Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.
During the last century, the Irish state imprisoned a greater share of its population than any other country on Earth: not just for crimes against people or property, but for falling foul of a repressive moral code. The victims are still counting the cost.
COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to the world economy, shining a harsh light on the frailties of global capitalism. But there won’t be a progressive paradigm shift coming out of the crisis without a dramatic upsurge of collective action.
After all the disruptions of the past year, the threat of ecological breakdown still hangs over us. The US left is in a stronger position than it’s known for decades: now it needs to strengthen its internationalism and mobilize for effective climate action.
C. L. R. James was one of the twentieth century’s intellectual giants. During a life of intense political engagement, he wrote classic books about the struggle against slavery and the social history of sport, never flinching in his socialist commitment.
From the ’60s New Left to the persistence of a mass-membership Communist Party today, Marxism has had a huge impact on Japanese politics and culture. Japanese Marxism is a highly creative tradition that deserves to be better known and understood outside Japan.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party narrowly avoided a second successive by-election defeat to the Tories yesterday. But the most important story of the campaign was the alienation of British Muslims from a political mainstream that openly despises them.
Five years after the Brexit referendum, Boris Johnson is flying high in British politics. He could have been stopped, but the pro-Brexit right and the anti-Brexit center were united in opposing Jeremy Corbyn and a Labour left–led government.
One man put a stop to Hitler’s march across Europe: not Stalin, Churchill, or Roosevelt, but a German Communist called Richard Sorge. Sorge was a real-life spy whose exploits surpassed any fictional creation, and one of the twentieth century’s great heroes.
Democratic Party leaders have accused Ilhan Omar of “moral equivalency” because she rejected the brazen double standard underpinning US foreign policy. But Omar is right: murderous violence against civilians is no less criminal when Israel or the United States are the perpetrators.
Tony Blair has a message for the center-left parties of Europe and the US: let business do whatever it likes and pander to the Right at all costs. Blair’s latest intervention is a glorified infomercial on behalf of the billionaires who support his globe-trotting vanity projects.
The by-election defeat for Labour in Hartlepool is a damning indictment of Keir Starmer, who has failed to deliver the “electability” his supporters promised. But his leadership is bound to double down on Labour’s right turn instead of drawing the correct lessons.
Forty years ago today, the death of the Irish Republican Army’s Bobby Sands inspired protests all over the world and sent Sinn Féin on a path toward its current position of strength in Ireland. Whether Sands himself would have approved of that journey is anyone’s guess.
Meet Tony Blair, a “democratic socialist.”
The German socialist philosopher Erich Fromm sought to explain the social psychology of right-wing authoritarianism after the Nazis drove him into exile. His work is full of valuable insights that can inform struggles for political and economic freedom today.
Sixty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to leave our planet. The space race was inseparable from Cold War rivalry, but it also stands out as an inspiring example of what humanity can achieve through grand collective projects that aren’t geared to private profit.
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has been an incompetent opposition to Boris Johnson. But he has fulfilled his immediate objective during his first year in charge: waging war on the Labour left, attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy, and pushing his party to the right.
The Suez Canal blockage inspired a thousand memes, but its consequences for the world economy were deadly serious. The canal has always performed a vital function for capitalist trade, and there’s no reason to think its economic and geopolitical importance is going to decline.
Too much writing about Rosa Luxemburg nowadays focuses on her personal letters and relationships at the expense of her ideas. It’s good to humanize our heroes, but we risk belittling the significance of a revolutionary thinker whose understanding of socialism should be a touchstone for today’s left.
During the Korean War, the United States inflicted unimaginable horrors on the Korean people. Yet today Americans know almost nothing about their government’s role in war crimes and atrocities.