A Marxist in Keynes’ Court

Maurice Dobb was one of John Maynard Keynes’ favorite students. He was also a committed Marxist.

Against Tipping

So long as the karmic tip jar clouds our perceptions, the insane injustice of an underpaid labor force reimbursed through only the guilty feelings of their coworkers will persist.

Back to the Fragments

A socialist-feminist classic appeared just as Thatcherism began pulverizing the Left. Today, should it be read as historical document or a blueprint for action?

Beyond Windsor

Queer theory fought the marriage equality movement and lost. What comes next will require scholars to come out of their journals and into the streets.

Degendering Value

Gendered conceptions of credit and reward are written into the structures of intellectual property law.

Don’t Mention the War

With a vacuous social vision, economics confronts the “return of the social question” woefully unprepared.

Edward Snowden and the American Condition

Law and lawyers can’t save us from the creeping police state – but politics might.

From Bandung to BRICs

Vijay Prashad’s Poorer Nations asks whether the Global South can pose a credible alternative to neoliberal development.

Locked Out

With roots in the laws of seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, intellectual property protections go back to the beginnings of capitalism itself.

Outside the New China

The exploitative relationship between city and countryside pervades Chinese life. Nowhere is inequality in access to public goods clearer than in the country’s urban education system.

Property and Theft

The overthrow of all intellectual property leaves unanswered the question of how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists.

Reading Material

Introducing the Jacobin books section.

She Came to Riot

The memory of riot grrrl deepens the divide between cultural and material feminism, hobbling critiques of inequality by mistaking self-improvement for revolution.

Silent Majority Music

To put it most unkindly, trap music is adult contemporary for the prosumer age.

The Fantastic Failure of The Lone Ranger

At least Verbinski tries to bring intelligent, politically-savvy revisionist westerns back into style.

The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk

In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by the privileged, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers supported the war effort. That memory is wrong.