Daniel Denvir is the author of All-American Nativism and the host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio.
As oil became a key energy source in the 20th century, Western companies backed by the US and UK monopolized production in the Global South. But in the age of decolonization, newly independent nations fought for a different global energy order.
President Joe Biden has proclaimed a break with the economic orthodoxy of recent decades in favor of what he calls “Bidenomics.” But how real is Biden’s break with neoliberalism?
Since the 1970s, many colleges and universities have become predatory financial giants, while mountains of student debt pile up and academic work becomes ever more precarious. An ascendant academic labor movement may be key to reversing these trends.
Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has uncovered a tradition of African American radicalism that was — and is — a crucial part of the American left’s history. He talks to Jacobin about the need to connect struggles against racism and class oppression.
In colonial regimes, dominant conceptions of private property developed alongside racial hierarchies.
Before tragically dying at age 32, Chris Chitty, a brilliant historian of gay life and capitalism, produced an illuminating unfinished book, Sexual Hegemony. In it, he provided a longue durée account of the development of homophobia and homosexuality.
The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci left behind a rich and complicated legacy of thought on socialist strategy for transforming the world. Historian Michael Denning guides us through the great — and misunderstood — thinker.
Some thinkers are arguing that capitalism as Marx defined it is over, and we’re entering something like digital neo-feudalism instead. Not true, argues Evgeny Morozov. To understand how capitalism operates today, Marxists have to drop the factory bias.
The US housing system is organized around subsidized private homeownership and underfunded public housing. But during the New Deal, leftists had a different vision: beautiful social housing for all but the rich.
Over the past two centuries, US imperial interventions have had a devastating impact on the peoples of Latin America. Those interventions have also played a crucial role in US domestic politics, enabling new power blocs to cohere and develop their strategies.
The Bush administration’s war on terror meted out unthinkable violence in the Middle East while imposing an atmosphere of repression and nativism at home. It was the perfectly malignant petri dish for helping produce Donald Trump.
Health care workplaces have replaced steel mills and auto plants as the nation’s big employers. But while industrial workers once had mighty unions, hospital workers have struggled by comparison to win representation and good contracts.
The great labor historian Michael Denning reflects on what Antonio Gramsci’s work has to tell us today.
Inflation is far from being a boring economic concept — it’s a question of who gets what in society, and how much power workers have versus bosses and shareholders.
In order to put social housing back on the agenda in American politics, we first have to understand how public housing was destroyed — especially by Bill Clinton’s Hope VI program.
During the New Deal, right-wing businesspeople were furious that their authority was being challenged in the workplace and in society. So they started organizing. And that’s the origin story of the modern conservative movement.
Neoliberalism is embedded in the European Union’s DNA. But for the continent’s left, there are few good alternatives.
Marxists have a powerful critique of exploitation in the capitalist workplace, but our analysis can’t stop there. A comprehensive analysis of capitalism, Nancy Fraser argues, must also account for the social relations that make the official economy possible.
A group of 20th-century intellectuals saw the democratic nation-state as a threat to private property. Their solution: shifting power to unaccountable international bodies like the WTO, helping pave the way to what we now call “neoliberalism.”
Once an arm of the radical labor movement, the ACLU now defends free speech as a neutral principle — including the anti-union speech of bosses and the political speech of corporations. The story of the ACLU’s evolution is the story of liberalism itself.