Why has the American left neglected this revolutionary inheritance?

I’ve boasted about Jacobin a bunch on this page. Beyond narcissism, it’s rooted in the feeling that our improbable success is symbolic of a wider intellectual shift. Qualify that with sober acknowledgement of the Left’s marginality, include token slaps in the direction of a certain mainstream commentator, strategically add “ youthful” profanity, and there you have it – a successful editor’s note.

Thoughts on politics, social movements, and the 2012 elections.

Marx wrote in The Civil War in France that every few years workers got to decide which members of the ruling class were to misrepresent them.

Putting full employment at the center of a new left-wing strategy.

Last spring, as the U.S. economy entered another period of slowdown and unemployment levels in the Eurozone hit record highs, a Internet meme called “Old Economy Steven” started making rounds.

We asked a former West Point professor about teaching literature at the nation’s most prestigious military academy. What he told us revealed the truth behind the country’s most elite warrior caste – and how liberal heroes like Thoreau and the Beats inspire the next generation of “Runaway Generals.

From Blackbeard to Kim Dotcom has piracy been a radical force?

In May, Michael Bloom­berg proposed a ban on the sale of sugary beverages over 16 ounces. If it passes, New Yorkers with an urge for a deluge of high-fructose corn syrup and caramel coloring will be forced to purchase multiple puny 12-ounce beverages.

Of far more legitimate concern than the impending subversion of world order by greenwashed commie terrorists is, of course, that the fabrication of such threats contributes to a blanket delegitimization of environmental activism.

What happens when we refuse to answer leading questions like these, which contain conclusions that should be in contention? What happens when we stop looking for socialism in all the wrong places?

Sex workers and their would-be saviors.

The following books were not published in 1972: The Happy Secretary, The Happy Nurse, The Happy Napalm Manufacturer, The Happy President, The Happy Yippie, The Happy Feminist.

Communal celebration has deep roots in human culture. Why shouldn’t the Left embrace it?

Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square, gather the people together there, and you’ll have a festival.

Why environmentalists’ fear of bigness dooms the developing world.

While bad gentrifiers see themselves as having little impact on their environment – they are simply maximizing their own self-interest by getting a good deal in an up-and-coming neighborhood – good gentrifiers are supremely aware of their privileged place in the urban food chain, and sometimes even feel guilty about it.

A leading Civil War historian challenges the new orthodoxy about how slavery ended in America. On 6 November 1860, the six-year-old Republican Party elected its first president. During the tense crisis months that followed – the “secession winter” of 1860–61 – practically all observers believed that Lincoln and the Republicans would begin attacking slavery as soon as they took [...]