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Seth Ackerman is Jacobin's executive editor.
Throughout the inflationary years of the 1970s, nearly half of Americans saw rising prices as the most important problem facing the country. Today, despite the best efforts of inflation alarmists, only 5 percent of Americans think it is.
A venerable theory about people’s political values is making a comeback: the theory of “postmaterialism.” But despite what you may have heard, the theory doesn’t say class politics is doomed in rich countries — and neither did the scholar who created it.
Enraged at the rise of an “intransigent” left, Larry Summers put his credibility on the line with wild predictions of runaway inflation in the wake of Joe Biden’s stimulus package last January. It’s looking like his predictions were wrong.
The marginal tax bracket at the heart of our income tax system obfuscates the key question about taxes in a democratic society: Who pays what? In the 1930s, France’s Popular Front government had a solution — until it was dismantled by the right-wing Vichy regime.
From chiefs and kings to billionaires today, a small handful of humans over thousands of years have figured out how to amass tremendous power and wealth. We talked to an anthropologist about how the ruling class got started.
The Biden administration is selling its COVID relief bill as a historic milestone in the war on poverty. In reality, it’s a temporary measure whose anti-poverty impact is roughly the same as last year’s CARES Act signed by Trump. For Biden to claim an anti-poverty legacy, he needs to make the child benefit permanent.
Haunted by the specter of democracy, the Constitution’s framers blundered into a historic miscalculation. We’re still living with the consequences.
Bernie critics seem to think they dodged a bullet. They haven’t — the bullet is still on its way.
What will decide the fate of neoliberalism today is not the extent of the economic damage the virus wreaks — it is the extent to which the virus transforms popular expectations.
For decades, America’s “flexible” labor markets have been celebrated by economists and favorably compared to Europe’s “sclerotic” labor institutions — the products of a century of militant worker struggle. Now, thanks to that very flexibility, the US stands on the brink of an economic disaster.
A big new study came out last week arguing that Bernie Sanders’s electability could be a “mirage.” There’s just one problem: the report is nonsense.
What makes Bernie Sanders so threatening to the Democratic establishment is that he stands for what millions of Democrats thought their party stood for all along.
Last night’s UK elections results point to a deep problem in world politics today: the gravitational pull of privileging cultural over economic combat — an outcome that consistently divides the Left and hands victory to the Right.
“Populism” is today employed as a bogeyman by liberals and centrists alike. Is there anything worth salvaging in the concept?
How should the Left view the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump? Are they a political opportunity or a distraction from the issues that leftists care about? A Jacobin roundtable.
The rationale for Bernie Sanders’s brand of politics has always been that it’s better to aim at shifting the basic parameters of American politics — however difficult that may be — than accepting those parameters and trying to maneuver within them.
Bernie Sanders’s embrace of the New Deal legacy is an opportunity to dispel some pernicious historical myths about the New Deal’s relationship with socialism and its attitude toward the struggle for racial equality.
In the emerging neoliberalism of the 1970s, Michel Foucault saw the promise of a new social order, more open to individual autonomy and experimental ways of living. That’s not how things turned out.
Beyond clichés about a “clash of civilizations,” a new book by French sociologist Fabien Truong illuminates the role of Islam in the lives of France’s poor and marginalized.
The pundits are puzzled that Bernie Sanders sees socialist values in the New Deal. They shouldn’t be. That’s how socialists around the world — and their enemies — saw it at the time.