Jacobin

The primacy of the dollar is considered one of the pillars of American might, conferring exorbitant financial privileges and coercive power. But what maintains the global dollar system is in fact inseparable from what’s driving American domestic decline.

Molly Crabapple tells the story of the Jewish Labor Bund, which built a mass socialist movement in the Russian Empire and interwar Poland — fighting pogroms, rejecting Zionism, and insisting that Jewish liberation was inseparable from everyone else’s.

Economist Daron Acemoglu wants liberal democracy to connect with working people’s material interests and political power. His case for institutional renewal should be taken seriously, but it needs a fuller account of class, war, and worker organization.

In an extensive new study supported by Jacobin, more than 40,000 voters evaluated nearly 800,000 candidate profiles. The results show how progressives could rebuild their working-class support.

US leaders have generally sought to cloak their imperialism with euphemistic rhetoric, but Trump has dropped any pretense about his shameless resource grabs. As the US grows weaker on the world stage, it’s also becoming more brazen and more dangerous.

The military dictatorship in Myanmar has lost control over much of the country to rebel forces. The status of the Rohingya people, victims of genocide, will be a crucial test of the new political order that appears to be taking shape.

Pundits have widely explained the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in terms of cultural backlash or the eastern German psyche. Yet its rise is no passing disturbance but a symptom of a much deeper crisis in Europe’s social model.

Sunday’s Swedish election saw the center-left bloc narrowly defeat the outgoing right-wing government. While the Social Democrats are set to lead a new coalition, the once-mighty party has continued to lose its historic base.

Talk of defending civilizational values looms large in the thinking of Vladimir Putin and his allies. Russia’s elites both define themselves against the West and imitate US conservatives’ culture-warrior assumptions.

Americans across the partisan divide seem increasingly fed up with school voucher schemes, which funnel public funds to unaccountable private entities. Even Betsy DeVos’s lobbying group is getting nervous about the voucher backlash.

The question isn’t whether the mainstream economic consensus on inflation is right or wrong. It’s clearly wrong. The question is, can we do anything about it?

Though little remembered now, at the turn of the 20th century Cleveland’s socialists heroically fought Samuel Gompers for leadership of the American Federation of Labor — putting forward a revolutionary alternative to Gompers’s conservative unionism.

A new survey of 6,100 voters finds that persuadable voters respond to plain talk about rent, groceries, and corruption — and tune out when Democrats lecture them about who’s dividing them.

Cleaning work is often called low-skilled, perhaps because it’s usually done by low-waged women. In an interview, a cleaner in the European Parliament and a hospital cleaner explain why their work should be more valued and better paid.

Steelworks 80, a planned steel expansion that brought workers to northern Sweden, was derailed by a global downturn. Its story shows how communities built around the promise of investment are left with the consequences when it disappears.

Nobody seems to care anymore about the fears and threats that originally motivated the war on terror. Yet 25 years after September 11, 2001, that war continues to infect American life at home and abroad, more violently and menacingly than ever.

Hollywood’s unions fight for tax credits and jobs but not for the movies themselves. That has to change. Unions can take up policies that could save American cinema not only as a way to make a living but as a vital art form.

Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party styles itself as populist and anti-elite. Yet it maintains close relationships with tech elites like Elon Musk, who was among the first to congratulate the party on Sunday’s election win.

Americans’ muted reaction to the quarter-century anniversary of 9/11 reveals a waning zeal for the American imperial project. We tolerate it only because we believe it can’t end. But it can.

Donald Trump and the Republicans want you to be terrified of socialists. But they really don’t want to talk about our core economic policies, because the moment you spell those policies out, they sound pretty good.