Jacobin

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.

Larry McMurtry’s 1985 cowboy epic is finding a new generation of readers online. Its revival raises an awkward question for publishing: What happened to the big, bloody, male-coded literary novel and to the men who used to read and write them?

Robert Kramer’s films captured the New Left from the inside, from its promising beginning through its painful unraveling. He faded from view mostly because his work was so hard to see. In our new age of political volatility, he deserves a revival.

The Phillips curve holds that low unemployment drives inflation, meaning that controlling prices requires putting workers out of work. Its continuing influence shows how power over the money supply shapes class power.

At its best, the Left has championed the cause of freedom against both political and economic tyranny. Does the spread of scourges like social media addiction and sports betting justify more restrictions on individual liberty than we’ve typically accepted?

Religious identity has become an unusually prominent battleground in next year’s French election. During the pope’s visit to the country last week, left-wing France Insoumise resisted ultraconservative attempts to monopolize Catholic identity.

While unions, churches, and leagues are losing members, fraternities and sororities are drowning in new recruits. Their staying power comes from bundling belonging with elite advantage.

After years of warnings that the war in Ukraine could spiral into a full-on Russia-Europe conflagration, the conflict has reached a point where this is a real possibliity. It’s a prospect that threatens not just European lives but the entire globe.

J. D. Vance’s spiritual memoir is short on the spiritual and long on hypocrisy, oscillating between complaints about “the elites” and half-baked policy ideas that show little engagement with the Catholic social teaching he professes to admire.

It’s been 100 years since the opening of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau, but the Alternative für Deutschland wants to cut funding from centenary events. The winner of recent state elections, the far-right party labels Bauhaus un-German.

Moral debates about sex work often overlook the wider effect of online porn in shaping our digital existence. More than just a corner of the internet, it has profoundly shaped how platforms keep our attention, and how we present ourselves online.

The message from United Auto Workers members in their recent internal elections, in which President Shawn Fain and his slate are poised to win big, is clear, argues former Fain Chief of Staff Chris Brooks: they want their union to keep fighting.

The rise of DSA over the last decade is one of the most striking developments in American politics. The group has successfully navigated the US electoral system but continues to face considerable challenges in rooting itself in the US working class.

Eric Hobsbawm was in Berlin when Adolf Hitler took power, in Paris at the Popular Front’s peak, and in the Communist Party when it all came down. Emile Chabal’s new biography follows a historian who always asked what remained possible after defeat.

Some commentators are claiming that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once supported Medicare for All and now merely backs a “public option.” Matt Bruenig explains why this is not true.

In studying with Anwar Shaikh, economist Howard Botwinick learned that Karl Marx’s account of capitalist competition is far richer than his critics assumed. That insight, Botwinick argues in an interview, offers the working class a road map to victory.

Pedro Sánchez’s coalition won reelection in 2023 based on a real record of measures to rein in the cost of living. Pulling off the same trick now may be much harder, after three years of institutional inertia.

The European Green Party rushed to condemn the Greens of England and Wales when they voted to support a single democratic state in Palestine. It has never condemned the German Greens for supporting Israel’s genocidal violence against the Palestinians.

The politically driven attempt to deport war critic Leonid Ragozin from Latvia shows that liberal democracies are starting to employ the very Trumpist and Putinist measures they claim to despise.

The start of the school year drew attention to disastrously dilapidated classrooms in the Paris suburbs. Rather than listen to students’ complaints, the government has responded with violent repression.