An Unusable Past
Nicolas Grospierre’s photographs of collective farm buildings in Israel and the Baltic states reveal these communities’ utopian dreams — and their uncomfortable colonial underpinnings.
Blog
Hayao Miyazaki’s Red Roots
Studio Ghibli is not the Japanese Disney but the anti-Disney. Dreamed up by animators with roots in the Japanese communist movement, its films celebrate creative labor and human solidarity against capitalism and war.
Talking Rural America With Thomas Frank
Urban elites’ contempt for rural America is centuries old — but so is rural populist resistance.
Country Music Doesn’t Deserve Its Conservative Reputation
Musician Nick Shoulders talks to Jacobin about a genre that has long broadcast the struggles and aspirations of working people.
We Who Plowed the Prairies
Pastoral visions of farmwork don’t square with the reality of what it means to live in rural areas today.
Peace to the Huts, War on the Palaces!
For thousands of years, organized peasants have challenged rural exploitation — and even toppled governments.
Communist Cowboys
The Eastern Bloc’s “Ostern” filmmaking turned the mythology of the American Western on its head.
The UAW Heads South
The South has long remained a nearly impenetrable citadel for labor. Fresh off the success of its Big Three strike, the United Auto Workers wants to storm the castle.
Communing With Nature
After stints in Haight-Ashbury, as many as one million hippies headed for the hills. Some of their communes have persisted into the present.
The People’s Propaganda
In the golden age of American political cartooning, Populist artists lampooned injustices that their contemporaries overlooked.
Issue 54: Dossier
The language of land management.