JACOBIN

OCTOBER 13. 2024

Rashid Khalidi: “Israel Is Acting With Full US Approval”

After 12 months, there’s no end in sight to Israel’s relentless onslaught against Gaza, now extended to Lebanon. Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how Israel and the US are working together to destroy all constraints on violence against civilians.

Video Games Are a Key Battleground in the Propaganda War

When video games went mainstream, the Pentagon realized their potential as a promotional tool, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on war-based games. Now the wheel has come full circle as they use game-style interfaces for real-life tools of war.

OCTOBER 12. 2024

Where the World Sees Crisis, Israel Sees Opportunity

Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah has been engaged in a limited war with Israel, which Netanyahu’s government escalated last month in a series of attacks on Lebanese society. Jacobin spoke to Lebanon scholar Joseph Daher about the dilemma the party faces.

Fredric Jameson and the Adventure of French Theory

After 1945, France produced an extraordinary wave of social theorists whose influence is still felt today. In his final work, Fredric Jameson discussed the excitement of watching this wave rise and fall and the conditions that made it possible.

OCTOBER 11. 2024

Efforts to Organize Amazon Are Advancing Across the US

Last week, Amazon warehouse workers in San Francisco organizing with the Teamsters marched on the boss to demand union recognition. It’s one of many organizing efforts targeting the logistics giant that are gaining ground across the country.

The Military-Entertainment Complex Is Bigger Than You Realize

The release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 offers a timely lens into the US military’s entanglement with the entertainment industries. The practice has a long history, stretching back to Top Gun, Rambo, and the anti-communist films of the McCarthyist period.

Leo Strauss Was a Theorist of Counterrevolution

Born 125 years ago this year, political philosopher Leo Strauss became a patron saint of US conservatism. One of the sharpest enemies of equality, Strauss’s work is an education in the antidemocratic spirit of the Right.

A Mutiny Against the West’s Order

Western hegemony is in decline, and the Left has to reckon with a new international balance of power. Peter Mertens, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, spoke to us about what the “mutinies” in the Global South mean for socialist strategy.

OCTOBER 10. 2024

The Labor Movement in Myanmar Is Facing Brutal Retaliation

Democratic forces in Myanmar have been fighting for more than three years against a military junta. Unions are a crucial part of the resistance movement, and the government has cracked down on them with deadly force.

More and More People Are Saying It: Scrap the Constitution

As the deep problems with the United States’ antimajoritarian institutions become clearer by the day, a growing chorus of voices is taking aim at our country’s exceptionally undemocratic Constitution.

OCTOBER 9. 2024

New Poll: Despite Blue-Collar Troubles, Harris Has Slight Lead Over Trump in Pennsylvania

A new battleground poll from Jacobin and the Center for Working-Class Politics / YouGov breaks down support by social class. Kamala Harris leads narrowly in Pennsylvania, but Donald Trump leads among unionized workers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Bucking the Media’s Palestine Consensus

The problem with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent grilling on Palestine by CBS News’s Tony Dokoupil isn’t that it was rude. It’s that Dokoupil’s questioning betrays a fundamental lack of concern for Palestinians’ basic humanity, shared across mainstream media.

Which Party Wants to Preserve the Status Quo?

When it comes to the economy, Democrats are now the party of the status quo, while Donald Trump’s GOP is making a misleading but radical-sounding pitch to upend the existing order in workers’ favor. It’s a fundamental role reversal in US politics.

The US’s Long History of Destabilizing Iran

Kamala Harris recently called Iran a “destabilizing, dangerous force” in the Middle East. The appropriate context for understanding this remark is the US’s own decades-long history of destabilizing Iran.