Jacobin

The Odyssey’s runaway success should green light more 70mm IMAX screens. But deindustrialization killed the skilled trades that built the projectors and the union jobs that ran them — so instead we’ll get resale markets and paywalled seats.

California Democrats just defied Gavin Newsom to endorse a billionaire wealth tax. The fight previews a national battle in which centrists push “pragmatic” alternatives that would barely make a dent in ultra-elites’ wealth or power.

The gig economy promised flexibility, but it also fudged one simple question: Who counts as an employee? This legal ambiguity undermines the rights of not just Amazon and Uber workers but the whole labor force.

To win change for working people, the Democratic Socialists of America should expand its vision of how to change our constitutional order. We can smash unaccountable executive and judiciary power even without having to amend the Constitution.

Milton Friedman argued that capitalism was democracy’s natural home. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The years-old joke goes that centrists fight the Left harder than they fight Donald Trump. It’s no longer a joke: after “rolling over and playing dead” after 2024, centrists like Third Way are now coming back alive — to fight against socialism.

When The Battle of Algiers premiered at the Venice Film Festival 60 years ago this month, the French delegation refused to attend. From the moment of its shooting, in the aftermath of Algeria’s liberation war, Gillo Pontecorvo’s film was deeply political.

The American carceral state is a machine of human rights abuses. But abolition hasn't convinced the country that it can end them. To build mass support for dismantling it, we need carceral minimalism.

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.