Jacobin

Bulgaria’s Socialist Party survived the end of communism, but in more recent years its neoliberal record and nationalist postures drove it toward defeat. New leader Krum Zarkov told Jacobin how he plans to turn the party toward a renewed socialism.

The Right has long owned ideas of government efficiency and cutting red tape, using them to carry out austerity. With the Commission on Government Efficiency (yes, COGE), Zohran Mamdani is attempting to claim the cause of good government for the Left.

Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism has become a touchstone for the Left on race and capitalism. August Nimtz argues that it misreads Karl Marx, erases black revolutionaries who were Marxists, and gives up on the working class.

Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising takes on the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 with his trademarked “gritty realist” style. The result is a glum plod through the 14th century. This is Robin Hood and His Morose Men when our times call for something much more.

Bourgeois economics treats capitalism as simply a market economy. Vivek Chibber traces how markets and private ownership worked under feudalism and under capitalism, and argues that socialism could use markets without restoring class society.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt blamed Israel for America’s Middle Eastern fiascos. But from Iraq to Iran, Washington has had its own reasons for war in the Gulf.

The disarmament of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and promised release of its prisoners offers a path to pacifying conflict in Turkey. It’s less clear if the Turkish state is ready to compromise with Kurds’ democratic demands.

Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi spent nearly three decades in Lebanon alongside the Palestinian resistance. Today, stripped of his passport and largely ignored at home, he’s making the most politically alive cinema in Japan at 87 years old.

A year since the Green Party of England and Wales elected Zack Polanski as leader, its membership has nearly quadrupled. His rise speaks to dissatisfaction with Labour but also the difficulty of building a deep-rooted alternative.

For Olivia Reingold, one of the most prominent and prolific contributors to The Free Press, defending Israel takes priority over the facts.

As concerns over inflation have mounted, borrowing costs for the US state have risen sharply. The bond market volatility is capital cracking down on the state’s debt-fueled spending spree, and workers are set to pay for the belt-tightening.

Vivek Chibber recommends five books that explain how empires work, how capitalism divides the world, and how Marxists have argued about imperialism.

Zach Cregger has never seen a Resident Evil movie, and that’s definitely for the better. His reboot is a fast, funny, scary blast of pure genre filmmaking and a darkly comic portrait of a society past collapse.

Claims that socialist party Die Linke threatens Jewish life in Berlin are shameful lies. Sadly, many desperate German politicians would rather make cheap antisemitism accusations than address the cost-of-living issues that drove Die Linke’s victory.

Human rights groups based in the West Bank have long documented Israel’s crimes — and that’s why they’re now subject to US sanctions. The US government is trying to make their work impossible in order to protect Israel from scrutiny.

According to philosopher Susan Neiman, the Left abandons the concept of good and evil at our own peril. If we refuse to use such morally freighted language, we concede it entirely to people who will use it for immoral ends.

On Sunday, Germany’s socialist party Die Linke won the Berlin elections for the first time. Like New York’s Zohran Mamdani, it beat the establishment parties by offering Berliners concrete action on rents and the cost of living.

Mitchell Abidor, author of Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, responds to his critics.

Plenty of contemporary comedy gazes upon American stupidity and concludes that Americans are stupid. The Chapo Trap House anthology Chunks suggests instead that people behave strangely because the world around them has become so strange.

Intelligence agencies like the CIA have been cultivating ties with universities for decades. They use money and influence to co-opt research and foster a benign image of their role at the expense of academic independence and freedom.