Jacobin

It is received wisdom that Ronald Reagan played “Pink Houses” and “Born in the USA” at his rallies because he thought he could drain these songs of their meaning. A new book explains how heartland rock came to appeal to left- and right-wing fans alike.

The Left can’t sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. If AOC chooses not to run for president, Eric Blanc argues that socialists should run a working-class candidate — even an unknown one — who can inject anti-billionaire politics into the race.

Federally qualified health centers are an essential source of medical care for poor and working-class Americans, especially in rural areas and neighborhoods of color. Medicaid cuts in Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill could shut them down.

Work under capitalism sucks, and Gen Z’s disillusionment with the labor market is justified. But work itself is socially necessary and the only way to transform it is through collective power, not withdrawal.

M. N. Pokrovsky was the first scholar to present a Marxist view of Russian history. He became a very influential figure after the 1917 revolution, but the rise of Stalinism meant that he was posthumously written out of the history books.

You were born on the wrong continent. Yes, the United States has a greater GDP per capita than Western Europe. But that GDP has not translated into broader prosperity in time and well-being for ordinary workers.

To address the US’s severe inequality, we can and should raise taxes on the rich. But we can also restructure markets so that they don’t produce such unequal incomes in the first place, by reining in corporate power and our predatory financial sector.

The Trump administration has already cut off Cuba’s access to oil. Now it’s attempting to starve the Cuban people, targeting the country’s capacity to grow, process, and import food — unless it buys from US corporations.

Half a century ago, feminists won Roe v. Wade with mass demonstrations and a sweeping national vision. A veteran of that movement argues that today’s fight requires the same strategy.

Patrick Deneen’s new book American Odyssey offers a compelling diagnosis of American dislocation. But its prescription mistakes nostalgia for the shared material commitments that make real community possible.

The globalization hype of the early 2000s has given way to an intense focus on national borders and competition between states. But the Left can’t afford to abandon its own form of internationalism based on the idea of universal human emancipation.

In 1906, US troops slaughtered up to 1,000 Moros at Bud Dajo in the southern Philippines, then called it a battle. Historian Kim Wagner explains how an empire can commit atrocities and how it teaches itself to forget them.

The Republican Party’s descent into chaos wasn’t Donald Trump’s doing. After successfully beating back the labor movement, the capitalist class became too disorganized to restrain the monster it created.

The Criterion Channel’s new Jonathan Demme retrospective is a chance to look beyond The Silence of the Lambs and rediscover one of America’s most adventurous, surprising, and charming filmmakers.

Runaway production isn’t just costing Hollywood jobs. It’s severing the intergenerational chains along which film crafts are passed down, replacing an industry town’s living inheritance with a dislocated workforce that must always start from scratch.

Before the votes had even been counted, some were treating last night’s Michigan result as a defeat for the Left. This is hard to square with the fact that well beyond Abdul El-Sayed’s win, progressives and socialists won major races.

Two University of California tech workers explain their unionization process — and how unions can help recapture the original promise of tech being used to better people’s lives rather than make the worst people in the world ever richer.

US police have long recruited military veterans with conditions that make them prone to violence and aggression. The problem is even worse when it comes to ICE, whose leaders valorize brutality and allow officers to kill with impunity.

People sometimes point to individual consumption to argue that the US is better off than Western Europe. But this comparison neglects how much more unequal the US is and how much more money we burn in our irrational private health care system.

The answer to union contracts being voted down is not for organizers to lower workers’ expectations. It’s to seize that vote as an opportunity to organize those expectations into collective power.