Happy Birthday, Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was born 200 years ago today. We should thank him for helping out his friend Karl Marx — but also for the critique of capitalism he produced in his own right.

How Postwar West Germany Used Support for Israel to Whitewash Its Image

In 1952, West Germany paid reparations to Israel — not as compensation to Holocaust survivors, but in the form of supplies to the Israeli state. Coming at the same time as denazification reached its end, the move had little to do with moral atonement, and everything to do with whitewashing West Germany’s international image.

Poland’s Massive Pro-Choice Protests Can Change the Whole Political Agenda

In recent days, Poland has seen its biggest protests in decades, with strikes and demonstrations against the harshened abortion ban. As MP Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk tells Jacobin, the movement is a lightning rod for frustrations at the country’s hard-right government — and can finally put women’s hardships at the center of the political agenda.

Italians Need Measures to Stop COVID-19, But They Need Income Support, Too

Faced with soaring case numbers, the Italian government has imposed tougher restrictions on businesses and social gatherings. Yet as millions face a miserable dilemma between personal safety and financial ruin, protesters have begun to defy the curfew — a sign of the fraying social consensus behind shutdown measures.

Rossana Rossanda Wanted a Party of and for Workers in Struggle

Rossana Rossanda died last month after decades of commitment to first the Italian Communist Party and then the dissident manifesto group. She insisted that a left party should be shaped by the demands of workers’ everyday struggles.

Karl Kautsky Was Once a Revolutionary

Lenin’s famous denunciation of Karl Kautsky as a “renegade” has long discouraged Marxists from actually engaging with the German-Austrian socialist’s writings. But if the Bolshevik leader sharply criticized Kautsky’s retreats, this was also because of his great admiration for his earlier work — a revolutionary Marxism that lay decisive stress on the battle for democracy.

A Human Rights Contradiction

Thirty years since reunification, the former East Germany is routinely presented as a “second German dictatorship” where human rights were all but nonexistent. Yet when that state took sides with Third World causes and antifascists in the West, it frequently used the language of human rights — an expression of solidarity that often clashed with realities in East Germany itself.

When the Left Grew Up

When Jacobin was founded in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Left was dominated by academic jargon, sectarian organizations, and samba bands. Ten years later, we have a long way to go, but it’s become a lot easier to talk about socialism as a real political force.

Deutschland 89 Shows the Scrap for Power After the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The new series in the Deutschland trilogy starts in the hours before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But there’s little time for either joy or commiseration — everyone’s too busy trying to lay their hands on East Germany’s assets.

Rossana Rossanda (1924–2020)

Rossana Rossanda, who died on Sunday at age 96, was an anti-fascist partisan and cofounder of Italy’s il manifesto newspaper. A communist till the last, she insisted that the Left must defend its own identity — and unflinchingly take sides with the exploited and oppressed.

Ho Chi Minh’s Time in Rio de Janeiro Helped Make Him a Revolutionary

Before he became Vietnam’s foremost communist, Ho Chi Minh traveled across Europe and the Americas as a ship’s cook. In Rio de Janeiro, he encountered a world of inequality, but also of defiant class solidarity — an experience that helped forge one of the twentieth century’s greatest revolutionaries.

Amadeo Bordiga Was the Last Communist to Challenge Stalin to His Face

Founder of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921, Amadeo Bordiga is little known today, even among scholars of that country’s Marxist traditions. Fifty years after his death, the first English-language collection of his writings shows why Bordiga shouldn’t be overlooked.

“There’s No Populist Instruction Manual for How You Nationalize Amazon”

From Podemos in Spain to Bernie Sanders’s bid for the nomination, recent left-populist campaigns inspired widespread hopes only to fall short. But overwhelming the fortresses of neoliberalism demands a long-term strategy — and mass mobilizations that last beyond the excitement of an election campaign.

We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany

Liberals say that socialists who don’t support Joe Biden are “like the German Communists who refused to fight Hitler.” The analogy doesn’t hold up — and it’s also historically illiterate.

The Rise of Italy’s Populist Right Is a Bleak Warning From the Recent Past

In early 1990s Italy, the retreat of the Left and mounting popular cynicism toward politics allowed a new radical right to begin building its hegemony. For all its idiosyncrasies, the Italy of those years looks increasingly like a mirror of our own future — a country where fascist talking points became normalized and even mild reformism was decreed illegitimate.

Poland’s Far Right Is Distorting the Debate on Welfare — and Winning

Ahead of his reelection on Sunday, Polish president Andrzej Duda claimed that “LGBT ideology” was a threat “worse than Soviet communism.” Together with his homophobic offensive, Duda successfully played on Poles’ fears over the economy — fusing a reactionary culture war with the promise to defend families’ benefits.

How Jewish Socialists Fought to Stop the Pogroms of the Russian Civil War

The Civil War of 1917–21 brought the third wave of pogroms in the former Russian Empire, mostly perpetrated by the counterrevolutionary forces. But even some Red Army units committed antisemitic atrocities — and independent Jewish socialists played a decisive role in forcing the Soviet state to stop them.

The New Thatcherites

“Today’s Working-Class Heroes Should Be at the Heart of Tomorrow’s Society”

European leaders won’t consider debt cancellation or abandon the dogma of neoliberal austerity. Coronavirus shows that well-funded public services are essential for our survival — austerity is a matter of life and death. We need an alternative.

Vladimir Lenin’s Time in England Would Shape Him Forever

After he left Siberia in 1900, Lenin would spend much of the next decade in London. He didn’t much like the food — but his time in the émigré milieu would help make him the revolutionary he was.