Jacobin

China’s university entrance exam is one of the most competitive in the world — a reflection of the cutthroat reality of the country’s labor market.

India’s civil liberties groups are largely made up of “concerned citizens” rather than the most oppressed groups in society. Their role in defending basic constitutional rights is increasingly under attack from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Soon after 9/11, world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein warned that US imperial decline was inevitable. But US leaders didn’t want to hear that their glory days were in the past, and they’ve managed that decline in the worst possible way.

Karl Marx mocked utopians for writing recipes for the cookshops of the future. But at their best, utopians emphasize hope without guarantees — a position that carves a middle path between blind optimism and the resigned inertia of “realism.”

In their heyday of radicalism in the 1980s, Germany’s Greens were a pacifist, ecological voice. Now the party backs higher military spending not just as a defense strategy but as the linchpin of Germany’s economic revival.

Since the 19th century, the choice between independence and incorporation into the US has been a central issue for Puerto Rican politics. Support for the left-wing Puerto Rico Independence Party is now surging among the country’s youth.

Karl Marx’s ideal society is taken far less seriously than his critique of capitalism. But he did offer a rich account of what a better society would look like — one built around meaningful work, mutual care, and human flourishing.

Keiko Fujimori has become Peru’s president after another narrow election runoff. While in past contests she tiptoed around her father’s authoritarian record, this time she capitalized on his strongman image.

The new sci-fi film The End of Oak Street is about a 1982 suburban cul-de-sac taken over by dinosaurs. It’s Steven Spielberg nostalgia recycled into something barely alive.

The Trump administration is attempting to criminalize union members for organizing against its immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year. That’s because it correctly sees labor as a threat to its authoritarian designs.

The current crisis in the world order isn’t just about Donald Trump ignoring multilateral institutions. The US has long broken the rules — the real change is that Washington is losing its ability to lay down the law to other states.

Twilight of the Dons, historian Colin Kidd’s dazzling study of Britain’s elite universities, opens a window into a lost world in which, for a brief period, mass democracy combined with the idea of scholarship as a vocation open to anyone.

The director of American Doctor talks to Jacobin about her documentary on three US volunteer physicians who worked in a besieged Gaza hospital — and the wall of disbelief that met them when they came home and told others what they saw.

Five million people have lost food assistance since Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Meanwhile, ICE has received $113 billion from the GOP’s reconciliation bills — and spent just 12% of it.

The working-class voters who delivered Donald Trump’s 2024 victory have steadily slipped away in 2026 according to new polling. But few of them are switching to the Democrats.

Earlier this year in Minnesota, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security infiltrated and surveilled meetings of nonprofit groups and two of the US’s biggest labor unions, the Communications Workers of America and the Service Employees International Union.

Everybody loves summertime. But from climate change to budget cuts on public spaces like parks and pools to a lack of vacation time, capitalism is increasingly robbing us of our summer fun.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, who retired this year from Cornell University, has studied how workers win unions, how employers stop them, and how organizers can learn from one another for four decades. Her findings have changed how unions think about organizing.

Next month’s state elections in Germany could see the Alternative für Deutschland reach power for the first time. The ruling Christian Democrats seem paralyzed and are increasingly imitating their rising far-right rival.

At the same time that the Supreme Court is making the political landscape less competitive, a series of corporate law developments are concentrating power within the commanding heights of the data economy.