In an essay penned shortly before his death, David Graeber argued that post-pandemic, we can’t slip back into a reality where the way our society is organized — to serve every whim of a small handful of rich people while debasing and degrading the vast majority of us — is seen as … | Continue reading
Under capitalism, automation destroys jobs. In a socialist society, it could free us from work and offer untold leisure to all. | Continue reading
A team of leading Finnish researchers had a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine ready last May, which could have allowed countries all over the world to inoculate their populations without paying top dollar. Yet rather than help the initiative, Finland's government sided with Big Pharma … | Continue reading
On Thursday, Australians woke to find Facebook had banned all news on the platform. Liberal PM Scott Morrison has refused to back down over the laws that triggered the move. Beneath the rhetoric, Morrison’s stand is about serving the interests of News Corp, not saving democracy. | Continue reading
The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s socialist Yugoslavia, inspiring thousands of people to build versions in their own homes. The idea behind them was simple — to make technology available to everyone. | Continue reading
Tech workers occupy a contradictory location in the American class structure. On the one hand, many are well paid and identify both as professionals and with management. On the other, the proletarianized aspects of their work can offer opportunities to seize for organizing as wor … | Continue reading
The arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has sparked mass protests against Vladimir Putin's authoritarianism. Navalny's journalism has highlighted the cronyism of Russia's elites — but his chameleon-like shifts between liberalism and anti-immigrant nationalism show … | Continue reading
Self-help gurus and positive psychologists tell us that we should be coaching ourselves to happiness. The painted-on smiles they want to sell us are a pathetic substitute for actually improving our societies. | Continue reading
The online pranksters behind the great GameStop bubble of 2021 are probably going to lose a lot of money. But they’ve done the world a service by reminding us of the utter uselessness of the stock market, an institution that serves no purpose besides making a small number of unde … | Continue reading
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promised Africa a “Green Revolution” to fight hunger and poverty. It hasn't worked — but it has upped corporate agriculture’s profits. Local farmers are being left empty-handed, and hunger is rising. | Continue reading
We can’t talk about the rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump, reactionary and bizarre conspiracy theories like QAnon, and the increasingly pervasive sense of nihilism across global politics without talking about neoliberalism. | Continue reading
Video games like CD Projekt Red’s forthcoming Cyberpunk 2077 are increasingly made under grueling working conditions — a particular irony for a game adopting the cyberpunk genre which, at its best, critiques the dystopian power abuses that so starkly characterize our world. | Continue reading
The entrepreneurial reality show Shark Tank is saturated with the absurdity of twenty-first-century capitalism. But watching it, you can’t help but think about how its basic premise — helping ordinary people with extraordinary ideas implement them on a wide scale — could be carri … | Continue reading
After a $200 million propaganda blitz, California voters passed the Uber- and Lyft-backed Proposition 22 on Tuesday, permanently excluding online “platform” workers from labor protections. Unsurprisingly, the companies are now talking about extending such legislation nationally. | Continue reading
In its search for the perfect mind-control technique, the CIA carried out horrifying tests on unwitting humans. The story of programs like MK-Ultra is a chilling look at how the US government turned its own citizens into guinea pigs — and destroyed lives in the process. | Continue reading
Netflix’s The Social Dilemma tells a horror story about how social media is creating political extremism and driving children into depression and addiction. But it never even hints that these ills have causes outside of our use of Facebook and Snapchat — and the possibility that … | Continue reading
It is not enough to question the decisions, the justices, or even the structure of the current court — we need to challenge, as Abraham Lincoln did, the foundation of its power to determine the law. | Continue reading
Five lessons from a socialist computing project in Salvador Allende’s Chile. | Continue reading
Though embraced by the likes of Glenn Beck, Thomas Paine was the American Revolution's most radical figure. | Continue reading
The Right wants you to believe that a coddled, overly sensitive left is propping up cancel culture. But punitive, hyper-surveillant ways of interacting online are built into the structure of privately owned social media companies, and they’re practiced across the political spectr … | Continue reading
Practically everything TikTok critics and China hawks say about the country’s data collection applies to the United States and its tech firms, too. We should be finding ways to protect privacy and free speech from governments and corporations everywhere — including our own. | Continue reading
Open container laws criminalize working-class people and make public life less fun. We need to legalize public drinking. | Continue reading
The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s socialist Yugoslavia, inspiring thousands of people to build versions in their own homes. The idea behind them was simple — to make technology available to everyone. | Continue reading
When Steven Pinker insists that the world is getting better and better, much of his case is based on claims about declining global poverty. But a new report from the UN’s top poverty expert dismantles that argument, showing that global poverty has gone nearly unchanged over the l … | Continue reading
Why do capitalists hate full employment? Because it weakens their power over workers. | Continue reading
US police have used rubber bullets against civilian protesters on a massive scale the past week. These projectiles actually originated in Northern Ireland — and their history is anything but | Continue reading
During yesterday's protests against the police murder of George Floyd, Amazon declared that it | Continue reading
Dave Rubin very much wants you to think of him as a serious man of ideas. But his new book shows him to be a shallow thinker who doesn’t even understand his own ideas. | Continue reading
Like many during this pandemic, my coworkers and I were told on September 11, 2001, to possibly risk our lives by staying on the job. Instead, we walked out. | Continue reading
The tycoons of Big Tech are following in the footsteps of their Gilded Age predecessors, using a facade of social concern to cover over their depredations. We need to depose the new Robber Barons. | Continue reading
Platforms like Airbnb claim to be building online “communities” — even as their business undermines the real communities in cities. But the history of cooperatives shows that it really is possible to democratize the services we use — so long as it’s connected to a wider redistrib … | Continue reading
Marx is often remembered as a political economist or philosopher. But he made his mark as a journalist. | Continue reading
The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity for us to think again about Marx’s idea of human freedom. As David Harvey writes in Jacobin, emergency steps to get through the crisis also show us how we could build a different society that’s not beholden to capita … | Continue reading
A universal basic income would shore up the market. We need ideas that shrink it. | Continue reading
Author of Broadway hit The Women, the Vanity Fair managing editor Clare Boothe Luce was a dogged anticommunist. As US ambassador to Italy, she worked tirelessly to keep the Left out of office — and set a precedent for Washington’s meddling in democracies abroad. | Continue reading
Whether in China or the United States, tech companies are teaming up with governments to boost surveillance amid the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a slippery slope that threatens to bring more civil liberties violations and more power for profit-hungry tech companies. | Continue reading
From his hopes in human-dolphin socializing to his claims that UFOs were sent by alien communists, J. Posadas’s quixotic beliefs are today legendarized in countless memes. But a new biography suggests that the Argentinian Trotskyist was not such an outlier — and explains why his … | Continue reading
On Monday night, workers at a Chicago Amazon warehouse joined a nationwide wave of walkouts over what they say is management’s inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic. One of the action’s organizers spoke to Jacobin about it. | Continue reading
Amazon workers are preparing to walk out of a Staten Island warehouse, claiming that COVID-19 is rampant there. “My job description says have a high school diploma and lift fifty pounds. It doesn't say risk my life working during a pandemic.” | Continue reading
Amazon workers are preparing to walk out of a Staten Island warehouse, claiming that COVID-19 is rampant there. “My job description says have a high school diploma and lift fifty pounds. It doesn't say risk my life working during a pandemic.” | Continue reading
Microchips, mobile spyware, and perpetual monitoring are all part of capital’s fantasy of twenty-first-century scientific management — a future in which our movements, impulses, and rhythms are perfectly adapted to the needs of profit-making. We need to fight back and regain our … | Continue reading
One hundred years ago, Britain nationalized hundreds of its pubs — and invented a better drinking culture. | Continue reading
In the world of philanthropy, George Soros is about as good as it gets. But allowing plutocrats, even progressive ones, to decide what's best for the rest of us is fundamentally unjust and undemocratic. | Continue reading
Six Californias? Having one is bad enough. | Continue reading
Google and other giant corporations still aren’t paying their fair share of taxes. We need to demand policies that redistribute our collectively generated wealth. | Continue reading
Without massive public investment, there would be no internet. Bernie Sanders's broadband plan would take the first steps towards returning the internet to its rightful owners, the public, so everyone can have reliable, high-speed broadband. | Continue reading
Generational politics is a socialism of fools. | Continue reading
As data-mining companies and government decision-making edge ever closer, it is not just our digital privacy that’s at risk, but our very capacity to organize in solidarity. | Continue reading