Jacobin

Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt state election was grim, with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland now close to power for the first time. The Left won’t beat it by defending the status quo. It needs organization and a future worth fighting for.

In Britain, healthy life expectancies between poor and rich regions can vary by as many as 20 years. Not only is this a social crisis; it is undermining trust in government and fueling the far right’s cynical politics.

Donald Trump Jr is raising money for Polymarket and lobbying to shield prediction markets from regulation. There should be a thick wall between Trump family business and the presidency. An event contract on whether one exists might be a good investment.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Canton–Hong Kong strike, one of the longest general strikes in history. The strike was a remarkable experiment in working-class democracy and its outcome shaped the course of 20th-century China.

Organized labor provides the essential mass base for a revived Left, while socialist politics provides the anti-capitalist horizon necessary to challenge capital. Vivek Chibber describes why the fate of the two are intertwined.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has signed an executive order creating the country’s first city agency dedicated explicitly to helping workers organize. He spoke with Jacobin about how the new office will advance his affordability agenda.

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The protest movement by young people in India has challenged the culture of fear that protects Narendra Modi’s Hindutva government. They are carving out the space for a future without Modi and his divisive authoritarian agenda.

As his war on Iran staggers on without victory in sight, Donald Trump is making overtures to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. But Kim is likely to demand a high price for any headline-grabbing summit after his previous experience of dealing with Trump.

Gloria Steinem died this week at age 92. The establishment’s favorite “radical” feminist, Steinem worked with the CIA to promote reactionary propaganda and helped direct the women’s liberation movement into a corporate-friendly, anti-socialist direction.

Work becomes less alienating when workers are given more autonomy, voice in workplace decisions, and jobs that develop skills. The Left needs a practical strategy for making jobs better now and transforming them in the future.

Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon has a good chance of making the runoff of the 2027 presidential election, but current polls offer little hope of outright victory. He’s counting on mobilizing habitual nonvoters and again proving the pollsters wrong.

South Africa’s racist regime murdered Ruth First, one of the leading activist-intellectuals of the anti-apartheid movement. First’s creative Marxist work on postcolonial Africa has outlived her assassins and is reaching a new audience today.

Public pension funds’ investment in private credit has soared, but it’s ever harder to tell where the money is flowing. The winners are private equity firms, who take advantage of our pension pots while hiding their activities, and fees, from view.

Ratko Mladić was a war criminal who died in detention last week in The Hague. But ahead of Serbia’s elections, President Aleksandar Vučić’s party shied away from criticizing the ethnonationalist general’s legacy.

The House just passed a resolution condemning the Democratic Socialists of America and socialism broadly. While it rehearses opposition to Stalinist authoritarianism, the bill’s real preoccupation is with socialists’ advocacy for expanded democracy.

California’s Proposition 40 would tax roughly 200 billionaires to fund health care for millions. Google cofounder Sergey Brin and friends have responded by inventing a new kind of pressure group: a lobby whose only client is the billionaire class itself.

The collapse of the GOP and Democratic establishments, and the rise of Donald Trump, have been driven by popular disillusionment with an economy that has for decades failed millions of people.

Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” have often been dismissed as tepid reformers. In fact, they were pragmatic champions of a world beyond capitalism who were laser-focused on organizing the working class.

Victor Serge’s legacy is not that of a man who abandoned socialism for anti-communism. It is that of a socialist thinker who refused every capitulation — to Stalinism, to liberalism, to despair — and who paid the full price of that refusal.