The Left in Purgatory
Socialists in the United States are stuck. How do we become masters of our own fate?
Issue No. 44 | Winter 2022
Socialists in the United States are stuck. How do we become masters of our own fate?
Without a radical change in its relationship to working-class voters, the Democratic Party is hurtling toward doom.
In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was heralded as the millennial successor to Bernie Sanders. Today, some on the Left are starting to have doubts.
Like our leading figures, our new left is young and highly educated. Is that tanking our chances at building a mass working-class coalition?
Die Linke was founded on the promise of unifying Germany’s left and rejuvenating what was once the world’s leading socialist movement. Fifteen years later, it’s struggling to survive.
Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum is German neoliberalism in one building — retrograde, pompous, and built on the ruins of socialist modernism.
Spinning comedy out of misery, Joel and Ethan Coen have spent decades telling the story of American failure. No wonder they’re so drawn to American socialists.
Peter Jackson’s Get Back, the latest revisionist Beatles product, has glimpses of the political moment that made the band possible — and how distant we are from it today.
The 1980s BBC series The History Man was a venomous takedown of academic pseudo-radicals. How does it stand up today?
Economic crises have reshaped the modern world. Economic historian Adam Tooze tells Jacobin how the coronavirus pandemic will upend global politics and commerce for decades to come.
India Walton was set to become mayor of New York’s second-largest city. Then Buffalo’s establishment had their say.
Born at the height of the Clinton era, the Working Families Party thought it had found a way to build a labor party in America. Today, it’s advancing progressive politics with a far narrower base than it expected.
In our era, state capacity is faltering, and the size and scope of NGO activity is expanding.
If everything is political, then nothing is political.
The “union label” ads of the 1970s are a reminder of how labor tried and eventually failed to win a battle for the airwaves.
In a world where the political is personal, we signal our political goodness — and hunt for political badness.
Stuck in the middle with you.