Much of the largesse will benefit the Big Five war contractors: Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX (formerly Raytheon). These are the companies behind such budget-shredding boondoggles as the F-35 and the littoral combat ships.
Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Campaign Lit a Spark Beyond Elections
Bernie Sanders’s impact on the American left is not typically measured in social movement terms. The story normally goes that democratic socialism returned to national politics after 2015, tens of thousands of people joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a new generation of socialist candidates ran for office, and a much larger left media ecosystem emerged.
US Meddling in Brazil May Decide Latin America’s Future
As Brazil heads toward Sunday’s presidential election first round, the contest is on a knife-edge. Polls show left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva neck and neck with the ultraconservative Flávio Bolsonaro, the oldest of his imprisoned father’s brood.
The Battle of Cable Street Was an Antifascist Landmark
Twenty years ago, I shared a platform with Aubrey Morris, one of the “ordinary” heroes of the Battle of Cable Street on October 4, 1936 — the iconic event in Britain’s prewar antifascist history. Aubrey was sixteen at the time, a Labour League of Youth member, and he still glowed with pride at having been part of the mass defiance that put the slogan “They shall not pass” into spectacular effect. He helped build barricades in Cable Street.
The Stakes Are High in Brazil’s Upcoming Election
For a time this summer, Brazil’s presidential election seemed Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s to lose, and Latin America’s largest democracy appeared poised to hold its ground while right-wing candidates triumphed in Colombia, Peru, Honduras, Chile, and Panama, and the Left lost its long hold on Bolivia.
West Point’s Honor Code Taught the Military to Lie
On May 12, 1962, General Douglas MacArthur strode into the West Point mess hall and delivered a stirring farewell address before an audience of more than two thousand cadets. It had been just over a year since another famed former general, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had famously delivered his own closing warning about industry’s capture of the Pentagon. Now MacArthur seemed worried about the corruption of the American soldier’s soul — the death of honor itself.
Against the Politics of Communal Fear
New York City’s new municipal strategy to combat antisemitism comes just days after the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu used his platform at the United Nations to call Zohran Mamdani “the antisemitic mayor of New York” and claim that since his election “many Jews no longer feel safe” in the city. The initiative seeks to expand education, support victims of hate crimes, and fund security at Jewish institutions and other houses of worship throughout the five boroughs.
A Decade After His First Presidential Run, Bernie Isn’t Alone
If you’re anyone who veers remotely to the left politically, there are two eras: a time before Bernie Sanders ran for president, and a time after. The US political landscape before Sanders’s first presidential campaign looks today like an alien planet. There were virtually no socialists who held elected office, or at least those who admitted to it. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was an obscure organization with a little over six thousand members across twenty-six chapters.
Jordan Bardella Isn’t Such a Friend of Jews After All
As a young member of the Front National (today’s Rassemblement National), Jordan Bardella was an “obsessive antisemite,” according to a story published by investigative site Mediapart this Monday. “Banks are all controlled by Jews,” Bardella allegedly wrote in one message published by Mediapart. “The Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them,” read another. “A Zionist is necessarily Jewish, and deeply so.”
American Capitalism Isn’t Just Billionaires
When one thinks of the rich in the United States, the first people who come to mind are the megabillionaires whose extravagant consumption, eye-popping wealth, and notorious political interventions have transformed them into household names. Perched atop the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest individuals are Silicon Valley moguls and Wall Street executives who command some of the most prominent corporations in America.
Eric Hobsbawm Owed His Success to Mass Culture
More than the “revolutionary historian” promised by the subtitle, the Eric Hobsbawm chronicled in Emile Chabal’s biography is above all a canny academic entrepreneur. Early in his career, Hobsbawm found a literary agent and converted his lectures for undergraduates into a series of best-selling books. He made valuable contacts with rising-star scholars and publishing houses in continental Europe.
The Bosses’ Oldest Dream
The English inventor Charles Babbage is best remembered for his work designing the foundations for all digital computers with Ada Lovelace in the nineteenth century. What’s lesser known is why he wanted to build them. In the decades leading up to the British Empire’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1833 (which Babbage supported), there was a serious question of how to get free and rebellious industrial workers to produce enough to sustain the empire. Babbage’s answer was to surveil workers and divide their efforts into standardized,
A Decade of Bernie Sanders’s Transformation of America
It’s been ten years since Bernie Sanders’s first presidential run — a run that transformed the Left and our sense of the possible in this country. It should be remembered as one of the most consequential electoral campaigns in US history.
Obama’s Monument to Empty Liberalism
“When I first saw it, I was like, ‘It’s a block.’” Woodlawn resident Linda Spears had been watching the construction of the Obama Foundation’s sprawling campus from her condo overlooking Jackson Park in Chicago, but it wasn’t until opening weekend, when the barriers came down, that she finally went inside.
Ireland’s Matches Against Israel Should Have Been Canceled
On Sunday night, the Irish soccer team bowed their heads in silence as the Israeli anthem echoed through the all but empty Nagyerdei Stadium in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city. The Irish players, who wore black armbands, skipped the traditional pregame rituals. There were no handshakes, no pennants, and (for the most part) no fans.
Frederick Douglass Had a Radical Respect for the Constitution
Is the US Constitution for or against slavery? Questions concerning the legacy of America’s founding and how to interpret the Constitution have long gripped public discourse; in recent years they have become inseparable. From the 1980s came the originalists, a group of legal theorists who sought to recover the Constitution’s original meaning through textual analysis buttressed by historical investigation. Adhering to the document’s original meaning, they argue, promotes institutional stability and the rule of law.
Democrats Have Created a Consultant-Driven Echo Chamber
“The number one rule of political fundraising,” Evan Barker writes in the first line of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, “is to never, ever, under any circumstances, speak about it publicly.” Then she spends 288 pages talking about it, and it’s a wonderful thing that she does.
Karl Marx Was for the Children
In the late 1870s, a visitor to Karl Marx’s North London house might have found the author of Capital on his hands and knees in the garden, with his grandson Johnny on his back shouting, “Go on! Plus vite! Hurrah!” Marx was past sixty, and he would keep at it until he was covered in sweat.
Owen Jones: Western Hubris Created Today’s Crisis
In 2011, Owen Jones solidified his reputation as one of Britain’s sharpest political commentators when he published Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. In the aftermath of the longest-serving Labour government in history, Jones asked how working-class people came to be vilified not just by elites but by representatives of the parties that supposedly existed to serve their interests. He followed this book up in 2014 with The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, a study of Britain’s powerful elite.
Trump Turned the 2026 World Cup Into an Imperial Spectacle
The 2026 World Cup was supposed to provide relief from the tournament’s bedevilment by autocratic regimes, following the outrage that greeted FIFA’s selection of Russia for 2018 host and Qatar for 2022. As it happened, hosting rights were awarded to the United States, Canada, and Mexico in 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term, in a process delayed by the scandal that forced FIFA president Sepp Blatter to resign and be replaced by Gianni Infantino.
The Vendetta Against Gino Has Nothing to Do With Justice
Albanian-born activist Rexhino Abazaj faces imminent extradition from France to Germany, where he is wanted for charges of violent assault against neo-Nazi plaintiffs. One remaining hurdle was France’s Court of Cassation, which this Wednesday ruled in favor of a lower court’s ruling from last month that validated Berlin’s issuance of a European Arrest Warrant (EAW). Abazaj, better known as Gino among friends and allies, could now face up to ten years behind bars if he is convicted in Germany.
Brazil’s Presidential Election Is Going Down to the Wire
As the Brazilian presidential election on October 4 draws closer, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is in a very tight contest with Flávio Bolsonaro, the son and heir of the Bolsonaro political dynasty. Lula is leading most of the polls for the first round, but the race appears too close to call in the event of a runoff between them.
Amazon Is Perfecting Total Surveillance of Its Workforce
Although Amazon is increasingly synonymous with worker surveillance, the logistics behemoth has never been a pioneer in that space. UPS was the first fleet to install GPS in their vehicles back in 1991. Netradyne, the company that makes the AI-powered product Driver.i installed in most vehicles in Amazon’s fleet, had already logged over a hundred million minutes of driving time before Amazon signed the firm on.
Primetime Turns Chris Hansen Into a Horror Show
Primetime has an interesting look that’s the key to its worldview, which is that our society is so bad that no one can escape its infecting qualities. There’s a smeary effect around the edge of the lens in many shots, which are generally in shallow focus, making everything appear greasy and defiled and half-hidden. This is in addition to a lurid color scheme dominated by nasty shades of red, green, and blue that are often clashing with each other, so that characters’ faces emerge out of surroundings that seem disgustingly tainted.
Economic Democracy Is at the Heart of Socialism
In 1872, British courts prosecuted more than seventeen thousand workers for a single offense: leaving their jobs. Under the Master and Servants Acts, wage laborers who quit before the end of an agreed term, or who merely refused to show up to work, could be sentenced to three months of hard labor.
Trump’s Greenland Deal Puts His Annexation Plans on Ice
Donald Trump recently concluded an agreement with the governments of Greenland and Denmark over the status of the Arctic island. Trump presented it as a big victory for his efforts, claiming that it granted the United States “permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many US concerns.”
We Have to Figure Out How to Design a Warming Planet
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we should start with the problem in its purest form: The world as we know it cannot go on. Something’s got to give. Ideally, that would be capitalism, but we don’t have enough time to pull that off before the planet catches fire. The planet is already catching fire. What to do, then? Everything — supply chains, information systems, labor practices, policy decisions, economic structures — is so inextricably linked that it feels impossible to know where to start chipping away.
Mark Carney Is Taking Aim at Canada’s Labor Movement
On September 21, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government introducedlegislation that could amount to one of the most significant rollbacks of workers’ rights in Canada since the creation of the postwar industrial relations system. Tucked inside the sprawling 232-page Bill C-39 are amendments to the Canada Labour Code that would give the federal labor minister explicit authority to terminate lawful strikes and impose binding dispute resolution when the minister decides a work stoppage threatens the “national interest.”
The Dilemmas of Socialist Governance of a Capitalist State
Since the 2016 combination of Donald Trump’s election and Bernie Sanders’s breakthrough campaign, efforts to synergize grassroots organizing with electoral engagement have become a priority for both long-standing and new radical formations. The dominant strategy is for socialists and progressives to run as Democrats aiming to both block MAGA’s drive toward US-style fascism and to win a measure of Left “governing power.”
The Beatles Belong to the Left
As we enter the late 2020s, the legacy of the Beatles — history’s biggest band, by any measure — is facing a final reckoning. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the group’s last surviving members, are now eighty-four and eighty-six, respectively. This should remind us that what might be called the “Beatles generation” is reaching the end of its natural lifespan, its icons departing the stage to become musty archival heritage. All things, as the late George Harrison once acknowledged, must pass.
A Labour Prime Minister Inaugurated Britain’s Neoliberal Era
When Britain’s Labour Party met for its annual conference in September 1976, the government headed by its leader, James Callaghan, was confronting a severe economic crisis. This included the combination of high inflation and unemployment (“stagflation”) and a currency crisis that would, by the end of the year, lead the government to arrange a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). IMF assistance came with the requirement of steep budget cuts.
Who Killed Asylum?
Asylum as we know it is basically dead. The immigration system has been so systematically hollowed out that, for the vast majority of the world’s poor and displaced, it might as well not exist anymore.
The United Arab Emirates Is Devastating Sudan for Profit
At one time or another, Sudanese governments have hosted, armed, or tolerated rebels and opposition groups from all of the country’s neighbors, from Egypt and Libya to Uganda and Ethiopia. Sudan’s neighbors have repaid the favor, and a range of outside actors are now involved in the Sudanese civil war.
We Can’t Blame the Supreme Court for Congress’s Problems
Almost everyone on the Left seems to have lost faith in the Supreme Court of the United States. This would have been improbable in 1954, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, or in 1973, after Roe v. Wade, or even in 1992, after the court upheld the core holding of Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
In Italy’s Financial Capital, Socialism Is Back in the Air
One in twelve people living in Milan is a millionaire. A report by the consultancy Henley & Partners ranks Italy’s second-largest city and financial capital as the world leader for millionaires per resident, well ahead of New York City, where the figure is one in twenty-two. A growing number come from abroad, drawn not just by the vibrancy of Italy’s fashion hub but also generous tax breaks for wealthy newcomers.
How Brazilian Cinema Survived Fascism
When writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho was on a press junket with his sensational genre-twisting, furiously satirical 2019 film, Bacurau, Brazilian cinema was in a state of crisis. Jair Bolsonaro’s oppressive right-wing government targeted the national cinema for destruction, aggressively slashing budgets, halting funding, canceling projects, and leaving thousands of films at various stages of development stuck in limbo. Punitive policies were tied to ideological manias such as Bolsonaro’s open hostility to members of the LGBTQ population,
Video Game Workers at Blizzard Won First Union Contracts
Nearly 2,000 workers at Blizzard, a Microsoft-owned video game studio that makes popular games like Diablo, won their first union contracts earlier this month. Their protections include recall rights and guaranteed severance packages for laid-off workers.
According to Polls, Americans Like Socialism a Lot
A crop of recent polls shows that socialism’s appeal is surprisingly broad. They also reflect a transformed US political landscape that is ripe for a socialist politician to capitalize on — if they’re willing to step up.
Their Internationalism and Ours
It’s hard to believe that just twenty-five years ago, the global justice movement had to defend itself against the charge of parochial, narrow-minded nationalism. This was the accusation made by respectable, supposedly forward-looking outlets like The Economist and The New Republic. The protesters in Seattle and Genoa stressed that they had no problem with the idea of an interconnected world. What they objected to was the pressure to liberalize and privatize national economies.
Greece’s Neo-Nazis Are Back
For over seven years after it entered parliament in May 2012, Golden Dawn was at the heart of Greece’s political life. Its rise was accompanied by scenes that should have made its character unmistakable. During the June 2012 election campaign, MP Ilias Kasidiaris assaulted two female left-wing politicians live on TV, while numerous other key members were documented openly expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Saudi Arabia’s Yemen Strategy Has Fallen to Pieces
Over the past few weeks, Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, also known as the Huthis, has launched an offensive and made big territorial gains. The latest turn in the Yemeni civil war could have major implications for the world economy, as it involves one of its most important trade routes through the Red Sea. It certainly poses a big challenge for Yemen’s neighbor Saudi Arabia.
Greed and Economic Desperation Are Fueling Sudan’s Civil War
The militias wreaking havoc in Sudan also profit from plunder and can pay their recruits a wage much higher than any civilian job available to them. This simple calculation is one of the most important factors behind the country’s horrifying war.
A Union Feud Shouldn’t Sink California’s Billionaire Tax
America’s already threadbare welfare state is on the brink of total collapse. Over the next ten years, national funding for Medicaid, whose benefits 81 million Americans rely upon, will be cut by about $1 trillion. States that expanded Medicaid access under the Affordable Care Act will be hit especially hard. More immediately, in just a few days, on October 1, and again on January 1, various new requirements for Medicaid eligibility will be instituted.
The First Walmart Union Contract in North America
At a Walmart distribution center in Mississauga, Ontario, workers have made history by winning the first-ever union contract with the logistics giant in North America. Their fight has meant pay raises for the company’s workers across Canada.
Europe’s Far Right Kisses the Ring
For years, Europe’s rising far-right parties have wrapped themselves in the language of sovereignty. Draped in their respective national flags, each has promised to put national interests and national identity above all else. France’s Rassemblement National deploys the slogan “Les Français d’abord,” meaning “the French first,” while Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland follows suit with “Deutschland zuerst.”
AI Destruction Isn’t Hypothetical. It’s Already Here
We’re several weeks into a fierce debate over whether artificial intelligence (AI) will kill us all. Triggered by a spate of former workers at major AI firms coming forward to warn that a future superintelligent AI could lead to human extinction, the debate has inspired a kaleidoscopic array of views that don’t break down along neat ideological lines. Some think it’s all hogwash, either the product of ignorant hype or part of a cynical hype campaign by the industry itself.
Francis Fukuyama Is Welcoming History Back
In his new autobiography, Francis Fukuyama boasts that for decades “students in introductory classes in international relations all over the world were required to read [Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations] alongside The End of History.” The flex is warranted; during my undergrad we were assigned both essays in one of my classes on international law. Many intellectuals dream about reaching this level of notoriety. But for Fukuyama, fame came at a heavy price.
What Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism Gets Wrong
Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition did not receive widespread attention after its original publication in 1983. Since 2000, when it was republished with a new preface and an introduction by historian Robin D. G. Kelley, however, the book has enjoyed widespread appeal and influence in the anglophone humanities and social sciences as well as among activists.
Socialists Should Be Champions of Government Efficiency
Early this week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, speaking at the Urban 20 (U20) Mayors Summit, bemoaned that government “efficiency has been taken on as a right-wing concern,” with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) being a particularly vile example. As with the phrase “quality of life,” the mayor observed, “there has been a sense that if you admit to an interest in those things, then you are assisting the Right.”
The Uprising We Got vs. the One We Need
How do you make a boring film about a peasant revolt? Writer-director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, Captain Phillips, United 93) has found a way. His new film, The Uprising, is about the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and it’s such a glum plod I should’ve forgotten it immediately after seeing it. But somehow it haunts me.
How Should Socialists Relate to the Market?
Bourgeois economics treats capitalism as simply a market economy. Vivek Chibber traces how markets and private ownership worked under feudalism and under capitalism, and argues that socialism could use markets without restoring class society.
US Imperialism Has Its Own Reasons for War in the Middle East
It happens every time now. The United States jumps headfirst into a Middle Eastern quagmire, and, like clockwork, voices start rising, blaming it all on Israel. The two most salient cases of this exercise unfolded around the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the George W. Bush administration, and the joint US-Israeli onslaught on Iran that began on February 28, 2026, led by the second Trump administration.
The Foundations of Turkey’s Peace With the Kurds Are Shaky
Turkey’s political scene is moving. The recently passed Framework Law redirects the Kurdish question — the principal fault line in the country’s imagined national unity — from armed confrontation to regulated pacification. This has political consequences far beyond its narrow legal scope. More than bringing one period of the Kurdish conflict to a close, it opens a new phase in Turkey’s class struggles by reshaping the balance between the state, the Kurdish movement, and the political opposition.
The Last Revolutionary Filmmaker
When the French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard died in 2022 at the age of ninety-one, obituaries celebrated both his boundless cinematic inventiveness and the radical politics that shaped his work. To some, his death marked the end of an era of politically committed filmmaking. But in Japan, another artist as equally radical is still, at age eighty-seven, hard at work.
Treasury Market Volatility Is Capital Disciplining the State
Since the 2008 financial crisis, American economic policy has rested on the seemingly unshakable conviction that global markets for US government debt were bulletproof. This fact would supposedly allow the state to run enormous deficits indefinitely, financing massive tax cuts for the wealthy even while military spending approached $1 trillion.
Five Essential Books for Understanding Imperialism
Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical SurveyAnthony Brewer 1980 There is a wide range of literature theorizing imperialism, and the best place to start is an overview that is judicious, encompassing, and careful. Brewer’s book is that. It covers not only the classical theories of Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg but also the postwar theories, like the unequal exchange arguments of Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Samir Amin and dependency theory.
Bari Weiss’s Most Loyal Soldier
On September 8, 2025, a video shot in Columbia University’s bookstore went viral on X. Over the elegant sounds of Antonio Vivaldi’s “Spring,” it cut between shots of available titles, all of them presumably assigned to students: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks; a children’s book about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law; Robert A. Dahl’s How Democratic Is the American Constitution?; and, among others, the Quran. The caption reads:
Zack Polanski’s Eco-Populism Could Do With More Socialism
The Greens were for decades a relatively marginal force in British politics, with only one member of Parliament (MP) and a modest but growing number of local councilors. However, its prospects changed in September 2025 after Zack Polanski was elected party leader on an eco-populist platform. This new leadership defined itself against Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, rejecting his apologia for Israel’s genocide in Gaza as well as his fiscal austerity, anti-migrant measures, and anti-protest authoritarianism.
Zach Cregger Made a Resident Evil Movie With Bite
Zach Cregger’s horror-comedy Resident Evil is a real blast of a movie, fast, funny, scary, and inspired. Only an exuberant film lover could come up with such a gleefully inventive ninety-five-minute thrill ride as this one.
German Centrists Are Smearing Die Linke as Antisemites
Let’s be clear: Die Linke, Germany’s leading left-wing force, which resoundingly won Sunday’s elections in Berlin, is not an antisemitic party. It does not have an “antisemitism problem,” nor is it a menace to Jews in Germany or Berlin. While some Jews in the city perceive the Left as a threat, this perception is fueled by a false media narrative lacking a factual basis.
The US Gives Impunity to Israel and Sanctions Its Critics
“It’s the first time, as a lawyer, I’m about to defend myself, not the people I work for.” Speaking as the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Geneva discussed Palestine this March, Raji Sourani complained of attacks on human rights defenders’ most basic duties.
The Left Should Start Using the Word “Evil”
Follow the news out of Washington for a week, and the usual vocabulary of political criticism starts to feel insufficient. Words like “authoritarian” and “illiberal” describe styles of governance. They say much less about what it is like to watch an administration indulge shameless sadism, pursuing cruelty for its own apparent enjoyment. The word that fits better is one many on the Left have trained ourselves not to use: “evil.”
First We Took Manhattan, Then We Took Berlin
Ok, Berlin doesn’t have a socialist mayor quite yet. But left-wing Die Linke, which won Sunday’s Berlin state election, is in a strong position to lead its next government. Even as the far right rises across Germany, Die Linke has distinguished itself with a strong stance in defense of multiethnic society and a constant focus on the cost of living and housing. For this, it was rewarded by many Berliners.
How Intelligence Agencies Bend Universities to Their Will
With a series of US military operations underway over the past year, intelligence agencies have come under the spotlight again. Media coverage has tended to offer flattering narratives of their exploits, recounting the “critical role” played by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping that makes it seem like a spy thriller.
Americans Are Turning to GoFundMe Just to Get By
At this point, you have to have been trapped in space for the last two years not to notice that the cost of living is onerously high. Or you could just be the Treasury secretary.
The Killer AI Robots Are Already Here
Over the last few weeks, panic about artificial intelligence has reached a fever pitch. AI industry whistleblowers as well as politicians like Bernie Sanders are sounding the alarm about the potential for an AI-driven apocalypse and the need to slow down or pause further development of the technology.
Hardt and Negri’s Empire Got Everything Wrong
A few months ago, my partner and I met a liberal, fortysomething history professor who told us that for his next book he’d been reading up on late-1990s alter-globalization movements. As the millennium neared, global capitalism seemingly stood unchallenged. Social democrats and ex-communists praised the free market, and groupings like the World Trade Organization (WTO) integrated Russian and Chinese leaders. Yet this, he had discovered, wasn’t the whole story.
The Uprising Wastes a Good Class-Struggle Story
Instead of inspiring an awakening as filmmakers hope, The Uprising repeats tired liberal calls for “healing,” and, when those disappoint, turns to fantasies of individual violence. The real 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt, however, still inspires us centuries later.
The Prospects for a 2028 May Day Mass Strike
Three years ago, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called for American unions to line up contract expirations for May Day 2028 to set the stage for a potential mass strike. How are the prospects of this coordinated action looking now?
American Reality Is Beyond Parody, but Satire Isn’t Dead
Plenty of contemporary comedy gazes upon American stupidity and concludes that Americans are stupid. The Chapo Trap House anthology Chunks suggests instead that people behave strangely because the world around them has become so strange.
West Indian Cricketers Refused to Grovel
The summer of 1976 was Britain’s hottest in 350 years. The West Indies cricket team was there all season long, playing England in city after city in the oppressive heat. There was a lot riding on its performance. To the cricketers and their fans back home in the Caribbean, the team’s mission went beyond athletics.
France’s Left Faces the 2027 Election Divided
The primary in France’s Parti Socialiste will not likely pick the winner of the 2027 presidential election. But it will decide whether the party seeks compromise on the Left, or else directs its fire against rival left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Debating Victor Serge
When I began writing Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, I expected to write a biography in keeping with the image common on the left of Serge as an uncompromising enemy of Stalinism who never fell into anti-communism and fought all his life for revolutionary socialism. This is what we find in the many writings of Richard Greeman, who single-handedly rescued Serge from oblivion by translating his novels and tirelessly writing about him.
Texas Wasn’t Always a Right-Wing Evangelical Powerhouse
There’s a common view of religious history that holds that the further back you go, the stronger the smell of brimstone and the more conservative the beliefs. It isn’t true, and it obscures how much the human hand makes the world, including our ideas of the sacred.
Frances Stonor Saunders Exposed the Cultural Cold War
With her landmark 1999 debut, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders “single-handedly established a new branch of sub-history,” as novelist Ian McEwan observed. The book won many accolades, though sympathizers of Western anti-communism clamored to downplay its revelations: that between 1950 and 1967, intelligence agencies partnered in a covert front, launched by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to manipulate Cold War intellectuals in a program whose basis was propaganda and censorship.
Is Trump Crashing the Dollar Empire?
With more than half of global trade conducted in dollars, the United States is still the world’s largest economy as well as its dominant military and political power. But Donald Trump, in his second presidential term, has put both these facts at unprecedented risk, using America’s global position for political gain and personal enrichment all while undermining the pillars of the nation’s financial dominance, such as the rule of law and the security of global trade flows.
Social Democracy Won the Century and Lost the Future
On Sunday, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party (SAP) emerged as the largest party in an election that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. Magdalena Andersson is poised to return as prime minister, with her four-party bloc holding a one-seat majority in a 349-seat Riksdag. The SAP won just 28 percent of the vote, its worst showing in more than 110 years.
Why Black Socialists Opposed Marcus Garvey
Africa loomed large in the vision of Marcus Garvey and his followers. In May 1920, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Executive Council decided to send a delegation to Liberia to explore the prospects for settlement and development.
Southern Gothic Films Take On the Horrors of the Past
One of the films featured in the Criterion Channel’s “Southern Gothic” series is Baby Doll (1956). It’s based on Tennessee Williams’s one-act plays 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Unsatisfactory Supper, which Williams adapted for the screen in collaboration with the most famous interpreter of his work, director Elia Kazan.
AI Hype Is Real. So Is AI Risk
Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders and Texas Democratic Congressmember Greg Casar announced plans to introduce a bill permanently banning the development of superintelligent AI. The bill would also temporarily pause advanced artificial intellgience research until the US establishes a rigorous new safety regime. It would also direct the government to pursue international treaties, perhaps on a par with those that ban development of nuclear and biological weapons.
The New Canada-EU Deal Is More of the Devil We Know
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants Canada to become the first “associate member” of the European Union. For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, it is a deal that he can present to his country as reducing its economic dependence on the United States. For the EU, it will help show, by building bridges with a like-minded democracy, that the bloc will remain a major player in a world order of declining American power.
US Imperialism Is Burning the Planet
Jacobin What is ecological imperialism? Matt Huber Many on the Marxist left define imperialism in terms of value transfers or unequal exchange between the Global North and South, but relations of value extraction and exploitation are also central to our theories of capitalism. I follow the work of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, who make three important points. First, we need to keep capitalism and imperialism as two separate concepts.
Ansar Allah’s Red Sea Advance Has Exposed Saudi Weakness
On September 9, Yemen’s Ansar Allah, or “Houthis” as they are also known, descended from the highlands down roads and riverbeds to the Tihamah coastal plain and captured the port of Mokha from the Saudi-based government the following day. By September 11, they had taken Perim Island in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Since then, they have used that position to blockade Israel and exercise leverage over the Saudi kingdom.
A Portrait of How Workers Build a Strike
I was at a Crotona Park barbecue in the South Bronx to celebrate my wife’s nephew, who was going off to a trade school after graduating high school. The family barbecue included a cross section of union members, among them electricians, hotel workers, Teamsters — not a strange amalgam, thanks to New York’s high union density. It’s often only in TV shows that you see a tight-knit group of friends from vastly different class backgrounds hanging out together.
AI Doomsaying Is an Aggressive Sales Pitch
It seems a strange publicity gambit for an industry to assert that its own product could wipe out humanity. In the lingo of our evolving tech empire, though, this is exactly what is meant by “criti-hype.” The term was coined by Lee Vinsel at Virginia Tech, who defined it as “criticism that both feeds and feeds on hype.”
Does Dollar Supremacy Help Americans?
It is scarcely possible to explain the convulsions of the twenty-first century without accounting for the pivotal role of the global dollar system. The financial crisis, the emergence of a new global monied elite, and the rise of China are inseparable from the dollar’s status as the world’s preeminent currency and the benefits and burdens it confers on different actors. The Trump administration has made maintaining the dollar’s primacy a central plank of its policy ambitions. “If we lost the world standard dollar,” said the president last year,
The Jewish Socialists Who Fought the Tsar and Zionism
Jewish socialist intellectuals founded the Bund in the Russian Empire in 1897, and it soon became a mass organization of the Jewish working class — a working class confined by law to the Pale of Settlement. From its inception, the Bund and the socialist politics it represented struggled against capitalists and autocrats alongside non-Jewish socialist comrades. It also competed bitterly with its Jewish rivals: Orthodox traditionalists, Zionists, and Bolsheviks.
The Call for Working-Class Liberalism Is Coming From Inside the House
The socialist left has a vexed relationship with major economists. This is a problem, because it sometimes leaves the Left on the outside of contemporary economic debates. Daron Acemoglu is precisely the sort of economist that the Left should not ignore. Alongside his frequent collaborators Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, he is a 2024 Nobel laureate in economics. He is also among the world’s most cited economists.
Donald Trump’s Imperialism of Decline Is a Global Menace
US leaders have generally sought to cloak their imperialism with euphemistic rhetoric, but Trump has dropped any pretense about his shameless resource grabs. As the US grows weaker on the world stage, it’s also becoming more brazen and more dangerous.
The Fate of the Rohingyas Is Crucial for Myanmar’s Future
In August 2024, Rohingya families gathered on the banks of the Naf River in Maungdaw, waiting to cross into Bangladesh as the fighting closed in. Drones and mortars found them there. Roughly two hundred people were killed, another entry in a catalogue of atrocity the Rohingya have been forced to keep for decades.
The Rise of Germany’s Far Right Reflects a Systemic Crisis
After the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) scored 44 percent of the vote in the September 6 state election in Saxony-Anhalt, many analysts sought some single, clearly identifiable reason. The interest in the AfD’s success is well justified: what happens in Germany shapes Europe and even world politics, and most mainstream accounts seek tools with which the center can disarm the far right.
How Amazon Busts Unions, in Its Own Words
Nearly ninety years ago, Ford kept its own private security force on the payroll for whenever they needed to beat up union supporters. Having traded in the brass knuckles and baseball bats of the early twentieth century for the empathetic listening and fine-grained surveillance of the early twenty-first, Amazon today employs an entirely different set of tactics to ward off union drives — tactics that may well be more effective precisely because they are so systematic.
Russian Elites Are Fighting for Unchecked Power
Ignoring a problem is rarely enough to make it go away. Take civilizationism, an approach based on shared culture taken to the level of civilizational identity. Also called civilizationalism, the idea has been around for centuries and has quietly inspired many conflicts. Overshadowed briefly by Cold War ideological conflict, it resurfaced in the 1990s when political scientist Samuel Huntington famously proposed a coming “clash of civilizations,” in contrast to his student Francis Fukuyama’s suggestion of the “end of history.”
Sweden’s Far Right: Faltering but Not Defeated
For the far-right Sweden Democrats, Sunday’s parliamentary elections may have looked like the final step toward full “detoxification.” Success in the election for the Riksdag promised to crown the party’s integration into the Swedish political system — a formality by this point, but a significant step nonetheless.
Report: The Working-Class Vote Is Not Lost
A new survey experiment from the Center for Working-Class Politics and Joan C. Williams finds that a six-part formula can lift Democrats’ working-class vote share by nearly 11 points. It also adds nearly 8 points among the party’s affluent, college-educated base. More than 40,000 respondents evaluated nearly 800,000 hypothetical candidate profiles, making the study one of the largest of its kind. The project was supported by Jacobin and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Americans Are Turning Against School Vouchers
Ten percent. That’s how many Arizonans support that state’s Wild West voucher scheme. If the figure seems surprising given the ardency of the sales pitch for “education freedom,” its source should send your eyebrows skyward. This bleak view of Arizona public opinion about the state’s $1-billion-plus Education Savings Account (ESA) program comes not from voucher haters but from their superfans: the American Federation for Children (AFC), the deep-pocketed and highly influential school-choice lobbying firm started by Betsy DeVos.
Economics Needs a New Approach to Inflation
Four years have passed since the COVID-19 pandemic’s inflation in the wake of the American economy’s reopening hit its peak, and the American business cycle is today in a strange way. Wanting to slow the rise in prices that accompanied the reopening and construction boom, the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve cut social spending and raised interest rates.
The Socialist Labor Unionists Who Took On Samuel Gompers
“We have started on a great big national fight with the union movement at stake!” Max Hayes, socialist newspaper editor and union leader, thundered to the assembled representatives of Cleveland, Ohio’s labor movement in the fall of 1909. “The American Federation of Labor will stand or fall as events issue.”
Swing Voters Want Kitchen-Table Populism, Not a Sermon
“Affordability” has now been embraced even by politicians who haven’t pushed a shopping cart since the Clinton administration. A record 89 percent of Americans say government corruption is widespread. And even mainstream liberal media is declaring that populism is dominating politics right now — so much so that Politico has an entire section devoted to the topic.