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- Jacobin Read
Turkey Risks Being Drawn Into Saudi Arabia’s War in Yemen
Ankara’s new defense pact with Riyadh risks drawing Turkey into the war in Yemen. The country’s past experience offers a grim reminder of how ordinary Turks pay for such entanglements.
- Jacobin Read
It Won’t Stop With Ilhan Omar
Up until now, the Donald Trump-J. D. Vance administration has been busy weaponizing the US immigration system against fairly low-level political opponents: college students protesting US support for Israel’s genocide, independent journalists applying scrutiny to government policies, or random tourists who happened to be critical of the president and his lackeys. Now it’s taking the unprecedented step of turning it against a sitting member of Congress.
- Jacobin Read
Climate Policies Can Bring Relief on Affordability and Beyond
As the US midterm elections approach, one word keeps coming up in campaign promises and headlines: “affordability.” That working people in the United States are struggling to afford basic necessities is a problem that many are willing to acknowledge, but there is very little agreement on what should be done to tackle a core driver of the affordability crisis: climate change.
- Jacobin Read
Historian Eric Hobsbawm Was a “Communist Polymath”
Emile Chabal, author of a new biography of the massively popular and influential historian Eric Hobsbawm, explains how Hobsbawm’s Central European roots set him apart in Britain — and why he kept faith with communism through the devastation of his century.
- Jacobin Read
How Bernie’s Campaigns Reorganized the Organized Left
Ten years ago, while socialist Bernie Sanders was making his historic run for the Democratic presidential nomination that drew millions of supporters and promised a “political revolution” to live long past his campaign, I was part of a small revolutionary organization that pooh-poohed him as a faux renegade.
- Jacobin Read
Britain’s Military-Industrial Complex Is Promoting War Fever
War fever has gripped the European political establishment. War in Ukraine and rumors of continent-wide conflict with Russia are now the staple justification for rearmament, ballooning arms budgets, and the reintroduction of conscription across Europe.
- Jacobin Read
The Problem With Homeownership
A few days from now, my adopted hometown of Vancouver in British Columbia is going to elect a new mayor and council. The low turnout in municipal elections here skews toward affluent owners of detached houses who pay the most property tax and grumble about it. Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC (“A Better City”) party, who won the 2022 election, understand their base: they froze property taxes this year after abolishing the living wage for city employees.
- Jacobin Read
Student Protests Are Making Their Mark on Serbia’s Election
Sitting in the trashy garden of a café frequented by students near an iconic Belgrade market, we are, naturally, discussing the elections. A somewhat hippieish father of a friend complains that the situation is terrible, that he’s never seen such polarization, and that decades-old colleagues are barely on speaking terms. He tells me he tried to lighten the atmosphere, joking “Guys, I am neutral, you can relax, you can all be yourselves with me.” His remark didn’t sit well with either camp.
- Jacobin Read
How Charles Manson Became a Hero of the American Far Right
The person most responsible for the recognition of Charles Manson as a quasi-icon of the twenty-first-century radical right is James Mason. Born in 1952, Mason is a lifelong white supremacist activist who joined George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party as a teen, then Joseph Tommasi’s more radical National Socialist Liberation Front, then became even more extreme after he took over that party’s newsletter, Siege (1980–86).
- Jacobin Read
Joe Biden’s Team Is Rewriting Its History on Gaza
After three years of slaughter in Gaza, some leading officials of the Biden administration are trying to justify their record. Figures like Antony Blinken and Brett McGurk have been on media tours recently giving their version of the story. Meanwhile, Akbar Shahid Ahmed has been working to provide a serious account of what really happened.
- Jacobin Read
Why Our Obsession With Extending Lifespans Is a Distraction
For just over five years, Bryan Johnson has been spending more than $2 million a year trying not to die. The American technology millionaire has turned his body into an elaborate — or, depending on your perspective, recklessly extravagant — experiment in human longevity, subjecting himself to extensive medical testing, controlled nutrition, rigid sleeping schedules, and experimental interventions. At forty-nine, he employs an entire medical team to scrutinize the smallest changes in his physiology.
- Jacobin Read
The Wargame Is Wretched Propaganda
Politicians are often accused of playing toy soldiers. Rarely, however, do they actually do it. The Wargame is an exception. Sky TV’s new four-part docudrama, which features a cast of prominent former ministers and securocrats, follows the British government as it responds to an imminent attack from Russia.
- Jacobin Read
Neukölln, the Berlin District Where the Left Broke Through
Amid resounding recent victories for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), on September 20 Germany’s socialist party Die Linke bucked the trend with a spectacular victory in Berlin. It dominated the campaign with its program of ending cuts, capping rents, and socializing housing companies, leaving other parties to respond to the popular demand that Berliners had confirmed in a 2021 referendum. The monster victory for the AfD in Sachsen-Anhalt further galvanized Berlin’s diverse urban working class to express opposition to the fascists.
- Jacobin Read
A Portrait of Eugene Debs for Today’s Left
You can tell the capitalist system is in trouble when Americans start talking about Eugene Debs. Although the popular image of the great labor and socialist leader has ebbed and flowed since his death a century ago this month, our New Gilded Age has placed him back in the spotlight. Progressive politicians and labor activists, including United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and union organizer Jaz Brisack, quote his speeches with regularity.
- Jacobin Read
In Russia’s Election, Nothing Happened, but Things Got Worse
Between September 18 and 20, Russians voted for a new State Duma, along with several regional parliaments and governors. According to the Central Election Commission, turnout reached 59.8 percent, up eight points since 2021. The result was the one everyone expected.
- Jacobin Read
All Aboard Eugene Debs’s Red Special
In 1908, on one of his five presidential runs, legendary socialist organizer Eugene Debs embarked on a whirlwind tour across the country on his own train, the Red Special. His mission: spread the socialist gospel to any American who would hear him out.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
- Jacobin Read
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.
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