Billionaire Peter Thiel insists that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and his portfolio of data mining and political bets puts that belief into practice. His is a program of authoritarian control disguised as innovation.| jacobin.com
Most major corporations — from airlines to social media platforms — now aspire to become unregulated banks. Bankification today accounts for the highest profit margins in the US economy, crippling productive capacity and setting the stage for the next crash.| jacobin.com
Since 1945, Finland has sought cordial relations with its vast Russian neighbor. But Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has emboldened champions of Finnish NATO membership — and made things harder for left-wing critics of the military alliance.| jacobin.com
In Finland, 70 percent of preschool children attend a full day care service supported by the government. There’s absolutely no reason why countries like the United States can’t do the same.| jacobin.com
The Finns rose to become one of Europe’s most prominent right-populist parties. Then they joined government.| jacobin.com
A national poll from Jacobin, DSA Fund, and Data for Progress finds broad support for democratic socialist leaders and left-wing policies.| jacobin.com
Increasingly, mainstream Democrats have sought to carve out a space for “acceptable” Zionism by saying that they support Israel but oppose Bibi Netanyahu. But the horrors of Gaza are a result of processes far more vast than one right-wing leader.| jacobin.com
Western plans for a Palestinian state fall far short of Palestinian self-determination, imposing tight limits on its future sovereignty.| jacobin.com
TikTok is being sold to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, the tech company of pro-Trump billionaire Larry Ellison. The move is yet another big step in the consolidation of major media sources under right-wing control.| jacobin.com
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have made it clear that they do not care what you think about the fact that they are accepting copious, thinly veiled bribes from billionaires.| jacobin.com
New research shows that unions don’t just boost wages at the workplace — they bring a broad range of social benefits. Simply put, if you don’t have strong unions, you probably don’t have a strong democracy.| jacobin.com
Right-wing media outlet PragerU is known for its misleading viral videos that it has long created for teens and adults. The operation is increasingly seeking to reach children, hoping to fill the Sesame Street–sized hole left by the defunding of PBS.| jacobin.com
Celebrities like Taylor Swift have long used a little-known Federal Aviation Administration program to shield their private jets’ flight records from public view. Now ICE is using the program to hide information about its deportation flights.| jacobin.com
Today, Italian lawmakers begin electing a new president. The president is often seen as a neutral referee standing above politics — but calls for ex–central banker Mario Draghi to take the job show how pro-market dogmas have been hardwired into public life.| jacobin.com
When the Italian government introduced a temporary ban on layoffs for the period of the coronavirus crisis, the employers’ federation reacted furiously. Firms have already received billions of euros in subsidies to help pay their workers’ wages — but what they can’t tolerate is any limit on their power to hire and fire at will.| jacobin.com
Last night Italy’s prime minister declared that all nonessential workplaces will be shut down to stem the spread of COVID-19. For two weeks, social distancing has been undermined by employer pressure to keep production going. As contagion soars, other countries would be foolish not to learn Italy’s lesson.| jacobin.com
We should be slashing emissions and climate-proofing our cities. Instead, Republicans are turning up the carbon spew and stripping away heat protections — effectively condemning the poor to die under rising temperatures.| jacobin.com
The radical idea at the heart of republicanism is a challenge to private bosses and public tyrants everywhere: that we can live free from the whims of arbitrary power. Democratic socialists should embrace the radical currents of this ancient philosophy.| jacobin.com
Bernie Sanders’s Workplace Democracy Plan, unveiled yesterday, is the best plan for promoting workers’ rights ever proposed by a major US presidential candidate. Whether they support or oppose it, all the other Democratic candidates will have to respond to it.| jacobin.com
Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program seemed like a step forward for choice and dignity. But it is beginning to look like a dystopian end run around the cost of providing social welfare that can beat back the deprivations that make life unbearable.| jacobin.com
Texas Democrats exited the state capitol to block a shameless Republican power grab. Their walkout creates an opening for broader resistance to the Right’s antidemocratic project — but only if labor unions and progressive groups step up to the plate.| jacobin.com
Belgium’s detention of Israeli soldiers over alleged war crimes in Gaza has set a historic precedent for holding Israel to account for its war crimes. And it’s a sign that the tide is turning against Israel.| jacobin.com
Belgium’s detention of Israeli soldiers over alleged war crimes in Gaza has set a historic precedent for holding Israel to account for its war crimes. And it’s a sign that the tide is turning against Israel.| jacobin.com
Donald Trump and his allies aren’t making a secret of it: if they win, they’re going to launch a campaign of repression to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement and the organized left.| jacobin.com
The data is clear: the Democratic Party’s alienation from the working class extends across racial lines.| jacobin.com
Kamala Harris and her surrogates keep bragging about Dick Cheney’s endorsement. It’s deeply obscene: Dick Cheney is a depraved war criminal whose image should not be rehabilitated.| jacobin.com
How bad could a second Donald Trump term get? That depends on how serious he is about replacing the career bureaucrats who staff the security state with MAGA loyalists ready to carry out his most demented policies.| jacobin.com
Contrary to some headlines, Donald Trump didn’t threaten immigrants with a “bloodbath.” But he did say some immigrants are “not people” — and the last five months in Gaza have shown us where this kind of rhetoric about “human animals” can lead.| jacobin.com
Today's capitalism may have increased the power of managers relative to owners of capital. But this shift doesn't mean a friendlier ruling class — if we want a better world, it’s still up to the working class to make it.| jacobin.com
Italy’s small textile firms have long been considered nearly impossible to organize. But a recent wave of successful simultaneous strikes is expanding possibilities for Italy’s hyperexploited immigrant workforce.| jacobin.com
In Berlin, TikTok wants to replace 160 employees with AI. If the company is successful, many others will follow suit — but workers are fighting back with a strike.| jacobin.com
Ozzy Osbourne’s working-class roots were central to the invention of heavy metal. But the world that birthed Black Sabbath is gone — and the conditions created by Britain’s postwar welfare state are long out of reach for today’s musicians.| jacobin.com
In the long run, the United States will pay for Donald Trump’s hubris in attacking Iran.| jacobin.com
Barbara and Karen Fields, the authors of Racecraft, on the illusion of race, the dead-end of| jacobin.com
Ari Aster’s new film, Eddington, pulls no punches against the Right or the Left. Yet its message is anything but moderate.| jacobin.com
Panamanians have taken to the streets to protest neoliberal austerity, Canadian mining, and US military presence. Raúl Mulino’s right-wing government, closely allied with North American interests, has responded by arresting thousands.| jacobin.com
Jaws is rightly celebrated as a landmark, generation-defining hit. But it’s not sufficiently recognized as a great 1970s film, exemplifying that rocky decade’s political ire, acerbic social critique, and the lingering practices of realist cinema movements.| jacobin.com
Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.| jacobin.com
Opponents of the academic boycott of Israel claim that its universities are havens of free inquiry. In fact, they supply vital support to Israel’s system of apartheid rule and are complicit in the violent suppression of Palestinian scholarship.| jacobin.com
In Los Angeles, emboldened tenants are winning big against abusive corporate landlords. But as the city fails to enforce the terms of their victories, landlords continue to harass tenants with impunity.| jacobin.com
Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald talks to Jacobin about the targeted killing of journalists in his harrowing new film Gaza: Journalists Under Fire.| jacobin.com
Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source capacity over the last decade.| jacobin.com
Despite years of employer attacks, unions still have vast resources at their disposal. This moment of worker upsurge is the time to use those assets to fund aggressive organizing.| jacobin.com
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.| jacobin.com
John Stuart Mill might have lots of libertarian fans, but his idiosyncratic ideas, despite their limitations, had more in common with democratic socialism than pro-capitalist ideologies.| jacobin.com
Despite his towering academic reputation, John Rawls’s ideas have had little impact outside the university. That’s a shame: as the failures of neoliberalism have become increasingly stark, Rawls’s egalitarian theory of justice has much to recommend it.| jacobin.com
In 1970, postal workers went on strike and provoked a national crisis for the United States government. Their rebellion holds lessons for labor today.| jacobin.com
Socialist philosopher G. A. Cohen was a brilliant thinker who subjected Marxism to the same scrutiny he would any other ideology. If you want to see Marxism at its most nondogmatic and precise, you should read G. A. Cohen.| jacobin.com
Television shows across the country are going dark because their writers have walked off the job. The strikers say they had no choice but to walk, as new technology and the squeeze from executives have put their very livelihood in serious danger.| jacobin.com
The Writers Guild of America is now in week three of its nationwide strike. Two key sticking points in negotiations: residual payments and the use of artificial intelligence.| jacobin.com
In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes built a new theory of inflation that sought to reckon with the proletariat’s recent and explosive entry onto the stage of history.| jacobin.com
Emmanuel Macron has ruled out appointing a government led by the biggest force in parliament, the left-wing New Popular Front. His refusal confirms a case long made by the Left: it’s time to get rid of the French president’s monarchical powers.| jacobin.com
American unions’ members are down, but their finances are through the roof. The labor movement can’t rebuild its dismally low membership unless unions start spending their resources on aggressive new organizing campaigns.| jacobin.com
Teamsters president Sean O’Brien headlined the RNC’s opening night and praised two of the party’s leading snake-oil salesmen: vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance and Missouri senator Josh Hawley. The party of billionaires couldn’t be happier.| jacobin.com
Both the Left and the Right used to articulate radically different visions of the future. Today the entire political spectrum looks backward, aiming to restore the past.| jacobin.com
Since the 2008 housing crisis, huge corporate landlords have taken over an alarmingly large share of the rental market. But the more tenants share the same landlord, the greater the number of potential organized tenants that landlord has to face down.| jacobin.com
In Finland, a new government represents how compatible neoliberal and far-right politics are. The Left must answer the challenge by opposing austerity in addition to racism.| jacobin.com
The battle against layoffs at Florence’s GKN auto parts plant may seem like a dispute from a past era. Yet the workers’ plan for the green reconversion of the factory shows how labor can point the way to the future.| jacobin.com
San Francisco’s groundbreaking Union at Home legislation encourages tenants to organize in their buildings the way employees organize at work. Housing activists in Berkeley are hoping their city will follow suit — but landlords are pushing back.| jacobin.com
The idea that we are entering an era of techno-feudalism that will be worse than capitalism is chilling and controversial. We asked former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to elucidate this idea, explain how we got here, and map out some alternatives.| jacobin.com
From the UAW to the Writers Guild, this year’s biggest contract victories have been won by unions in which members directly elect their leaders. That’s a right denied to most US union members — but it may be the key to unleashing broader labor militancy.| jacobin.com
On the enduring appeal of Christopher Lasch — on both the Left and Right.| jacobin.com
Late last night, the Writers Guild of America announced they have reached a tentative agreement with the Hollywood studios. The union’s negotiating committee is calling the deal “exceptional,” but it’s now up to rank-and-file writers to vote on it.| jacobin.com
States at war generally adopt interventionist economic policies to mobilize resources and manpower. Ukraine hasn’t followed suit, instead pursuing dogmatic free-marketeer measures that suit Western creditors more than its own population.| jacobin.com
The United Auto Workers, headed by a new reform leadership, are set to strike the Big Three automakers at midnight tonight. The entire working class will be watching to see if autoworkers can claw back decades of concessions and win a transformative contract.| jacobin.com
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone chronicled the growing loneliness and isolation of wealthy societies. Twenty years later, the problem is far worse than he could have imagined.| jacobin.com
