Jacobin

Israel has systematically destroyed 135,000 buildings across the Gaza Strip, an orgy of vandalism that has continued since the declaration of a ceasefire. It is obstructing all efforts at reconstruction with the aim of making life in Gaza impossible.

This summer, France again saw hellish heat waves and record-high wildfires. But the job of dealing with fires is increasingly pushed onto volunteers, as an austerity government refuses to invest in its professional firefighting force.

A recently unveiled statue in Jakarta is the city’s first public memorial to one of the many crimes of Suharto’s dictatorship. Its rarity exposes the culture of historical amnesia that’s making it easier to roll back democratic rights today.

The US government wrote off almost all the money it lent businesses during the pandemic. Now it’s wrecking credit scores and threatening to garnish paychecks to collect student loans. Debt can be forgiven easily enough — just not for the working class.

Over the short term, AI may create more jobs than it destroys. But bosses will use it to de-skill work and suppress wages unless workers make it a terrain of class struggle and fight to put it under public control.

War, dollar chaos, and soaring oil prices fueled the inflation of the 1970s. Workers and the welfare state took the blame. As war sends oil prices soaring again, that story still limits what we think society can afford.

Hoping to pressure Starbucks to finally sign a contract with its 12,000 unionized baristas, Starbucks Workers United has called for a boycott of the company. It is asking individuals as well as organizations and unions to stop patronizing the coffee giant.

Matt Johnson’s Tony takes a few pages from Anthony Bourdain’s best-selling memoir and turns them into a warm, character-driven film about a spoiled kid learning how to work. It’s fantastic.

The response of Colombia’s new leader, Abelardo de la Espriella, to a deadly earthquake has been tawdry beyond belief. The reactionary president has used the disaster for publicity stunts and will only accept overseas aid from his far-right allies.

The civil rights movement’s commitment to nonviolence wasn’t just moral but also strategic, based on a calculation of how the movement could best exert power. No practitioner of that nonviolence was more effective and disciplined than Rev. James Lawson.

Employers have long put customers to work watching and judging workers. With the development of technology like Ray-Ban Meta glasses, now customers have new surveillance tools of their own.

Donald Trump’s trade demands, which would have killed off whole sectors of the productive economy, like auto, were impossible to accept. The negotiations’ collapse could open space for democratic industrial strategy that rejects free trade.

France’s first presidential debate on Thursday was hosted by employers’ group Medef. Entrepreneurs laughed when left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon called for wage raises, but he was deadly serious.

The new slasher film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma promises “a frenzy of psychosexual mania.” What director Jane Schoenbrun delivers is tamer but considerably funnier.

Media coverage around Michigan’s Senate race and Abdul El-Sayed’s ties to Hasan Piker has become constant and hysterical. Less discussed: Michigan Republican Mike Rogers’s career-long advocacy for an Iran war now wreaking economic havoc on Michigan.

Democratic Party centrists’ well-funded and single-minded war on socialists is leading them to take increasingly contorted, absurd positions against figures like leftist streamer Hasan Piker.

Blue-collar and white-collar workers increasingly find themselves on opposite sides of the groundswell against AI data centers. But there are opportunities for building trades unions to make common cause with data center opponents.

United Auto Workers members are now voting by mail ballot for their top officers. The election will decide whether President Shawn Fain, who led 2023’s stand-up strike against the Big Three automakers, will continue the effort to reform the UAW.

Spooked by anti-billionaire talk from the Democratic Party base, ultrawealthy donors are backing Republicans this cycle. That confronts the Democrats with a choice they’ve spent years avoiding: chase big money or build mass politics.

Caparezza is one of Italy’s most inventive rappers, and one of few who combine mainstream success with political engagement. He spoke to Jacobin about music, freedom, and his hometown of Molfetta, which recently elected a communist mayor.