{"title":"Jacobin","id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com","updated":"2026-07-07T19:28:08.617322Z","link":{"@attributes":{"href":"https:\/\/jacobin.com"}},"logo":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/static\/img\/logo\/logo-type.png","subtitle":"Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.","entry":[{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/liberia-firestone-subcontracting-union-busting","title":"Liberian Rubber Workers Triumphed Against Union Busting","updated":"2026-07-07T19:28:08.617322Z","author":{"name":"Andrew Tillett-Saks"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Unions","term":"Unions"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Work","term":"Work"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["Stepping onto the Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia, the largest contiguous rubber plantation in the world at 185 square miles, is a step into the past\u00a0\u2014 though which past or which historical moment is debatable. The \u201cplantation,\u201d as it\u2019s officially referred to by Firestone, is at once reminiscent of American chattel slavery, nineteenth-century company towns, and the old Western colonies of Africa.","Most of the eight thousand workers and their families live on the plantation in Firestone-provided housing evocative of dilapidated public housing in poor inner-city US neighborhoods. Their children are born in Firestone hospitals and attend Firestone schools on the plantation. The workers are all Liberian while upper management is primarily white Americans. No Firestone tires are produced in the country; Firestone uses the Liberian workers to extract the latex, package it up, and send it off to other countries for production. Traversing the nearly undrivable dirt roads of the plantation, one sees scores of workers cutting tall grass with rusty machetes, workers forced to relieve themselves in open fields due to the lack of public toilets, and rusty facilities so dilapidated they look as though they might have been abandoned and untouched for decades.","Yet this plantation was recently the scene of a momentous union victory. Facing rampant subcontracting\u00a0\u2014 an increasingly favored weapon of employers worldwide seeking to avoid unions\u00a0\u2014 the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL) confronted the practice head-on and won a union election among the plantation\u2019s four thousand subcontracted workers; this past December, they secured their first collective bargaining agreement. As workers and unions around the world increasingly struggle with how to deal with subcontracting and short-term contracts, Firestone workers in Liberia overcame huge political, legal, and economic obstacles to provide an example of how unions might tackle the problem."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"Firestone Workers vs. Subcontracting"},"div":{"p":["Firestone workers in Liberia organized their union, FAWUL, in 2007 in response to abhorrent living and working conditions and as part of a broader national wave of organizing. Firestone and government authorities fought the union bitterly\u00a0\u2014 police shot and killed one worker during a twenty-day recognition strike\u00a0\u2014 but the workers ultimately prevailed.","In 2017, Firestone, which is owned by the Japanese tire company Bridgestone Corporation, began subcontracting half of its workforce in an attempt to break the union. Apparently finding the union\u2019s incremental improvements to plantation conditions intolerable, Firestone management terminated four thousand workers and immediately rehired most of them as short-term contract workers, now technically employed by one of several \u201ccontractor heads\u201d instead of Firestone.","The newly subcontracted workers\u2019 work remained the same, but their wages and benefits fell drastically. Wages were cut in half, with most subcontracted workers earning roughly $3.50 per day; subcontracted workers went from one family per plantation dormitory room to several families per room; their families lost access to company hospitals and schools; the price for company-supplied rice went from $40 to $80 per month. Perhaps most significantly for both the workers and the company, they were no longer members of the union\u00a0\u2014 membership plummeted from eight thousand to four thousand overnight.","Companies seeking to lower wages, disempower workers, and avoid unions increasingly utilize subcontracting, and Firestone executed the strategy in textbook fashion. Typically, employers like Firestone contract a middleman to posture as their workers\u2019 new \u201cemployer.\u201d Workers continue to provide the same labor for the company but with worse wages, benefits, and general working conditions. The coup de gr\u00e2ce comes when the employer then denies any responsibility for the workers\u2019 newfound suffering. Firestone directed workers unhappy with their new working and living conditions to talk with the contracted middlemen, claiming there was nothing they could do as the workers were technically no longer Firestone employees.","The union faced an existential crossroads\u00a0\u2014 grapple with the subcontracting or face a slow death of the union and erosion of everything it had won. With the union\u2019s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) expiring in December of 2024, and with Firestone gradually subcontracting even more of the workforce, FAWUL decided to make organizing and winning union recognition for the subcontracted workers their central demand in CBA renegotiations. Subcontracted workers are notoriously difficult to organize due to their tenuous status and unclear employer, but FAWUL decided it had to undertake the challenge if the union was to survive long-term."],"figure":{"img":{"@attributes":{"alt":"A housing camp for Liberian Firestone workers.","height":"750","loading":"lazy","src":"https:\/\/media.jacobin.com\/images\/2026\/7\/541510024864.jpg","width":"1000"}},"figcaption":"A housing camp for Liberian Firestone workers. (Courtesy Andrew Tillett-Saks)"}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"The Campaign"},"div":{"p":["The union hired nineteen external organizers in January 2024 with the sole focus of organizing the four thousand subcontracted workers. Unions from the United States, particularly the United Steelworkers, provided solidarity and support for the organizing effort, including funds, organizing trainings, corporate research, and solidarity videos from US workers.","Facing brutal conditions on the plantation and having already seen the power of the union, the subcontracted workers organized relatively quickly. Workers live in \u201ccamps\u201d of run-down, bare-bones housing projects across the plantation, and organizers went camp by camp, summoning all subcontracted workers. For months, organizers trudged across the muddy dirt roads every day to all corners of the eight-mile plantation, talking to subcontracted workers. Within six months, organizers had built an underground organizing committee across the subcontracted portions of the plantation and collected a majority of subcontracted workers\u2019 signatures on a petition demanding union membership. In a race against time to organize the subcontracted workers prior to CBA negotiations scheduled for September 2024, FAWUL submitted a petition to the Liberian Ministry of Labor in August and demanded that Firestone accrete the subcontracted workers into the existing union.","Whereas in many countries the union would know what process to expect upon submitting a union recognition petition, the situation in Liberia was more uncertain. The country\u2019s new president and a new labor minister had just taken office in 2023, and a sweeping new labor law in the form of the Decent Work Act had passed only in 2015. Moreover, due primarily to a brutal history of Western imperialism and exploitation, Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world, and large corporations often take advantage of the country\u2019s poverty by using money to curry favor with politicians.","On August 16, the Ministry of Labor notified FAWUL that a union election for the subcontracted workers would be held in two weeks, on August 30. On critical election questions, however\u00a0\u2014 such as who would be listed as the employer, the list of eligible voters, specific polling times and locations, and the rules governing the election\u00a0\u2014 the government did not provide specific answers. The union faced the daunting task of preparing the workers for an election without the crucial information it needed, with a nagging worry that perhaps the fix was in for Firestone.","The union\u2019s struggle had become a three-front fight: organizing the workers, pressuring Firestone, and now seeking a fair election from the Liberian government. With increasing urgency, the union made repeated requests to the government for an eligible voter list, polling locations, and election rules, all to no avail. In internal union debates, some workers proposed canceling the election, while others argued that the contract workers were well organized enough to prevail even under extremely unfair election conditions.","Union representatives traveled to the Ministry of Labor office to push for answers just a week prior to the scheduled election but left the meeting in even greater dismay. Most shockingly, the ministry informed the union that a majority of total  voters would be needed for the union to win recognition. The union\u2019s expectation, based on prior election experience in Liberia, was that it needed only a majority of those workers who actually voted. Moreover, the ministry stated that it could not provide a list of eligible voters list or poll details yet because the employer had not provided them. Even more than the continued absence of critical information, the implication that the employer would have the right to unilaterally determine the voter list and poll details shocked and outraged the union.","But the union decided to press on. Its attorneys scoured the murky Liberian labor laws, looking for evidence that the proposed election rules did not comply with proper legal protocol. International allies of the union, including labor leaders from the United States, placed calls expressing concern over the undemocratic process. The union held a rally in the middle of the plantation\u2019s central soccer field, bussing in hundreds of workers from across the plantation despite torrential rain. Organizers continued to traverse the plantation camp by camp, motivating the subcontracted workers and informing them that they couldn\u2019t tell them exactly when or where they\u2019d need to vote on August 31, but that they would indeed have to vote."],"figure":{"img":{"@attributes":{"alt":"Organizers gather subcontracted workers in the camps. ","height":"750","loading":"lazy","src":"https:\/\/media.jacobin.com\/images\/2026\/7\/606533431060.jpg","width":"1000"}},"figcaption":"Organizers gather subcontracted workers in the camps. (Courtesy Andrew Tillett-Saks)"}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-3"},"header":{"h2":"The Final Days"},"div":{"p":["Four days prior to the election, representatives of FAWUL traveled again to the Ministry of Labor office to seek clarity and object to the unfair election rules. The union bemoaned that the election was four days out and it still had no voter list, no poll location details to inform workers, and faced the unexpected requirement of a majority of the entire workforce rather than a majority of voters. The ministry reversed course on the spot, informing the union that they would only need a majority of total voters to win the election, that the union could submit a list of preferred polling locations that the ministry would utilize in addition to the employer\u2019s requests, and that if the ministry still did not have a voter list from the employer within twenty-four hours then the union could determine the official voter list.","The reversal shocked the union, but it quickly moved to take advantage of the concessions. FAWUL reps demanded the new election rules in writing, out of precaution. They walked out of the Ministry of Labor office with the new election terms, typed up on the spot, complete with the official stamped seal of the Minister of Labor.","The ministry\u2019s change to the election rules raised the union\u2019s morale and made victory seem possible. Still, chaos reigned in the days leading up to the election. FAWUL persistently complained to the ministry that without set voting times and locations well in advance, the union would not be able to get the necessary information to all of the workers. The ministry repeatedly promised to conduct \u201cvoter education\u201d in person on the plantation, but two days prior to the election, it still had not done so, and polling times and locations remained completely unclear.","Finally, on the day prior to the election, the Ministry of Labor announced the voting times and polling locations to the union. The promised visit to the plantation never materialized, but FAWUL quickly got on its popular radio station and ran an election notice, with polling times and locations, on loop throughout the day and night. A meeting of the union\u2019s \u201ccamp leaders\u201d committee reviewed the election details and dispatched the leaders back to their camps to disseminate the information and organize the next day\u2019s vote as quickly as possible."],"figure":{"img":{"@attributes":{"alt":"A preelection rally to support subcontracted Liberian workers. ","height":"750","loading":"lazy","src":"https:\/\/media.jacobin.com\/images\/2026\/7\/288032905973.jpg","width":"1000"}},"figcaption":"A preelection rally to support subcontracted workers. (Courtesy Andrew Tillett-Saks)"}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-4"},"header":{"h2":"Election Day"},"div":{"p":["Election Day itself was even more chaotic than the buildup. With polls scheduled to open at 9 a.m., union leaders slept at their headquarters and eagerly awaited the arrival of the Ministry of Labor staff in the morning to run the election. With twenty-two designated polling locations, some at disparate points on the plantation, the union expected the ministry staff to arrive early for dispatch in order to reach all polling locations in time. But by 8:30 am, ministry staff had still not yet arrived.","Concerned that polls would not open on time, a pickup truck of union leaders drove to the ministry staff\u2019s hotel. At 8:45 am, fifteen minutes prior to the scheduled election, they found ten ministry staff members casually discussing their plan for the day. In addition to the late hour and the growing impossibility of reaching all polling locations in time, facilitating twenty-two polling locations with only ten staff presented an obvious challenge. Animated conversation ensued as union leaders railed that workers expected the polls to open at 9 a.m. and implored the ministry staff to get out of the hotel and to the polling locations.","The ministry staff compounded the union\u2019s dismay by insisting that they work in pairs, halving the already limited number of polling locations they could potentially staff. In disbelief but with little alternative, union leaders rallied the ministry staff out the door, into the single ministry vehicle, and out to whatever central polling locations the ministry deemed it could facilitate.","Throughout the morning, hundreds of subcontracted workers across the plantation lined up and waited for hours at polls not yet opened. Despite intense heat and intermittent rain, workers waited in order to vote for their union. Ministry staff began at just four central polling locations and moved to other locations only when no workers remained in line to vote at the initial polls. Confused camp leaders phoned the union leadership furiously throughout the day reporting the situation at their respective camps\u00a0\u2014 typically hundreds of workers lined up to vote for hours but no ballot box or ministry staff in sight.","Even as the sun set on the plantation, workers waited in line in the dark well into the evening as ministry staff drove from location to location, collecting every ballot and gradually thinning the long voting lines. Despite the chaotic process, the subcontracted workers had turned out to vote in droves across the plantation.","Workers and FAWUL leaders waited as the ministry counted the ballots in a small, dim room on the plantation. At 10 p.m., the ministry summoned the union leadership to announce the vote count. Firestone representatives refused to attend, apparently clinging to the lucrative illusion that the company bore no responsibility for the subcontracted workers.","It was a landslide: 1,660 workers voting for the union and just forty-nine against. FAWUL leaders went back to the union headquarters and announced the results to a crowd of workers and organizers. Rapturous chants of \u201cUnion power!\u201d and celebratory dancing ensued in the FAWUL office well into the night."],"figure":{"img":{"@attributes":{"alt":"Liberian workers wait in line to vote for a union.","height":"750","loading":"lazy","src":"https:\/\/media.jacobin.com\/images\/2026\/7\/225378575667.jpg","width":"1000"}},"figcaption":"Workers wait in line to vote. (Courtesy Andrew Tillett-Saks)"}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-5"},"header":{"h2":"The Struggle Continues"},"div":{"p":["The subcontracted workers\u2019 election victory was secured only after an arduous fight. There were countless excuses the union could have used to avoid organizing the subcontracted workers: Firestone refused to acknowledge the workers as their employees; FAWUL\u2019s upcoming CBA negotiations required that priority be given to their existing members; the election process afforded by the government was unfathomably chaotic and unfair, and so on.","Yet the union drove forward with organizing the subcontracted workers anyway. FAWUL leadership understood that failure to organize the subcontracted workers would mean the eventual death of the entire union and of any semblance of decent working conditions on the plantation. As employers continue to expand subcontracting globally to drive down wages and evade responsibility for humane working conditions, unions around the world face the same dilemma. As in FAWUL\u2019s situation, it is difficult to imagine a path forward for unions that does not directly confront subcontracting and organize subcontracted workers, despite the many challenges involved.","The ensuing CBA struggle highlighted both the challenges and potential of organizing subcontracted workers. FAWUL settled a contract for the permanent employees that did not cover the subcontracted workers, forcing them to negotiate a lower-tiered contract, and not all subcontracted workers are included in the final bargaining unit. Nonetheless, in late 2025, the subcontracted workers ultimately won a CBA with life-changing improvements including 60 percent raises and access to company hospitals and schools, among others. Nearly all workers on the Firestone plantation are once again unionized.","If, as C. L. R. James wrote, \u201cThe rich are only defeated when running for their lives,\u201d FAWUL\u2019s work in organizing the subcontracted workers and winning better conditions on the plantation for all workers is far from finished. The tiered CBAs continued to provide an incentive (albeit diminished) for Firestone to further subcontract and could create grounds for future disunity among the workers. Poverty and exploitation on the plantation are far from vanquished.","Yet Firestone workers\u2019 determination and victory are a beacon of hope for workers across the world who are engaged in similar struggles. Subcontracting as an employer weapon is unlikely to disappear soon, but\u00a0\u2014 as shown by the Liberian rubber workers\u00a0\u2014 neither is the formidable power of the workers united."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-07T19:22:44.136Z","summary":"The Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia is the largest contiguous rubber plantation in the world. In a model for labor struggles around the globe, thousands of workers there have overcome Firestone\u2019s efforts at union busting via subcontracting."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/spanish-language-immigrant-worker-organizing","title":"Want to Organize the Working Class? Learn Spanish.","updated":"2026-07-07T17:20:39.196479Z","author":{"name":"Levi Vonk"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Society","term":"Society"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Unions","term":"Unions"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["In Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s latest , , there\u2019s a scene I still think about at least once a week.","About halfway through the movie, the main character, Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), is on the lam and seeks refuge with his daughter\u2019s karate teacher, Sergio \u201cSensei\u201d St Carlos (Benicio del Toro). Unfortunately for Calhoun, Sensei is using his apartment building as a kind of underground railroad for undocumented immigrants, and he has arrived right in the middle of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid.","A fascinating combination of tension and hilarity ensues as the two men attempt to escape. Calhoun, calling his revolutionary comrades for backup, cannot remember the series of passwords necessary to identify himself. Frustrated, he begins to berate the phone operator for not giving him the rendezvous point, to which the uppity operator chirps, \u201cOkay, this doesn\u2019t feel safe. You\u2019re violating my space right now.\u201d","The moment would be a bit too on the nose\u00a0\u2014 another shallow depiction of supposedly maladjusted leftists\u00a0\u2014 if not for Sensei. As Calhoun moans and pleads for help, unable to communicate on even the most basic level with someone who is supposed to be his comrade, Sensei is continuously whisking through the maze of his underground railroad station, calmly instructing a well-oiled machine of community members how to safely hide the people in their care.","Sensei often speaks entirely in Spanish, and his lines are not translated for the audience or Calhoun. Yet the message could not be clearer: English, the primary language of the movie and its protagonists, the language of the old-guard revolutionaries, has somehow gotten stuck, revolving around an increasingly rigid set of social and intellectual passwords to the point that nothing meaningful can be said at all, even in the most dire of circumstances.","Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us or Calhoun, a new underground has sprung up to continue revolutionary struggle. It just doesn\u2019t look or sound like what we have come to expect.","Despite Hollywood\u2019s obvious limitations, a poignant portrayal of contemporary American class politics has emerged anyway in . What is depicted is not the conscious answer to our political predicament but one of its most pressing questions: How can we possibly organize the working class if we don\u2019t even speak their language? And what if, rather than simply \u201cus\u201d organizing \u201cthem,\u201d they could actually teach us something instead?"]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"A Working Class Primed to Reject the Status Quo"},"div":{"p":["It\u2019s no secret that traditional labor is on the ropes. In 2024, union membership in the United States hit , slipping below 10 percent of all workers nationally, and the top  of our country owns more wealth than the bottom 90. The stakes could not be higher. We are losing. It\u2019s time to get creative.","Fortunately, as  so concisely depicts, there has been a secret weapon sitting right under our noses this whole time: undocumented workers. There are somewhere between eleven and fourteen million undocumented people in the United States today, nearly all of them Spanish speakers. They conduct our most essential labor\u00a0\u2014 the country\u2019s cooking, the cleaning, the growing and harvesting of our food, constructing and maintaining our infrastructure, even raising many of our children\u00a0\u2014 and they are paid the bare minimum for it.","Normally, a group like this would be the perfect target for labor organizing. If you get these particularly important workers to stop working, the entire country shuts down. But even very left organizations often treat undocumented laborers in the United States as mostly an afterthought. This is largely due to two legitimate obstacles.","The first, of which much has been written, is that undocumented workers have comparatively fewer labor protections; going on strike, despite laws against retaliation, can lead to deportation. It is incredibly difficult to ask people to risk so much for so little promise of reward, an enduring structural problem of our political era.","The second obstacle, however, can be addressed much more immediately. And yet it is also, bafflingly, mostly not grappled with on the organized left: few of us speak Spanish. If we are serious about addressing the first obstacle, we need to address the second. Spanish is the language of America\u2019s underclass, its most essential proletariat. We cannot reasonably expect to organize this proletariat if we cannot speak their language.","Moreover, the Spanish-speaking workforce extends well beyond undocumented workers alone. As of 2019, there were forty-one  people in the United States who spoke Spanish natively. This includes undocumented immigrants but also precariously documented people (such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] recipients or those on work visas) as well as permanent residents and citizens, most of whom are likely first- or second-generation immigrants whose families came to the United States to work.","Spanish speakers, then, are much more likely to understand, even if only on an unconscious level, that their belonging in a society is directly related to the labor they conduct for it. They are also more likely to have some memory\u00a0\u2014 either through family members or their own experiences\u00a0\u2014 of more radical approaches to labor struggle in Latin America than what has existed in the United States for the last half century. In short, there is huge political potential in this population, not just for how we can organize them but how their struggle can organize our own. Yet it\u2019s just sitting there, largely untapped.","Spanish speakers are not a monolith, however, and significantly more Latinos voted for Donald Trump in 2024 than 2016. Two common but incorrect analyses of this fact are that Latino voters are simply more \u201c,\u201d and therefore cotton readily to Trump\u2019s strongman politics, or that, relatedly, they are less educated, and so more  to right-wing propaganda.","But as Ren\u00e9 Rojas and Mirabel Tineo make clear in \u201c,\u201d a material analysis of working-class Latino voters shows that they shifted right in 2024 not because Trump was particularly appealing but because the Democrats had given them nothing to show for their decades of loyalty.","\u201cLatinos,\u201d they write, \u201care the United States\u2019 working class. They embody crucial transformations in working-class structure and the material insecurities that result, and they suffer from the general political abandonment of American workers.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 Latinos\u2019 experience as workers battered by decades of class warfare shapes their political behaviors.\u201d","Once drastically declining wages and worker protections are factored into the equation, Latinos\u00a0\u2014 who often experience these inequalities first and most viscerally\u00a0\u2014 deciding to no longer back centrist Democrats who smooth over anti-worker policies starts to make a lot more sense. Rather than dismissing them as bad voters, as some in the  have, we should start seeing them for who they actually are: perfectly primed workers ready to reject the status quo.","Latinos also account for the majority of the nation\u2019s total population growth\u00a0\u2014 approximately  between 2022 and 2023. By 2050, nearly  Americans will be Latino. If socialism is the science of the future, that future speaks Spanish. If the labor movement got serious about learning it\u00a0\u2014 not just outsourcing pamphlets and trainings to translators but committing to spending the next several years boosting Spanish fluency within their own organizations across the board\u00a0\u2014 the entire horizon of labor organizing in this country could expand drastically."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"The Makings of a Mass Movement"}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-3"},"header":{"hr":{}},"div":{"p":["How to implement something as complicated and time-consuming as learning a new language at scale? By tying language classes to organizing classes, and tying those classes to practical actions that help organize worker power.","We already have historical precedent for something like this. In 2006, Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner proposed the draconian anti-immigrant bill H.R. 4437, which would have classified immigrants without papers\u00a0\u2014 and those acting in solidarity with them\u00a0\u2014 as felons. In response, Latino groups around the country organized a May Day march known as A Day Without Immigrants. Somewhere between four and five million people walked out of work in over 160 cities that spring. As Eric Blanc , \u201cYou don\u2019t have to imagine what a nationwide strike in defense of immigrants could look like. It\u2019s already happened.\u201d","A Day Without Immigrants is likely the closest thing we\u2019ve had to a general strike\u00a0\u2014 labor\u2019s holy grail\u00a0\u2014 in recent US history. Now United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has announced that his union is  for a 2028 , which seems  to develop into an actual general strike, given low union density and the lack of worker consciousness in the United States right now.","What could get us closer to a general strike, however, is declaring another Day Without Immigrants in conjunction, and coordinating with the immigrant rights networks that made the first one so successful. What if, over the course of these next two years, as a strategy to build up consistent momentum for May Day 2028, this partnership offered free Spanish-language classes for English speakers in the movement, and free English-language classes for Spanish speakers?","These classes are not the goal in itself but the means. Free English classes give the Latino working class a concrete and practical offering while also integrating them more deeply into labor organizations. Free Spanish classes do the same from the other end, providing a long-term goal and structure for organizing-minded people to continue showing up on a regular basis.","Another historical example that backs up this idea is the  campaign, which began in 1980s Los Angeles when the majority-immigrant workforce saw their real wages significantly cut after being reclassified as contract workers, placing them at the bottom of a two-tiered compensation system. Despite perceptions of immigrant workers as difficult to organize, Justice for Janitors eventually spread from Los Angeles to Houston, Boston, and Miami, winning successful wage increases in each city. This was in large part because the campaign was effective at blending the language of social justice (immigrant rights) with the language of building rank-and-file union power (worker rights)."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-4"},"header":{"h2":"Friend or Foe?"},"div":{"p":["Justice for Janitors becomes even more convincing considering their successes in relation to someone like C\u00e9sar Ch\u00e1vez. Long before his sexual abuse  came to light, the supposed ur\u2013\u201cLatino organizer\u201d had another dark mark on his record: he continuously villainized undocumented migrant workers. Throughout his United Farm Workers (UFW) leadership, undocumented migrants were framed as stealing American jobs, as scabs, as driving down the negotiating power of the union.","Of course, there is some truth to this. US farmers often attempted to break UFW strikes by hiring undocumented workers. To stop them, Ch\u00e1vez actively  for their deportation. Union members were even encouraged to collaborate with immigration agents, overtly intertwining union power with capitalist policing and militarized borders.","It was a huge mistake. In retrospect, UFW members and undocumented workers had far more in common than whatever they believed divided them; broadly speaking, they shared an ethnicity, a culture, a language, and an identity as workers. This was a historical crossroads where everything could have gone differently. The border was not yet heavily militarized, and being undocumented was far less criminalized. It was a chance for Ch\u00e1vez to use workers\u2019 commonalities to UFW\u2019s advantage\u00a0\u2014 perhaps even impeding, or at least slowing, the rise of the mass deportation regime\u00a0\u2014 instead of dividing them based on immigration status.","But Ch\u00e1vez did not choose this path. Ultimately, farmers weren\u2019t deterred from hiring undocumented workers (they make up at least  of the agricultural workforce today), and by casting them as the mortal enemy of the citizen worker, Ch\u00e1vez immediately foreclosed any possibility of building power with them collectively.","Fifty years on, we now know that the real problem, as American workers have so painfully discovered, is not undocumented workers themselves but the conditions that allow them to be so deeply exploited. Mass deportation plays a crucial role in capital\u2019s ability to discipline labor, undocumented and citizen alike.","As Suzy Lee , today the Trump administration has effectively conflated undocumented immigrants with immigrants as a whole to further its mass deportation campaign.","\u201cFor decades now,\u201d she writes,","Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s protectionism, then, plays right into the political logic of Trumpism. Every time labor replicates this stance, it does the same,  with the very capitalists it professes to be fighting. And as I have  previously, the Trump administration hasn\u2019t stopped there, conflating  with  in order to then go one step further, conflating both with anyone deemed to be politically dissident. The point is to first erode undocumented people\u2019s rights, normalize this erosion, and then erode everyone else\u2019s as well."],"blockquote":{"p":"the status of undocumented or unauthorized migrants has been treated as a form of criminality in public discourse, if not always de jure. The Trump campaign did not correct this slippage. More important, most of Trump\u2019s ire seemed to be directed toward migrants who were technically neither undocumented nor unauthorized but were admitted under temporary humanitarian programs or paroled into the country while awaiting adjudication of their asylum claims."}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-5"},"header":{"h2":"On Speaking Spanish Poorly"},"div":{"p":["Language classes in themselves, of course, will not magically solve these deeply structural problems. But there is, again, an example from history that proves that the acquisition of language and collective power can go hand-in-hand.","In 1912, one of the most famous strikes in US history occurred in a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which came to be known as the Bread and Roses Strike. Mill bosses had strategically hired thousands of immigrant workers\u00a0\u2014 approximately half of them teenage girls\u00a0\u2014 specifically in the hopes that they would not be able to communicate with each other. These workers were not merely divided by two languages but over three dozen. A Polish woman would be placed beside a German, who would be placed beside an Italian.","In response, workers formed a strike committee that, despite having very few resources, was able to translate all of its meetings and communiqu\u00e9s into the language of essentially every worker. The strike was brutal\u00a0\u2014 three workers were killed and over three hundred more arrested\u00a0\u2014 but in the end they won nearly all of their demands.","Learning a new language is, of course, difficult. It demands years of time and effort, and it is embarrassing to speak poorly, to sound ignorant. But that is exactly why it is so effective.","Learning another\u2019s language, however imperfectly, implies that you care enough to have sacrificed something significant in the name of understanding them better, of speaking the way they speak. This is how trust gets built. It is a demonstration that one is willing to labor for the other, often at great cost. Language, like organizing, is ultimately about exchange. You\u2019ve got to give something to get something.","This is the real truth of internationalism: it is knowing that the world is always already at your doorstep. It is not only believing in proletarian struggle in far off places, but also that the struggle for the entire world is here right now, right in front of you."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-07T16:50:45.515Z","summary":"Millions of workers in the United States are Spanish speakers. Socialists who can\u2019t talk to them can\u2019t organize them."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/neoliberalism-state-markets-populism-democracy","title":"Right-Wing Populism Did Not Kill Neoliberalism","updated":"2026-07-07T15:48:28.708244Z","author":{"name":"Mat\u00edas Vernengo"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Economy","term":"Economy"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"State","term":"State"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Ideology","term":"Ideology"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"p":["Neoliberalism often hides in plain sight. Its defenders rarely identify as neoliberals. Philip Mirowski  it as the movement that dared not speak its own name. Its advocates often suggest that it never existed, except as a term of abuse invented by the Left. Branko Milanovic has recently gone further, arguing that neoliberalism is . The era of globalization built on cosmopolitanism and international competition has given way to a more protectionist and nationalist world. But the mistake is to identify neoliberalism with globalization or free trade. These were policy instruments, not its defining feature. Its defining characteristic has always been the subordination of democratic politics to market rationality and the institutional insulation of capital from popular demands. Seen in this light, the rise of right-wing populism marks not the end of neoliberalism but one of its latest transformations.","Milanovic is right that the old language of free trade and cosmopolitan integration no longer describes the behavior of the major powers. The United States and Europe now use tariffs, subsidies, sanctions, industrial policy, and geopolitical controls with an openness that would have seemed unusual a few decades ago. The political backlash against deindustrialization, inequality, and financial crisis is real. But it does not follow that neoliberalism has ended. One should be cautious about the significance of the change: the truth is that the West, and especially the United States, never abandoned industrial policy. In practice, state intervention in strategic sectors has been a constant, even if it is often denied at the level of discourse.","It is crucial to distinguish neoliberalism from the slogans with which it has often presented itself. Neoliberalism was not a rediscovery of the old-fashioned  doctrine of classical liberalism. It is also not just a political movement. Its analytical foundation lies in modern neoclassical economics\u00a0\u2014 above all, in the claim that markets are the superior mechanisms for coordinating social life and that government failure is generally more dangerous than market failure.","That distinction explains both what neoliberalism is and why it has been so durable. It can survive the abandonment of particular policies, even of free trade itself, so long as markets remain the norm against which political action is judged and capital remains insulated from democratic claims.","Neoliberals use all kinds of subterfuge to disguise the nature of their ideas. They prefer to call themselves classical liberals, defenders of economic freedom, or simply realists who understand how markets work. Both Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek\u00a0\u2014 the intellectual standard-bearers of neoliberalism\u00a0\u2014 eventually rejected the term. They invoked the authority of Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, but that link to early classical liberalism was always tenuous. In particular, the Chicago School use of the mantle of Smith: the myth of the self-made man, the virtues of the entrepreneur, and the dangers of bureaucratic power fueled the rise of American conservatism, another label that was often rejected, even when Friedman was a key adviser to Barry Goldwater.","The neoliberal story is simple. Society prospers when individuals are free to buy, sell, invest, and compete, while government stays out of the way. That story has been one of the most successful political narratives of the last half century. It has made privatization sound like liberation, deregulation sound like modernization, and attacks on unions sound like a defense of ordinary consumers. It has allowed enormous transfers of power and income upward to appear as the neutral outcome of impersonal market forces.","Adam Smith is often treated as neoliberalism\u2019s patron saint. The familiar image is of Smith as the apostle of the invisible hand. But Smith\u2019s concerns were different, rooted in his own historical experience. Smith wrote against a world of aristocratic privilege, colonial monopoly, mercantilist restrictions, and feudal remnants that impeded the rise of the bourgeoisie. His political economy was concerned with production, accumulation, and the distribution of income among social classes. Wages, profits, and rents were not simply rewards handed out by a perfectly efficient market. They were shaped by social relations, institutions, and conflict.","Smith defended commercial society because he believed that the division of labor could raise productivity and weaken old systems of privilege. But he did not provide a theory showing that markets always produce the best possible social outcome. Nor did he regard the state as inherently illegitimate. He assigned it responsibilities in infrastructure, education, justice, and defense. The liberalism of Smith\u2019s age was, at least in part, an attack on an established order dominated by landlords, monopolists, and inherited power.","Neoliberalism is something different. It is not primarily a revolt against privilege. More often, it is a defense of new privileges attached to property, finance, corporate power, and the freedom of capital to move beyond democratic control.","The difference becomes clearer once we look at the economics behind it. Classical political economy, from Smith through David Ricardo and Karl Marx, focused on production and distribution. It asked how economies reproduce themselves, how profits and wages are divided, and how accumulation changes the social structure. It treated capitalism as a system marked by conflict between classes, even when its authors differed sharply on whether that conflict was manageable or desirable. Neoclassical economics changed the terms of the discussion. Instead of beginning with classes, production, and distribution, it began with individuals, their preferences, and choice in a world of scarcity. Prices became signals that coordinate decentralized decisions. In its idealized world, markets allocate resources efficiently because each person responds to incentives, and prices convey the information needed to guide production and consumption.","That framework did not automatically imply neoliberal politics. Much twentieth-century neoclassical economics supplied arguments for public intervention. Welfare economists accepted the marginalist framework but emphasized that markets could fail. Monopolies could distort prices, pollution could impose costs on others, public goods could be under-provided, and private investment could fall short of what society needed. From that perspective, taxes, subsidies, regulation, public investment, and social insurance could improve market outcomes. The state was not necessarily opposed to the market. It could correct the failures of markets.","The decisive neoliberal move was to reverse the presumption. The question was no longer whether markets fail. Of course they do. The question became whether governments can do any better. The Chicago School, and in particular the work of Ronald Coase and George Stigler, was instrumental for that change. They argued that political institutions are captured by special interests, bureaucrats pursue their own power, regulation is distorted by the firms it is supposed to control, and democratic demands lead to wasteful spending, inflation, and political disorder.","This also marked a shift of the Chicago School on antitrust, associated with the work by Aaron Director, Friedman\u2019s brother-in-law, Stigler, and their disciples Robert Bork and Richard Posner, who redefined the problem of monopoly away from political power and market structure, and toward a narrow consumer-welfare standard. Big firms were no longer presumed dangerous because of concentration or power. For the Chicago antitrust school, many allegedly monopolistic practices were actually , reflecting an efficient solution to market conditions. Corporations were often treated as efficient unless clear price effects could be shown, and that eventually had significant implications for antitrust policy.","The intellectual implications were clear. Even an imperfect market is usually preferable to a government trying to correct it. Regulation is better done by the corporations, and their behavior should be judged by whether prices hurt the consumer. This is the intellectual heart of neoliberalism. Its central claim is not merely that private enterprise is good or that all government intervention is bad. It is that the price system is the best available mechanism for organizing society, while collective action through democratic institutions is inherently suspect. The price system is the king.","The ideas of James M. Buchanan, another figure of the Chicago School, are central in this respect. Unlike Friedman or Hayek, who emphasized the superiority of markets and often hoped to persuade public opinion, Buchanan focused on institutional design. His objective was to create constitutional arrangements that would protect capitalism from democratic pressures regardless of electoral outcomes. Nancy MacLean argued that Buchanan\u2019s influence in the broader neoliberal movement, the so-called public-choice school, was to design mechanisms that  the scope of democratic choice and limit the control over capital, basically through independent central banks, fiscal rules, and judicial protections of property. The objective was to reduce the scope of democratic institutions that could limit capital\u2019s autonomy. The implicit idea, however, was still that markets are the best mechanism for the harmonious coordination of individual exchange interactions. That is why they had to be shielded from majority rule.","Austrian economists, the Chicago School, public-choice theorists, and law-and-economics scholars developed that claim in different ways. Some preferred formal models; others distrusted mathematical economics. Some wanted a minimal state; others wanted a state strong enough to impose competitive discipline. But they shared a basic belief: markets are the privileged form of social coordination, while politics tends to corrupt, distort, and destroy.","Hayek is particularly important in this context. His deeper argument against state intervention was that no government planner could possess the dispersed knowledge held by millions of individuals. Prices, he claimed, communicate information that no central authority could ever gather or process. The market was therefore not just efficient\u00a0\u2014 it was a kind of social intelligence.","This was a powerful idea because it gave markets an almost moral authority. To interfere with prices was not merely to alter the distribution of income. It was to disrupt a vast, spontaneous system of knowledge and coordination. Democracy could make demands, workers could organize, and voters could seek redistribution\u00a0\u2014 but all such claims could be dismissed as dangerous intrusions into a process supposedly wiser than any collective political decision.","The neoliberal state was therefore never meant to be weak. This is one of the ideology\u2019s most persistent disguises. Neoliberalism does not ask the state to disappear. It asks the state to reorganize society so that markets and capital are protected from democratic pressure. It needs courts to enforce contracts, central banks to discipline labor and control inflation, police to protect property, trade agreements to limit national policy, and international institutions to make debts enforceable.","It may oppose welfare spending, but it does not oppose public power when public power is used to rescue banks, guarantee financial assets, suppress unions, privatize public services, or open new spaces for capital accumulation. Quinn Slobodian calls this the  of markets. The goal is not to free markets from all institutions. It is to build institutions that place markets beyond the reach of popular sovereignty.","That is why neoliberalism has been compatible with authoritarian politics. Its first large-scale experiments did not occur in the peaceful democracies usually associated with the free market. Chile after the 1973 coup and Argentina after the 1976 coup became laboratories for privatization, deregulation, anti-labor policy, and monetary orthodoxy. The debt crisis of the 1980s then helped generalize these policies across Latin America and eventually much of the developing world.","The Washington Consensus presented this transformation as a technical necessity. Countries were told they needed fiscal discipline, trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and independent central banks because there was no alternative. Structural adjustment was sold as a repair job, not as a redistribution of power.","That is another reason neoliberalism has been successful politically. It converts political choices into technical questions. The issue is not whether workers should have greater bargaining power, but rather how to allow labor markets to adjust efficiently. That means eliminating the power of unions and promoting greater flexibility. The issue is not whether governments should direct credit toward housing, infrastructure, or industry, but rather whether governments know better than bankers. The issue is never whether public services are universal rights, but rather which ones are public goods that cannot be delivered efficiently by markets. The issue is not whether wealth should be taxed, but rather whether that would threaten the entrepreneurs and distort investment incentives. The effect is to make class conflict disappear. There are no longer workers and owners with competing claims on income and power. There are only individuals making choices, entrepreneurs responding to incentives, consumers maximizing welfare, and governments interfering with the self-organization process that would order things around.","The ideal citizen in this worldview is not a worker with collective interests. It is an entrepreneur, or, more precisely, a potential entrepreneur. The unemployed person is not someone failed by the economy but someone who must become more adaptable. The indebted household is not caught in a system of unequal power but must learn financial responsibility. The worker demanding higher wages becomes a threat to competitiveness. The union becomes a special interest. The welfare state becomes dependency. The entrepreneurial myth speaks to genuine frustrations. It tells people they are not powerless, even as the institutions that might give them collective power are dismantled. It promises freedom while narrowing its meaning to the freedom to compete.","This is why contemporary right-wing populism should not be mistaken for a clean break with neoliberalism. Donald Trump\u2019s tariffs, sanctions, and attacks on globalization are often presented as a rejection of the old free-market consensus. But the underlying moral economy remains deeply neoliberal. The entrepreneur is still the hero. Government is legitimate when it protects national business, punishes foreign competitors, or clears obstacles to private accumulation. Tariffs are sold less as a challenge to markets than as a way of restoring a supposedly fair market order against cheating foreigners, bureaucrats, and global elites.","The same point applies more broadly to the new industrial policy, which, one might add, was never completely abandoned in the United States or Western Europe. States may subsidize national champions, direct investment, or protect selected sectors. Yet they can still treat profitability, competitiveness, shareholder value, and private returns as the ultimate criteria of success. Protectionism is not, by itself, an alternative to neoliberalism. Nor is a larger state. States have always intervened in markets. The question is whether intervention changes the social hierarchy of power or merely uses public resources to secure a more competitive capitalism.","Two recent  by the Supreme Court of the United States on the independence of regulatory agencies are symbolic of neoliberalism\u2019s persistence. One protects the appointed officials of the Federal Reserve from firing, while the other allows similar intervention in the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The implicit assumption is that the Fed occupies a unique institutional position whose insulation from democratic politics is both desirable and necessary. The Court simultaneously expanded presidential control over agencies such as the FTC while preserving the Fed\u2019s special status under the Federal Reserve Act.","Trump has challenged parts of the postwar administrative state, but neither the court nor much of the political establishment has questioned the privileged constitutional and ideological status of the Federal Reserve. The Court\u2019s ruling does not simply protect the Fed. It reaffirms the neoliberal distinction between acceptable democratic intervention (over regulatory agencies) and unacceptable intervention (over monetary policy). That is a powerful indication that, despite the rise of right-wing populism, the neoliberal constitutional order has proven remarkably resilient. The court protects the Fed because monetary discipline remains central to the neoliberal institutional order, but it makes the FTC more directly subject to presidential control, undermining the agency most associated with policing corporate power. The asymmetry is revealing. Central banking is insulated from democracy, but antitrust enforcement is weakened. That is not the end of neoliberalism, but one of its mutations. The system worked to protect the institutions that discipline labor while reducing the autonomy of institutions that might discipline capital.","Right-wing populism, which emerged as a result of the success of neoliberalism, and the inability of left-of-center governments to decisively break with it in order to deal with the market failures it caused, has not abandoned the underlying logic of free markets. The underlying project was the protection of capital, the weakening of labor, and the encasement of markets against democratic control. Neoliberalism will not end merely because governments impose tariffs or because nationalist politicians denounce globalization. It will end only when states cease to treat market rationality as the primary logic of governance. It will end only when the entrepreneurial myth ceases to be the dominant mode through which people are addressed and governed. That would require pro-labor organizations, parties, unions, and civil society organizations, to acquire the structural power to contest capital. Only then, can we begin to build a society in which employment, housing, health, ecological survival, and democratic equality are not subordinated to the logic of free markets."]}},"published":"2026-07-07T15:48:28.708244Z","summary":"Neoliberalism\u2019s defining feature was always the insulation of capital from democratic control. Trumpism\u2019s break with free trade has changed the rhetoric. But the underlying economic order remains intact."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/odyssey-criterion-nolan-coen-brothers","title":"Great Cinematic Odysseys to Prepare You for The Odyssey","updated":"2026-07-07T14:47:32.082061Z","author":{"name":"Eileen Jones"},"category":{"@attributes":{"label":"Film and TV","term":"Film and TV"}},"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["There\u2019s a new Criterion Channel  called \u201cOdysseys\u201d that is clearly meant as a tie-in with Christopher Nolan\u2019s upcoming much-anticipated epic  opening soon.","But before I get into the Criterion film picks, I must note that I have now had this conversation a few times in the past month when discussing, in vague ways, summer movie releases:","So it\u2019s a braver thing than it might seem to create a film series relating both to Homer\u2019s epic and \u201cthat big new Christopher Nolan movie starring Matt Damon,\u201d without even specifying the connection, on the assumption that you\u2019ll get the connection without being told. Over at Criterion Channel, they\u2019re like the Irish monks of medieval times who preserved the knowledge of a whole civilization in illuminated manuscripts. They go right on with their work, regardless of what kind of ignorant claptrap has taken over in the outside world.","Of the films chosen by Criterion coprogrammer Sean Fennessey of  podcasts, only ? (2000), the delightful roots-music-driven comedy written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, is directly referencing   throughout. Set in hardscrabble Depression-era Mississippi, it\u2019s about a glib conman and tale-spinner named Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) who breaks free of a Mississippi chain gang with the two fellow prisoners manacled to him, Pete and Delmar (John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson). Everett\u2019s in a hurry to get home because he\u2019s heard his estranged wife, Penny (Holly Hunter), is being courted assiduously and might soon remarry.","But Everett tells his pals nothing of his real motives, beguiling them instead with a tantalizing tall tale of a cache of bank robbery money that must be recovered within a few days, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s government floods the Tennessee Valley and \u201chydro-electrics up the whole dern state.\u201d","On their journey, the trio of escapees encounter many obstacles, all predicted by a blind seer just as in Homer\u2019s , here depicted as an old man working a pump trolley along a railroad track:","Their obstacles include appropriately Homeric encounters with three seductive women washing clothes in a stream who waylay them with the lure of sex and moonshine whiskey (the sirens); a huge, one-eyed, silver-tongued Bible salesman who robs them, played by John Goodman (the Cyclops); a distracting lakeside community baptism ceremony where both Pete and Delmar suddenly get religion in a full-immersion rite (the lotus eaters interlude); and a terrible nighttime, torchlit, murderous sequence at a Ku Klux Klan rally (a variation on Odysseus\u2019s trip to the underworld).",{"cite":"O Brother, Where Art Thou"},"Ulysses Everett McGill is that harried wanderer and \u201cman of constant sorrow\u201d who ultimately finds a great unexpected treasure in the local music constantly played and sung by black and white Southerners all over the place. They\u2019re so familiar with it, they have no idea of its tremendous worth. This theme is signaled by the first song in the film, \u201cPo\u2019 Lazarus,\u201d sung by actual chain-gang prisoners of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, who created the percussive sounds with the axes they were using to cut logs. It was recorded in 1959 by famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who feared the loss of a precious legacy and went around recording many musical performances of ordinary people in the United States and Great Britain from the 1940s through the 1960s.","Ironically, given the movie\u2019s many citations of its source material, Joel and Ethan Coen always maintained that they never read . This is probably not true, as the Coen brothers are notoriously prankish tall-tale tellers themselves. Tim Blake Nelson, who was a classics major at Brown University and had definitely read , is  as saying he didn\u2019t believe them.","Though in the old days, it was a common phenomenon for people to know a fair amount about texts they never read. Certain canonical works had so permeated the culture, people knew them at secondhand, never having read the primary source material\u00a0\u2014 even if they were assigned it in high school. It used to be pretty easy to pass for greater erudition than one had by soaking up plenty of info through general reading and pop culture references."],"blockquote":[{"p":["Me: The next one I have to review is .","Them: What\u2019s that one about?","Me: It\u2019s, you know, THE .","Them: [blank stare]","Me: Homer\u2019s ? Odysseus? Trying to get home after the Trojan War? Sirens? Cyclops? All that?","Them: [faking recognition] Oh! Oh, yeah. Right, right. That ."]},{"p":"You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. But first\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward."},{"p":["O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story","Of that man skilled in all the ways of contending","A wanderer, harried for years on end.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0"]}]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"Homer by Way of American Slapstick"},"div":{"p":["The Coens certainly did know at firsthand a different source for their film: Preston Sturges\u2019s great 1941 comedy , which is another \u201codyssey\u201d movie included in Criterion\u2019s series. It\u2019s about a popular Hollywood movie director, John L. \u201cSully\u201d Sullivan (Joel McCrea), who specializes in slapstick comedies but longs to deal with serious social issues by adapting a realist Depression-era novel entitled\u00a0\u2014 get ready for it\u00a0\u2014 ?, which suggests that the Coens were attempting to at long last make Sully\u2019s big important picture themselves. Trying to dissuade the young director, Sully\u2019s two studio bosses mock his lack of real-life experience of poverty and suffering:","But the gambit backfires when Sully admits to his shame that he went right from an expensive boarding school to college to a career as a successful Hollywood director. Rather than giving up the project, he decides to educate himself. He puts on ragged clothes and goes out into the world with nothing but ten cents in his pocket and a determination to share the suffering of the common people.","Many comical adventures ensue as Sullivan gets tailed on the road by a promotional team in a luxurious \u201cland yacht.\u201d He gets rid of them, but he finds that one of his biggest problems is sinking into anything like a life of true privation. He can\u2019t even stay out of town\u00a0\u2014 no matter how he travels, on foot or hitchhiking or riding the rails, he keeps getting delivered right back to Hollywood and the lap of luxury. It\u2019s anything but an odyssey, as if Odysseus\u2019s biggest difficulty was staying  from his home and family in Ithaca long enough to have adventures.","But eventually, in a remarkably bleak turn of events, Sully inadvertently manages to find real trouble when he\u2019s arrested on an assault charge and consigned to a long sentence on a prison farm chain gang in the Deep South\u00a0\u2014 certainly a kind of underworld straight from Homer. He\u2019s so far beyond rescue that, at last, he knows what it means to be really in trouble. Deep suffering begins when there\u2019s no way out.","In these dire circumstances, Sully\u2019s great discovery is that comedy is a balm to the soul of those who live in a permanent state of trouble. He learns this when the chain gang gets a rare treat, hosted by a black church that screens for their downtrodden guests an old Disney cartoon full of the slapstick antics of Mickey Mouse\u2019s dog Pluto.  is a tribute to all the makers of comedy who ever existed, literalized in the film\u2019s opening dedication. It\u2019s also Sturges\u2019s defense of his own work in films at a time when Frank Capra was admired for making more serious populist comedy-dramas taking on social ills."],"blockquote":{"p":"What do you know about trouble?\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0You want to make an epic about misery. You wanna show hungry people sleeping in doorways.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 You wanna grind ten thousand feet of hard luck, and all I\u2019m asking you is, what do you know about hard luck?"}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"Cinematic Homecomings"},"div":{"p":["Several of the other films in the series, which include Martin Scorsese\u2019s  (1985), Wes Anderson\u2019s  (2007), David Lynch\u2019s  (1999), and Nicolas Roeg\u2019s  (1971) are far more equivocal about the blessings of homecoming, though they preserve the harrowing nature of the arduous trek full of detours and obstacles. Even the comedies sink into grimness when it appears all is lost and there\u2019s no way home, though \u201chome\u201d might turn out to be the blank featureless office and a dead-end job. Martin Scorsese\u2019s satirical black comedy  manages to keep both humor and horror going throughout as corporate data-entry drone Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) decides to enliven his existence with an evening in SoHo and lives to regret it. Unlike the other films of the series, this odyssey is confined to a constrictive urban area in Manhattan. And Hackett isn\u2019t seeking out any big adventure or pursuing any vital mission.","The most mundane acts drag him ever deeper into a nighttime labyrinth of weirdness and escalating menace. He attempts to hook up with a flirtatious but troubled young woman (Rosanna Arquette); to borrow enough money to get home after losing his only $20 bill in a wild cab ride; to get out of the pouring rain when the only refuge on offer is the apartment of a strange and desperately needy woman with a beehive hairdo (Teri Garr); and to hide from an angry mob convinced he\u2019s the perpetrator of a series of local burglaries.",{"cite":["After Hours","After Hours"]},"It\u2019s one of the great benefits of , rewatching such a wide span of striking films that are \u201cby turns tragic, comic, mythic, and deeply personal tales of wanderers and seekers tap into the fundamental human yearning to find our way back to where we belong.\u201d It\u2019s always worth revisiting, for example, John Ford\u2019s landmark  (1956), the only Western in the Criterion retrospective.  centers around a violent, racist Civil War veteran (John Wayne) and his vengeful, yearslong search for his niece (Natalie Wood), who was abducted by the Comanches in a raid on her home. Wayne\u2019s homecoming in  is a famously heart-wrenching one. Having given up his barbaric plan to murder her abductor and her as well, on the assumption that she\u2019s probably been \u201ctainted\u201d by sexual experiences with a Comanche, he returns his niece safely to the surviving extended family members. But he\u2019s excluded from their lingering embrace and their drawing inside together in reunion. In the famous last shot of the film, he stands clutching himself with one arm, framed by the prairie homestead doorway, before walking off toward the horizon, bearing away with him his antiheroic darkness and unsettledness that can have no further constructive place in their lives.","Maybe one\u2019s great fortune has been there at home all along while you wandered in search of it. Maybe home is just a safer place than the rest of the crazy bedeviled world. Maybe you can\u2019t go home again, like the man said. Maybe you\u2019ll wish you hadn\u2019t."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-07T14:47:32.082061Z","summary":"From Preston Sturges and the Coen brothers to Martin Scorsese and John Ford, the Criterion Channel\u2019s \u201cOdysseys\u201d series traces the enduring appeal of Homer\u2019s epic in American cinema."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/turkey-nato-cold-war-imperialism","title":"Turkey\u2019s Key Role in NATO Is No Contradiction","updated":"2026-07-07T13:57:15.955655Z","author":{"name":"O\u011ful Tuna"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"History","term":"History"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"International Relations","term":"International Relations"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit this week in the Turkish capital began in familiar circumstances: police repression of anyone dissenting against the alliance. Ahead of the meeting, Ankara was placed under what amounted to a quasi\u2013state of emergency. Without formally declaring emergency rule, the governor\u2019s office banned virtually all forms of protest and public political expression from June 28 to July 10. Road and park closures, emptied student dormitories, special security arrangements, and accreditation barriers for journalists turned the capital into a securitized zone where political expression and ordinary urban life were temporarily suspended.","Officials repeatedly emphasized the security risks surrounding the summit. But the scale of the crackdown pointed to something more revealing: hundreds of people were detained in pre-summit operations, including academics, journalists, lawyers, trade unionists, and civil society figures.","These figures reveal not only the erosion of the rule of law in Turkey but also Ankara\u2019s continuing importance within the alliance. Indeed, while NATO leaders often say that the bloc is built on shared values of democracy and the rule of law, repression in Turkey has rarely threatened the country\u2019s standing inside the bloc. It\u2019s not hard to see why. Turkey possesses NATO\u2019s second-largest army, controls access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, borders the Middle East and the Caucasus, and retains diplomatic leverage from Ukraine to Syria. Its strategic value has long outweighed liberal concerns, and it is again today proving its importance to the bloc. Turkey is hosting the NATO meetup as the war in Ukraine, the devastation of Gaza, and the escalating conflict around Iran, are reshaping regions directly connected to one of the alliance\u2019s most strategically important members.","Turkey\u2019s key role in NATO should not be treated as a contradiction or a temporary embarrassment. Its record shows that the alliance\u2019s southeastern flank has often depended on the mutual reinforcement of external security priorities and internal authoritarianism.","From the Cold War onward, Turkey\u2019s role as an anti-communist frontier state helped consolidate a security apparatus directed not only against foreign enemies but also against the domestic left, trade unions, and other forms of dissent. This apparatus did not operate only through abstract ideology: it was sustained by military aid, bases, intelligence cooperation, officer training, and an anti-communist security doctrine that linked Turkey\u2019s internal enemies to the global Soviet threat.","To understand Turkey\u2019s place in NATO today, one must return to the origins of that relationship: the making of a frontier state in the early Cold War."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"Turkey as NATO\u2019s Anti-Communist Frontier"},"div":{"p":["The official Turkish story of NATO membership is usually told as a story of strategic necessity and the country\u2019s Western calling. The republic made a \u201chistoric choice\u201d after World War II by siding with the \u201cfree world\u201d and the Western bloc, a choice \u201ccrowned\u201d by NATO membership in 1952. From that moment on, NATO became, in official rhetoric, the cornerstone of Turkey\u2019s defense and security policy while Turkey itself assumed the defense of the alliance\u2019s southeastern frontier throughout the Cold War.","There was a material basis to this narrative. Turkey emerged from the war diplomatically isolated, economically strained, and militarily vulnerable. In 1945, the Soviet Union terminated the two countries\u2019 1925 Treaty of Friendship and pressed Ankara on the future of the Turkish Straits; Turkish leaders also feared demands for military bases and territorial revisions in eastern Anatolia. These fears helped push Ankara toward Washington.","Yet this founding story has always been politically loaded. For decades, the \u201cSoviet demands\u201d operated in Turkish official memory as a near-mythical origin point: proof that Turkey had no choice but to enter the Western military system. Recent historiography has complicated this picture. Onur \u0130\u015f\u00e7i shows that the Turkish leadership genuinely felt exposed in 1945\u201346, but he also challenges the older official narrative that treats NATO membership as the inevitable response to a simple Soviet threat. The threat was not invented out of nothing, but the decision to join was also motivated by Turkey\u2019s own search for a place inside a new, US-led imperial architecture.","The Korean War made this logic explicit: Turkey\u2019s decision to send troops was presented as a sacrifice for the \u201cfree world,\u201d but it was also a bid for admission into the Atlantic alliance. By 1952, Turkey had become not merely a beneficiary of Western security but a militarized frontier state. Its value lay in its manpower, its anti-communism, and also its geographic proximity to the Soviet Union, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"The Turkish Left Against the Alliance"},"div":{"p":["In March 1968, Behice Boran, one of the leading figures of the Turkish left, concluded an article titled \u201cWhy We Must Leave NATO\u201d with a striking formulation: \u201cUnderlying the previous governments\u2019 dependence on the United States, their entry into NATO, and the present government\u2019s insistence on remaining in NATO are not military reasons or considerations, but political and economic ones.\u201d Turkey\u2019s domestic bourgeoisie, she argued, had opened the country to foreign capital, external loans, and the military and political influence of the states behind them. \u201cThe bilateral agreements and NATO,\u201d Boran wrote, \u201care the military front of Turkey\u2019s economic and financial relations with the capitalist world.\u201d For Boran, NATO membership represented more than just a security arrangement; it was the military form of Turkey\u2019s dependent capitalism.","The 1960s in Turkey were marked by the rapid growth of the Left. The military coup of May 27, 1960\u00a0\u2014 or the \u201cMay 27 Revolution,\u201d as many left-wingers then called it\u00a0\u2014 produced a new constitutional order that opened limited but real space for socialist politics, trade unionism, student activism, and public debate. The Workers\u2019 Party of Turkey, the first socialist party to enter parliament in republican history, won seats in 1965 and became the most visible expression of this new socialist current. Boran would later lead it in the 1970s.","As the Turkish left gained momentum, a nationalist-conservative, religious-conservative, and anti-communist reaction grew alongside it. Backed by sections of the state, the right-wing press, and Turkey\u2019s Western allies, this reaction cast left-wing workers, students, and intellectuals as agents of the \u201cMoskof\u201d\u00a0\u2014 an old derogatory term for Russians, repurposed for Cold War propaganda. Anti-communist associations and religious-conservative educational networks helped turn this politics into a social infrastructure, producing cadres who, from the 1970s onward, would enter parties, ministries, municipalities, business associations, and eventually the commanding heights of the Turkish state. NATO and the United States were presented as the only barriers against a renewed Russian threat, linking contemporary anti-communism to older memories of Ottoman-Russian conflict.","Yet this period also saw the first major rupture between Turkey and the alliance. The Cyprus question, which still hangs over Turkey\u2019s relations with the West, showed both the Turkish state and ordinary citizens that NATO membership did not guarantee automatic support. The Johnson Letter of 1964, sent by the new US president, made this painfully clear: Turkey could be restrained by its principal ally even when facing a crisis involving another NATO member, Greece. For the Turkish right, however, this did not fundamentally alter the strategic picture. The greatest threat was still imagined as coming from the north, in the Soviet Union.","Despite the strength of anti-communist propaganda, the Left could not be fully contained by the military memorandum of 1971, forcing an authoritarian turn. Repression was severe, but not enough to kill off left-wing politics and trade union militancy. By the end of the 1970s, however, political violence, economic crisis, and Cold War polarization had created the conditions for a more decisive intervention. What appeared as street violence was also a struggle over the future of the state, labor, and Turkey\u2019s place in the Cold War order. On September 12, 1980, the army intervened once again. In the oft-cited phrase attributed to CIA Ankara Station Chief Paul Henze, \u201cour boys\u201d had done it."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-3"},"header":{"h2":"Political Islam and Capital"},"div":{"p":["The military coup of 1980 did not simply crush the Turkish left. It also completed a long transformation in the ideological foundations of the republic\u2019s anti-communist order. Do\u011fan Avc\u0131o\u011flu and many militants of the 1968 generation located the decisive break not in 1980, but in the post-1950 consolidation of a pro-American, anti-communist, dependent capitalist regime. Their reading could sometimes idealize an earlier republican project, but it grasped something essential: by the late Cold War, the Turkish state\u2019s dominant ideology was no longer national-developmentalist republicanism, but a right-wing synthesis of military tutelage, neoliberal capitalism, NATO loyalty, and religious conservatism.","The late Marxist theoretician Yal\u00e7\u0131n K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck grasped this transformation with unusual clarity, even as it was taking shape. Writing on the eve of the 1980 coup, he argued that Turkish capital, faced with worsening inequality and the defeat of the organized left, would need not only military repression but also a deeper religious discipline. The army, in his view, could repress Islamist parties as political competitors while simultaneously adopting a more intensified version of religious conservatism. This was the paradox of the post-1980 order: not the victory of Islamism over the state, but rather the state using Islam to anti-communist ends.","In this sense, K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck anticipated, in a specifically Turkish register, Samir Amin\u2019s later argument about \u201cpolitical Islam in the service of imperialism\u201d: political Islam could grow not outside Western security structures but inside a Cold War order that armed the military, tied Turkey to NATO, and bound its ruling classes to international capital. This also changes how we should understand the later rise of Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan\u2019s Justice and Development Party (AKP). From the Turkish-Islamic synthesis of the post-coup years to neoliberal conservatism, the path to the AKP was prepared inside the post-1980 settlement. The party did not represent a clean break with Turkey\u2019s NATO order, however much its rhetoric sometimes clashed with the West. It was the most successful political form produced by that settlement: pro-market, anti-left, socially conservative, and capable of translating the old anti-communist state into a new Islamist-conservative hegemony."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-4"},"header":{"h2":"Bargaining Power"},"div":{"p":["Turkey no longer occupies the same position it held in the early Cold War. It is not simply NATO\u2019s southeastern outpost against the Soviet Union, nor merely a military frontier guarding the Bosporus, the Black Sea, and the approaches to the Middle East. Today Ankara operates as a bargaining power inside the alliance: a difficult and often disruptive force but still an indispensable one. Its value lies in its ability to move between theaters\u00a0\u2014 Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, the Caucasus, the Eastern Mediterranean, Gaza, and Iran\u00a0\u2014 where Western power is either overstretched or dependent on regional intermediaries.","This is why Turkey\u2019s periodic tensions with NATO have rarely produced a real rupture. From the S-400 crisis to Syria, Ukraine, and NATO enlargement, Ankara has repeatedly turned tensions with the alliance into leverage. Erdo\u011fan\u2019s governments have understood this well. Their foreign policy has often appeared to oscillate between East and West, for instance with rhetoric about Palestine, but this balancing act is not anti-imperialism. It is bargaining from within the architecture of empire. The AKP\u2019s anti-Western rhetoric should therefore not be mistaken for a break with the NATO order. Its novelty lies elsewhere: it translated the post-1980 synthesis of security-state authoritarianism, neoliberal capitalism, and religious conservatism into a durable regime.","This week\u2019s securitized Ankara summit has brought this story full circle. A meeting presented as a gathering of democratic allies required the crushing of basic civil liberties in the city where it is taking place. This was not an accidental contradiction but a reminder of the deeper continuity in Turkey\u2019s NATO history: external security has repeatedly provided the language justifying internal repression.","The story of Turkey\u2019s NATO membership is thus not simply a history of foreign relations but also a history of regime formation. NATO helped shape Turkey\u2019s anti-communist state, its suppression of the Left, its post-1980 neoliberal and religious-conservative turn, and its later emergence as a difficult but indispensable regional power. Turkey entered NATO as an anti-communist frontier state; it now operates as a bargaining power inside the same alliance. Its place in NATO has long been secured not despite authoritarianism but often through it."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-07T13:57:15.955655Z","summary":"Turkey, which hosts this week\u2019s NATO summit, has the alliance\u2019s second-largest army. Its strategic role in a US-dominated world order has long outweighed any concerns about its lack of democratic standards."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/garbage-sanitation-workers-waste-recycling","title":"The Invisible Heart of Modern Life Is the Garbage Worker","updated":"2026-07-07T12:47:35.851161Z","author":{"name":"Alex N. Press"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Economy","term":"Economy"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Work","term":"Work"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["Simon Par\u00e9-Poupart begins !, a memoir of his years as a garbage collector, by explaining why he started swearing again. He had promised religious friends he would stop taking the Lord\u2019s name in vain. Then one day, he jumped off the truck and found eighteen overloaded contractor bags wedged between two badly parked cars. They were stuffed with construction debris and nails. If he hurt himself carrying them, that would be his fault. If he scratched either car squeezing back through the gap, that would also be his fault. The homeowner, meanwhile, watched from behind the curtains.","\u201cIt\u2019s then,\u201d Par\u00e9-Poupart writes, \u201cat that very moment, that the urge overcomes you and you let out a cry of rage: \u2018Jesus f\u00a0\u2014 ing Christ!!!\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 I mean, swearing is all you\u2019ve got left.\u201d","The homeowner quickly becomes \u201cthe good middle-class\u201d aquarium owner, while the garbageman is reduced to \u201cthe piddly creature that keeps the tank glass clean.\u201d Within a few more pages, Par\u00e9-Poupart has invoked Sisyphus, Georges Bataille, Victor Hugo, and Ren\u00e9 Descartes; described garbage juice as \u201cthe holy water of your baptism\u201d; and explained that \u201cit\u2019s the swearing that makes you a real garbageman.\u201d","Par\u00e9-Poupart has spent more than twenty years collecting garbage in and around Montreal. By his estimate, he has hauled nearly seventy thousand tons of waste. Garbage collectors, he writes, \u201cscrub clean the stains of our consumer society.\u201d Their work \u201ckeeps the whole edifice from crumbling down.\u201d They make it possible to live the way most people do while remaining almost entirely invisible. The illusion he wants to dismantle is simple: \u201cNothing disappears by magic.\u201d","\u201cBeing a garbageman is itself an act of self-violence,\u201d Par\u00e9-Poupart writes. The pace wrecks shoulders, knees, wrists, and backs. The highest compliment another collector can receive is simple: \u201cHe\u2019s a machine.\u201d But if becoming machine-like is the standard, Par\u00e9-Poupart asks, what exactly is being demanded of the worker? \u201cIsn\u2019t the fact that we\u2019re forced to work at this inhuman pace a sure sign that we\u2019re drowning in waste?\u201d","It is a question the book keeps returning to. Nobody on the truck decided products should become cheaper, flimsier, and harder to repair, or that municipalities should move ever greater quantities of waste with ever fewer workers. The garbage collector inherits those decisions.","Which brings Par\u00e9-Poupart to the recycling bins.","He returns to them with comic obsession. They\u2019re too heavy in summer and worse in winter. They fill with rainwater. They freeze into snowbanks. They scatter paper across entire streets.","\u201cThe bins and boxes have all clearly been designed, selected, and purchased by people who\u2019ve never been on the back of a garbage truck,\u201d he writes. \u201cAnd of course, no one ever thought to ask our opinion!\u201d","Winter is when everything breaks down. \u201cPut a garbageman on recycling, especially in winter,\u201d he writes, \u201cand prepare to hear the drawn-out lamentations of a cursed soul.\u201d He imagines recycling becoming an Olympic event: competitors dragging overloaded wheelie bins over snowbanks, weaving between parked cars, wrestling frozen containers loose before sprinting back to the truck to do it all again.","Throwing garbage has style. Routes have rhythm. Ti-Chris, the legendary coworker everyone insists once threw a washing machine into the truck with one hand, is the sort of singular figure every workplace seems to produce. Garbage collectors recognize one another by the way they move.","Victor Hugo called the sewer \u201cthe conscience of the city.\u201d Par\u00e9-Poupart argues that garbage \u201cbursts our mirages\u201d and \u201ctells the whole story\u00a0\u2014 if you know how to listen.\u201d"]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"The View From the Back of the Truck"},"div":{"p":["Garbage collectors have their own hierarchy. Garbage is at the top, recycling comes next, and compost is last. To anyone outside the industry, the ranking seems upside down. Recycling is cleaner. Compost is greener. Garbage is simply garbage.","But garbage collection leaves the greatest room to organize the route yourself. Trucks fill quickly. The rhythm rarely breaks. Experienced workers improvise. Compost collection, by contrast, \u201cquickly degenerates into a bureaucratic shitshow.\u201d \u201cThe more workers feel free to steer the course of their work,\u201d Par\u00e9-Poupart writes, \u201cthe less they feel supervised.\u201d","The recycling bins were designed by people who never hauled them. Routes are reorganized by people who never ran them. Supervisors explain the work to people who have spent decades doing it. Every few pages, someone who has never climbed onto the back of the truck is reorganizing the lives of people who do.","At one private waste company, Par\u00e9-Poupart and his coworkers try to organize a union. They want higher wages and management to take their \u201cpoint of view and know-how into account.\u201d Instead they got cameras installed in truck cabs, consultants, and bosses who treated experience as an obstacle rather than an asset.","\u201cIf you boys aren\u2019t happy, piss off,\u201d one manager tells them. \u201cThink I\u2019ll have a hard time finding other employees with no education willing to work for twenty dollars an hour?\u201d","The assumption that garbage collection is simply what people without other options do surfaces throughout the book. Par\u00e9-Poupart worked his shifts while earning a bachelor\u2019s degree and then a master\u2019s, alternating \u201cshifts behind a truck and days spent in the classroom and the library.\u201d He kept throwing trash anyway. When one resident tells him to \u201ctry getting an education,\u201d Par\u00e9-Poupart replies that he already has a master\u2019s degree. The man doesn\u2019t believe him.","\u201cRecycling is a magic trick,\u201d Par\u00e9-Poupart writes, \u201cor more properly a sleight of hand.\u201d The garbageman makes bottles, cardboard, and plastic disappear\u00a0\u2014 \u201ctadaaa!\u201d\u00a0\u2014 and everyone else gets to feel the problem has been solved.","His target isn\u2019t recycling itself so much as the story told about it. Reduce receives \u201cshort shrift,\u201d because there is remarkably little money in producing less waste. Reuse isn\u2019t much better. Recycling leaves the same system intact while promising environmental responsibility. \u201cMore crap, less waste: that\u2019s the plan, folks.\u201d By this point, the blue bin is no longer a symbol of environmental virtue. It is another awkward piece of equipment designed by somebody who never had to drag it between parked cars.","Then the route leaves Montreal. It does so through a chapter in which Par\u00e9-Poupart follows Quebec\u2019s recycling stream to Vietnam, drawing on anthropologist Mika\u00ebla Le Meur\u2019s research in the recycling village of Minh Khai. Milk bags and yogurt containers become plastic bales unloaded in Minh Khai, Vietnam, where women spend ten-hour days opening, washing, sorting, and separating waste shipped from wealthier countries. Par\u00e9-Poupart quotes Le Meur\u2019s account of one worker asking whether jobs like hers exist in France. Told they probably do not, she replies simply: \u201cThen take me with you to France.\u201d","Elsewhere he writes that what separates rich countries from poor ones is not that one produces waste while the other does not. Both do. The difference is that one enjoys \u201cthe privilege of getting rid of their waste,\u201d while the other inherits it."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"Where the Garbage Goes"},"div":{"p":["Compared with production, the labor process, or logistics, of waste has occupied a relatively modest place in political-economic literature. But there is an important body of work on the subject. Robin Nagle\u2019s , an ethnography of New York sanitation workers, remains one of the finest accounts of the labor that keeps a city alive, demonstrating that garbage collection deserves to be understood as skilled, indispensable work. Harold Crooks\u2019s  traced how the absence of democratic public control over waste collection left organized crime extraordinarily well positioned to dominate the business. Scholars like Zsuzsa Gille, Martin O\u2019Brien, and Josh Lepawsky have all treated refuse as a problem of political economy rather than sanitation. ! is a welcome addition to that tradition.","Near the end of the book, Par\u00e9-Poupart briefly invokes Zygmunt Bauman\u2019s observation that modern societies produce \u201chuman waste\u201d alongside material waste. It is a fitting conclusion to a memoir that has spent two hundred pages showing how easily the workers who handle waste disappear from public view as well. Consumer society depends on rendering certain people as disposable as the things they are paid to move.","Near the beginning of the memoir, Par\u00e9-Poupart says he wanted to prove \u201cthat no job is \u2018lower\u2019 than another.\u201d By the end of the book, it\u2019s difficult to doubt him. In showing what garbage collection actually demands\u00a0\u2014 its skill, judgment, and accumulated know-how\u00a0\u2014 he also reveals how much of modern society becomes visible from the back of a garbage truck.","What stays with the reader, though, are the small details from the routes themselves: contractor bags wedged between parked cars, blue recycling bins frozen into snowbanks, truck cabs fitted with cameras, milk bags arriving in Vietnam. Together they reveal a society that looks rather different from the back of a garbage truck than it does from the curb."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-07T12:47:35.851161Z","summary":"The backbreaking toil of the sanitation worker is the work that makes all of human civilization possible."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/aipac-nbec-black-voters-israel","title":"Black Conservatives Have Made Their Own AIPAC","updated":"2026-07-06T17:33:47.173772Z","author":{"name":"Jasmine Wynn"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Politics","term":"Politics"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Party Politics","term":"Party Politics"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["On June 23, democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated pro-Israel incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat by 4 percentage points in New York\u2019s Thirteenth Congressional District. However, in the process of campaigning, Espaillat\u2019s team leaned into a rather audacious strategy. It  anti-blackness in a historically black area in an attempt to win. Ultimately, Espaillat\u2019s camp failed, but its attempt reveals a broader strategy on the part of the Right to undermine socialist candidates. ","The vitriol was partially stoked by the National Black Empowerment Council (NBEC). It is part of a playbook of tactics that the NBEC has used before and will likely use again in the future."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"What Is the NBEC?"},"div":{"p":["The nebulously titled National Black Empowerment Council was  by former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) alumnus Darius Jones in 2021. Jones specifically was the former national African American constituency director at AIPAC; his codirector, Richard St Paul,  on the committee\u2019s national council. At the federal level, a  of the group is Ja\u2019Ron Smith of conservative lobbying firm CGCN. Smith  the highest-ranking black aide to President Donald Trump.","On the \u201c\u201d landing page of the National Black Empowerment Action Fund (NBEAF), NBEC\u2019s \u201c,\u201d a sparsely populated list is present. The three policy priorities are \u201cJobs and Economic Mobility,\u201d \u201cEducational Equity and Excellence,\u201d and \u201cPublic Safety and Common-Sense Criminal Justice Reform.\u201d The focus on all three issues  recent polling on which issues matter the most to black American voters; however, the tangible policy proposals of the NBEAF are rather scant.","For the economic mobility section, the description merely lists \u201cgood-paying jobs and generating economic activity in black communities\u201d as the key objective, with no specific economic proposals. More recently, the NBEC also  an event in the heart of NY-13 focused on black economic empowerment in May, shortly before several inflammatory NBEAF-funded flyers were mailed to several constituents, myself included. For education, the objective is to \u201censure Black children have access to excellent educational options that nurture their personal and intellectual development,\u201d again with no specification for if those policies include better-funded public education or the favored conservative alternative of school-voucher programs. Furthermore, the use of the phrase \u201ccommon sense policies\u201d in the public safety section is followed by no substantive solutions for criminal justice reform.","Interestingly, in a video introducing the work of the NBEC to a wider audience, Jones routinely discusses the importance of advancing a \u201cmodel of advocacy\u201d within the black community\u00a0\u2014 one that reflects NBEC allies such as former New York City , who has been accused of corruption, and current , AIPAC-backed challenger to former Rep. Cori Bush. During her 2024 race, Bush herself  the NBEAF for ties to AIPAC.","It is evident that NBEC is primarily focused on increasing buy-in for their vision of a cohesive center-right black upper class of businesspeople, politicians, leaders in higher education, and more. It is a leadership class more concerned with creating a conservative base within the black upper class in support of Israel\u2019s oppression of Palestine, starting at the college level."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"Expanded Partnerships With Israeli Universities"},"div":{"p":["Parsing through transcribed interviews from Jones in his capacity as the founder of the NBEC,  often center Israel. Rarely does Jones provide substantive breakdowns of solutions to the issues impacting the black community, such as the root causes of economic disempowerment or educational inequity.","There are clear reasons for the NBEC\u2019s obsessive focus on Israel. The lobby shares a significant portion of its donor overlap with AIPAC, especially donors   on higher education. Billionaire Daniel S. Loeb  $100,000 to the NBEAF\u2019s  political action committee (PAC), known as the Empowering Black Americans PAC, in spring 2024. Loeb was one of several high-profile financiers  in a WhatsApp chat with former Mayor Eric Adams urging Adams to deploy police onto Columbia University and the City College of New York\u2019s campuses.","Two 2025 posts on the NBEC\u2019s Facebook page include the t of Texas State University\u2019s nascent partnership with \u201cleading institutions in Israel\u201d as an act of diplomacy, paired with their  of a partnership between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, and eighteen historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). At a time in which boycotts have sought to highlight what the academic Maya Wind has called Israeli universities\u2019 \u201cwork on behalf of the Israeli state to counter international grassroots organizing for Palestinian rights\u201d in the occupied territories and beyond, it is difficult to see how these partnership expansions are not just a form of indoctrination. Especially when they are aimed at HBCU campuses that   administrative crackdowns against   in solidarity with Palestine."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-3"},"header":{"h2":"NBEAF\u2019s Impact on the 2026 Midterms Cycle"},"div":{"p":["The campaigning challenges that Chevalier faced were not unique. Former Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) endured the same two years prior. In her widely spectated showdown against current Rep. Wesley Bell of Missouri\u2019s First Congressional District, it  that AIPAC-affiliated mailers sent to in-district voters depicted Bush with an unusually large \u201cjaw and forehead.\u201d This was a blatant attempt to masculinize her image, a common trope used against black women. Similar racist tactics were  during current Rep. George Latimer\u2019s challenge against former Congressmember Jamaal Bowman in New York\u2019s Sixteenth Congressional District, where certain anti-Bowman campaign mailers allegedly darkened Bowman\u2019s skin.","In all cases, the racialized attacks on pro-Palestine candidates were primarily done in the name of protecting pro-Israel interests in Congress. For Jones, who is a  supporter of \u201csocial justice\u201d for minority groups, such smears against black candidates who extend their vision of racial justice to Palestine seem rather contradictory to his organization\u2019s mission of \u201cempowering\u201d the black community. While NBEC and its affiliates market themselves as aiding \u201cBlack families in living their life safely,\u201d Jones\u2019s operation willingly accepts monetary support from the same billionaires who  an influx of police into historically black Harlem in the name of squashing critics of Israel\u2019s apartheid and genocide.","The attempt to create a wedge between a generation of black Americans and the struggle for Palestinian liberation is motivated by a broader right-wing agenda. It is an agenda that will ultimately harms black Americans, since it is also opposed to the redistributive policies pushed by Bush, Chevalier, and others.","In the words of Darius Jones , \u201cNot all leaders who share racial identity prioritize the community\u2019s needs.\u201d The NBEC writ large is no exception."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-06T17:33:47.173772Z","summary":"The National Black Empowerment Council presents itself as a voice for black communities. Its funding, alliances, and political strategy suggest a different mission: expanding pro-Israel conservative influence within black political institutions."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/balkans-serbia-albania-kushner-protests","title":"The Same Enemy Is Driving Protests Across the Balkans","updated":"2026-07-06T15:32:11.499297Z","author":{"name":"Aleksandar Matkovi\u0107"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Environment","term":"Environment"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Politics","term":"Politics"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["I\u2019ve been following the  in Albania but from a particular angle: as a participant in a similar wave of mass protests . In 2024, I got three months of death threats after I published a scholarly article exposing controversial economic data related to a German-backed lithium mining project that threatened to  the Serbian countryside. Since some of the threats were written in German and followed a visit by that country\u2019s then Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the case drew international attention. It is still under United Nations investigation and was covered by the , which helped draw attention to the massive  and subsequent repression in Serbia at the time. Previously, I was involved in internationalizing Serbia\u2019s lithium struggles, linking activists and local communities from Portugal, Chile, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere with those in Serbia under what became known as the \u201c.\u201d It was these international links that triggered the threats in my case.","So, there\u2019s good reason to speak up about what\u2019s happening in Albania after the last month of protests against a destructive luxury resort project backed by Jared Kushner. Surely, not everyone shares this view. Decades of nationalism and war have created deep divisions between Serbia and Albania. Yet there are important similarities. Both governments are currently facing backlash from their citizens over ties to foreign-led development projects. This marks a shift in both countries: citizens are no longer identifying with their own states. Instead, both societies are experiencing a growing divide between citizens and state structures, which repress their own populations in defense of projects led by US and other global elites.","Like Serbia, Albania has experienced brain drain. It lost more than a million citizens through migration during the post-1991 transition to capitalism. Official  suggest that over 43 percent of the population now lives abroad. Both countries face mounting environmental conflicts, while political opposition is either ineffective or, in Albania\u2019s case, sometimes aligned with extractive industries, while trade unions remain weak. Both countries are also becoming increasing focuses for US capital. Already prior to the Zv\u00ebrnec luxury resort scheme, Kushner was involved in a real estate project in Serbian capital Belgrade proposing redevelopment of the General Staff Building\u00a0\u2014 a partially destroyed site, until now preserved as a memorial to the 1999 NATO bombing. Plans to transform the site into a luxury development, reportedly linked to the Trump network, provoked public outrage and led to the project\u2019s withdrawal.","Kushner\u2019s trajectory in the Balkans is emblematic of a broader transformation of US hegemony in the region, which some have now dubbed \u201cTrump\u2019s .\u201d In Serbia, the United States was the third largest international investor in 2024 and signed a landmark Energy Cooperation Agreement with its government. In May, a previously announced \u20ac2.6 billion hydroelectric \u0110erdap 3 project was even publicized by the US Embassy . Similar dynamics appear in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where American investments used to be  in 2022. However, this is expected to surge, as the United States has brokered a  deal with Bosnia and Croatia to construct a liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline connecting the two countries\u00a0\u2014 a key target for US LNG exports. The company set to do the construction is , a Donald Trump\u2013linked US-based enterprise now officially endorsed by the Bosnian state.","The same approach is now changing Albania, where US investment previously  from approximately $100 million in 2020 to over $300 million in 2023. This is also expected to surge, as the United States seeks to position Albania as an LNG hub through a $6 billion project in cooperation with Greece. Thus, US energy investments are changing the Balkans as a whole.","This is in line with the strategy encoded in the \u201cWestern Balkans Democracy and Prosperity Act\u201d  by the US Congress in October 2025. The same strategy features US attempts at removing Chinese and Russian influence and explains why, subsequently, Serbia\u2019s Russian-owned oil sector has faced sanctions, contributing to supply instability and pressure on the national currency. This reflected a broader strategy of restricting energy flows among China\u2019s partners, from Venezuela to Iran. In this context, the Balkans is now embedded in shifting patterns of US hegemony.","It is only within this context that Kushner\u2019s $1.4 billion  must be understood. And it is not without precedent: Peter Thiel has also expressed intentions to build a Mediterranean city populated by IT specialists and a  elite, where capital is explicitly prioritized over democracy and human rights. The expansion of US capital in the region thus signals not only increased investment but also increased power over the Balkan states; a broader Pandora\u2019s box of projects is emerging, some of which are deeply unsettling.","In fact, the Balkans are once again transforming into a site of geopolitical competition between major powers, potentially destabilizing Europe. This is another structural reason why intra-Balkans solidarity will become more widely important.","Citizens of Albania and Serbia are therefore justified in questioning whether their states function as agents of their citizens or as intermediaries for global capital, enforcing its conditions on their populations. The citizens of Bosnia are doing the same. Even though protests in Bosnia are still localized, in past instances they did spread across the country, as in 2014. In all three cases, the Balkan states increasingly appear as vehicles for foreign capital and its fantasy projects while repressing their own citizens."]},"section":{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"Beyond the Fragments"},"div":{"p":["Historically, the Balkans have been marked by fragmentation shaped by both national conflicts and competing external influences. These divisions have made the region vulnerable to extractivism. Overcoming them is thus essential if any pan-Balkan strategy\u00a0\u2014 politically or economically speaking\u00a0\u2014 is to emerge in response to what increasingly look like proxy resource conflicts.","Issues such as mining and ecological degradation transcend national borders and create material interests that can potentially be articulated across them without relying on the states that are backing devastating projects. In this sense, we are witnessing an opening in the region. Previously, isolated, nationally bounded movements were unlikely to succeed against transnational forms of power. For Serbia, Bosnia, and other Balkan countries to support Albanian protests is thus not only a moral claim but a strategic necessity.","If the Balkans is to avoid becoming another peripheral zone for elite megaprojects and a proxy for clashes between extractivist superpowers, we need to do more than think in terms of the nation-state. In fact, this also opens up space for rethinking the Balkans itself. Recently, the Regional Alliance to Defend the Nature of the Balkans, a network of over thirty organizations across the region that also includes the Alliance of Ecological Organizations of Serbia, expressed its  for environmental activists, local communities, and citizens in Albania. There have also been limited instances of  between Bosnia and Serbia\u2019s local communities when it comes to the struggle against lithium mining. So, the perspective of integration, one might say, is opening up.","However, the obstacles to deeper society-wide cooperation remain substantial. Bosnia, Serbia, and Albania all have weak opposition forces that are unable to channel this energy or, in some cases, are even opposed to it. If a new political opposition emerges with an alternative vision, and if they can articulate it effectively\u00a0\u2014 which the student movement in Serbia certainly had the potential to do in some regards\u00a0\u2014 such cooperation could reshape the Balkans. At the very least, the current moment may be creating conditions for the Balkans to assume a new role.","Finally, we cannot ignore an old idea. The proposals for Balkan federation were conceived a hundred years ago out of the fear that the region as a whole might be subordinated\u00a0\u2014 like the process that is currently under way. This confronts the Balkans with an alternative. The region may again become a resource colony, as many protesters fear. Or else it can avoid this fate by choosing the path of solidarity and mutual support. To do that, it has to recognize what\u2019s at stake."]}}}},"published":"2026-07-06T15:32:11.499297Z","summary":"In Serbia, the connivance between politicians and multinational capital has fed a sustained protest movement. Current protests in Albania, resisting a luxury development project backed by Jared Kushner, target a similar cronyish capitalism."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/pope-leo-sspx-excommunication","title":"Inside the Schism Threatening the Catholic Church","updated":"2026-07-06T22:31:12.967243Z","author":{"name":"Mary Jo McConahay"},"category":{"@attributes":{"label":"Religion","term":"Religion"}},"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["When Pope Leo XIV signed off on the excommunication of four newly consecrated bishops and other formal followers of the Society of Saint Pius X on July 2, the dark cloud of schism floated over Christianity\u2019s largest religious denomination. Leo, only in office since last year, invoked the extraordinary measure in the first big public test for the first American pontiff. ","Whether the faithful rally around the smart and apparently amiable man who sits on the throne of St Peter or draw back from the move will determine the immediate trajectory of the former Robert Prevost, of Chicago, who over the last year has emerged as a world leader unafraid to speak truth to power. Leo has famously stood up to President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance on immigration, the war in Iran, and Catholic doctrine.","Declaring a group \u201cin schism\u201d is rare, meaning it is no longer considered inside the church. A memorable schism was the Protestant Reformation, five hundred years ago.","The SSPX, as the society is known for short, or Lefebvrists, as outsiders call them after Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who founded the movement in 1970, amounts to a mere splinter within a global Catholic population of 1.4 billion. Yet it is an outsize symbol of recalcitrance at the heart of the church, a mirror of the traditionalism that was meant to disappear in the wake of the global Second Vatican Council (Vatican II, 1962\u201365) but has been spreading with spiritual and political effects beyond the SSPX.","Catholic traditionalists have ultraconservative social views. The SSPX has maintained ties to ultraright figures in Europe such as France\u2019s late Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alternative for Germany lawmaker Maximilian Krah, and Italian neofascists. In the United States, archconservative Catholic groups like the Napa Institute, where Vice President Vance has spoken, promote pre-Vatican II theology. The US contingent of traditionalists represented by the Institute is wealthy, connected to its European counterparts, and aims to influence policy in the direction of its beliefs, such as against gay rights.","Isolating the SSPX may isolate this politically powerful group of Catholics. \u201cIn the US, you have a grey area of some bishops and certain circles of the clergy that were saying, \u2018These guys are a little crazy, but they have a few valid points,\u2019\u201d Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor and historian of the church in the United States told the . \u201cPope Leo did the right thing in making clear, you cannot be in the grey area any more.\u201d","To followers of Lefebvre, who died in 1991, and myriad other \u201ctraditional Catholics,\u201d Vatican II was a turning point. The bishops of the world had set out to modernize the church and, as Pope John XXIII, who called for the meetings, said, \u201cto open the windows and let in the fresh air.\u201d They did not abandon doctrine but traded Latin for vernaculars, turned the altar around so the faithful might see the priest instead of staring at his back during Mass, allowed the liturgy to reflect local culture without changing its essentials. They also condemned antisemitism and elevated ecumenism, embracing friendship and understanding with other faith traditions. To traditionalists, the new direction was anathema. Richard Williamson, an SSPX bishop, denied the Holocaust, and at the consecration in Switzerland current SSPX leader Davide Pagliarini  it was \u201chumiliating\u201d to see Pope Leo meet with representatives of other religions, \u201cfalse and incapable of bringing salvation.\u201d"]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"SSPX\u2019s Followers"},"div":{"p":["\u201cNo good fruit came of Vatican II,\u201d avers one of the six hundred thousand SSPX adherents who attends Mass at one of the society\u2019s eighty chapels worldwide (by ecclesial rule they may not be called \u201cchurches\u201d). Most are in France and the United States, but they exist in sixty more countries too. There followers are baptized, married, and confirmed, and their children may go to SSPX schools. In 2021, Leo\u2019s predecessor, Pope Francis,  there was \u201cno place in the church\u201d for those who reject the council, whose guiding principles were a return to the sources of the early church, connecting it more closely to the gospels and the poor, and , bringing things up to date. The immediate trigger for Leo\u2019s action was the SSPX decision to consecrate four new bishops after he expressly told them not to. \u201cIt\u2019s very sad, bittersweet,\u201d said B, an SSPX follower who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. \u201cThe Society has done everything it can to prevent this,\u201d he said. \u201cOur bishops were old and couldn\u2019t travel all over the world anymore. We needed younger ones.\u201d Nevertheless, B remains firm in his convictions. \u201cIf I say things correctly it comes from God, not me,\u201d he said.","B is a third-generation SSPX adherent living in Michigan, where he was taught at home before attending one of the society\u2019s ninety-four schools from fifth grade through high school. There he received what he described as a \u201cvery good education which taught Catholic studies first, because that is most important, but other things, math, science.\u201d B, who works in supply chain management, and his wife, who has not worked outside the home since she had their first child, were married several years ago by an American SSPX priest, Michael Goldade of St Marys, Kansas, one of the four men consecrated bishops in front of seventeen thousand people in a Swiss vale on July 1 without the necessary papal mandate. Goldade is now excommunicated.","The Vatican decree was directed at formal members of the society. Because of this, B doesn\u2019t believe that he is subject to excommunication since he is not attached to the Society as its priests or seminarians are. Even if B had been excommunicated, it is unclear how much of a difference it would make. He told me he would not attend a non-SSPX church. Although excommunication renders invalid any sacraments the society\u2019s priests will now administer, such as baptism and matrimony, B believes this is overridden by canon law that provides legitimacy to any priest acting in a grave crisis or emergency. B\u2019s claims about canon law are true; they rely on the same reasoning Lefebvre gave decades earlier.","And what, I asked him, is the grave crisis? \u201cI am not able to attend a [mainline Catholic] parish without peril of losing my soul and those of my children,\u201d B said. SSPX services, he believes, are the only true version of Catholic practice and the only way he can fulfill his religious obligations.","A friend of B\u2019s brother, Cassandra Hackstock of Steubenville, Ohio, was, along with others in her extended family, a devout SSPX adherent for more than seven years before leaving disillusioned at age twenty-four. She didn\u2019t like what she saw as the society\u2019s treatment of women as inferior to men and felt she had been lied to after reading published material about what she saw as the valid excommunication of Lefebvre in 1988, which SSPX had said was unjustified. She was riddled with fear lest it be discovered that she also read documents of the Second Vatican Council. \u201cVatican II was demonized so it was evil to read them,\u201d she said. \u201cI was shocked to find nothing shocking.\u201d","While in the society, Hackstock tutored young girls, who are taught separately from boys in SSPX education, in a basement forty minutes away from the main church. \u201cI begged the pastor for a classroom, but he said the girls couldn\u2019t be on the property where boys were except for assembly and Mass.\u201d Hackstock said she was taken aback when introduced as their \u201cteacher\u201d because she had no degree or teaching certificate. \u201cWe don\u2019t you to have a college degree,\u201d the priest told her. \u201cHe always tried to smooth over whatever was troubling my soul. I had the faith, that\u2019s all that was needed.\u201d Now forty-eight, having completed a master\u2019s degree in Catholic studies, Hackstock said she still carries \u201ca tremendous burden of guilt\u201d for the deception. Adherents were \u201cencouraged to tell each other their faults,\u201d and Hackstock said she felt isolated from the rest of the world in the society, but it was nonetheless sad to leave behind the warm sense of community.","Her disquiet didn\u2019t go away when she left. She needed therapy, as if to be deprogrammed, but mental health professionals will drive you to suicide, she said she had been told, which would condemn you to hell. \u201cI needed to unlearn many things I believed were true,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen you leave, it takes a long time to recover.\u201d For years, she was estranged from siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles who stayed in the society.","Hackstock said her SSPX experiences \u201cfit in really well\u201d with the current surge in traditionalist religion and \u201cthe MAGA movement,\u201d as if its beliefs were spilling into the mainstream. The movement was, she suggested, part of a broader wave of Christian nationalism, which she sees in mandatory Bible reading in Texas schools, \u201cthe rise of the alpha-male type,\u201d and a new push by some for large families."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"The Spirit of SSPX Lives in Washington"},"div":{"p":["As news of the excommunications spread, canon lawyer Father Gerald Murray told the Catholic commentator Raymond Arroyo that the extraordinary penalty was meant \u201cto bring the offending party back to full communion by recognizing their offense,\u201d but it had an important second meaning: \u201cTo warn the rest of the faithful who engage in similar behavior.\u201d","Many Catholics are returning to traditionalist practices. Young people and converts especially may be drawn to the beautiful and exotic-seeming Latin Mass, which Pope Francis discouraged, following the Vatican II mandate to celebrate Mass in the vernacular so it would be more accessible.","Beliefs like those of the SSPX are rife among Catholic \u201ctrads,\u201d social conservatives championing the church of yore, such as Vice President Vance, who said that part of what drew him to become a convert in 2019 was that the church was \u201cjust really old.\u201d Take the Lefebvrists\u2019 insistence that women should have many children, sometimes ten or more. Vance has famously  childless \u201ccat ladies\u201d as bad for society and told the traditionalist attendees of the Napa Institute that families were \u201cnot having enough children\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 causing a civilizational crisis in this country.\u201d At a Budapest rally just before Prime Minister Victor Orban lost reelection, Vance  the Hungarian leader for policies encouraging women to have more children, guaranteeing cancellation of of home-loan debt after three children and lifetime exception from income tax after four. The \u201cnumber one thing\u201d that the Republican Party \u201cshould be is pro-babies and pro-families,\u201d the vice president said at Napa.","Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven, typically votes with the conservative Supreme Court supermajority made up of six judges who grew up Catholic. She  to a secretive, insular Christian community with 1,700 members called People of Praise who, like the Lefebrists, are patriarchal and complementarian, believing that men and women are created by God for different roles, with the man the undisputed head of the family. The husband is obliged to correct his wife if she strays from the straight and narrow path of the group\u2019s beliefs.","B, the Michigan SSPX follower, who has two children and another on the way, told me that he and his wife are determined to have \u201cas many children as God gives us.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 Five is considered a small family.\u201d He consults his wife on matters, but his faith tells him that he is the ultimate authority in the marriage, \u201cresponsible for decisions before God.\u201d He is heartened, he says, that \u201cCatholics in positions of power now are advocating bigger families\u00a0\u2014 the replacement helps the country to be stronger.\u201d","Catholic traditionalists are often closer in their social views to extremist white evangelical Christians such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson than to mainstream Catholics. Johnson belongs to the patriarchal and complementarian Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest US Christian denomination after the Catholic Church. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth\u2019s evangelical sect, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) preaches women\u2019s submission to men. In Hegseth\u2019s case, it is difficult to distinguish the belief from straightforward misogyny. He  left and right or blocks them from promotion. He has shared a video showing CREC pastors arguing that women should not have the right to vote. Like the ultraconservative Catholic Opus Dei movement whose Washington, DC, center on K Street draws policymakers, CREC opened a DC branch for members who relocated to work in the Trump administration, CREC founder Douglas Wilson told the Associated Press. \u201cThis is the first time we\u2019ve had connections with as many people in national government as we do now.\u201d Wilson, who has called for a Christian theocracy, is one of three CREC pastors to have  at monthly \u201cvoluntary\u201d sessions (some say individuals feel pressured to go) at the Pentagon prayer meetings organized by Hegseth.","Pope Leo holds no sway over non-Catholics, but his condemnation of the SSPX carries weight against Catholic traditionalists. It may weaken the position of religious extremists in Washington and elsewhere.","On the other hand\u00a0\u2014 and this cannot be known immediately\u00a0\u2014 the Vatican\u2019s very public condemnation of the SSPX, whose beliefs so sharply mirror those of religious conservatives in general, might also fuel the traditionalist fire."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-06T15:18:24.547Z","summary":"Pope Leo excommunicated four newly consecrated bishops last week, members of the conservative Society of Saint Pius X. Their movement represents a broader traditionalist reaction in the Catholic church, fueled by Christian nationalists in the US and beyond."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/france-palestine-hassan-israel-repression","title":"In France, Lawfare Is Used to Silence Pro-Palestine Lawmaker","updated":"2026-07-06T15:04:04.268963Z","author":{"name":"Marlon Ettinger"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Policing and Repression","term":"Policing and Repression"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"War and Imperialism","term":"War and Imperialism"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["On July 7, France Insoumise Member of the European Parliament Rima Hassan will appear in court for the first time, after two years of judicial harassment from French pro-Israel organizations, Emmanuel Macron\u2019s government, and the far right.","The case against Hassan is based on so-called \u201capologia for terrorism\u201d laws, after Hassan posted a tweet affirming the Palestinian right to self-defense. It\u2019s a controversial position in mainstream French political culture, which still doesn\u2019t recognize Israel\u2019s genocide against Palestine or France\u2019s own obligations under international law to prevent it.","\u201cI gave my youth to the Palestinian cause. As long as there is oppression, resistance is not only a right, it is a duty,\u201d Hassan tweeted. The quote came from K\u014dz\u014d Okamoto, a member of the Japanese Red Army who made this comment while on trial for a terrorist attack that killed twenty-six people at an airport near Tel Aviv in 1972.","For Hassan, posting the quote was an expression of the idea\u00a0\u2014 clearly supported by international law\u00a0\u2014 that people have a right to resist a foreign army occupying or colonizing their territory and didn\u2019t endorse Okamoto\u2019s own actions. Hassan soon deleted the tweet to avoid confusion.","But before she deleted it, Matthias Renault\u00a0\u2014 a politician for Marine Le Pen\u2019s Rassemblement National\u00a0\u2014 had jumped into action, on March 27 referring the tweet for prosecution to a Paris court. He was joined in the referral by the minister of the interior and two powerful French pro-Israel lobbies: the European Jewish Organization (OJE) and the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism (LICRA). Both organizations have pushed lawfare against supporters of Palestine in France, mendaciously casting expressions of anti-Zionism and even criticism of Israel as examples of anti-Jewish racism. The OJE\u2019s president, Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, despite previously enjoying good relations with Macron, denounced him last year for his fig-leaf decision to recognize the state of Palestine. OJE was also a civil party in a 2023 complaint against Jean-Paul Delescaut, a trade unionist in northern France who was convicted on apologia-for-terrorism charges. One resulting penalty was a \u20ac5,000 fine Delescaut was sentenced to pay to OJE before the conviction was overturned on appeal in March.","\u201cWhether it\u2019s a politician, or an activist, or a comedian, or a journalist, if you say something they don\u2019t like about Israel, they\u2019ll file a complaint,\u201d Hassan told me.","Since Hassan\u2019s election two years ago, she has been targeted by a range of pro-Israel groups who have launched legal proceedings against her. Hassan has been faced with a total of sixteen such complaints so far, though thirteen of them have already been dismissed. Eight of the sixteen were initiated by pro-Israel groups, including B\u2019nai B\u2019rith, the Jewish Observatory of France (OJF), and the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Antisemitism.","\u201cWhat I\u2019ve learned from this is how to better map the actors\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0in the judicialization of the debate in France,\u201d Hassan said."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"Fake Leaks to the Press"},"div":{"p":["This transformation of political debates into drawn-out legal conflicts escalated ahead of Hassan\u2019s detention at the beginning of April.","After the charges were referred, Hassan was put under heavy and unusual surveillance\u00a0\u2014 as if the court expected her to dodge the charges. Given her behavior in all the other legal proceedings against her, where she turned herself in voluntarily for questioning even when she had no obligation to do so, there was no honest reason to believe she would abscond. Still, according to  by , Hassan\u2019s travel records were pulled from Air France, the national rail operator Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 nationale des chemins de fer fran\u00e7ais (SNCF), and Eurostar operator Thalys. Her phone was also put under active geolocation tracking. Hassan and her team first realized this when she turned herself in voluntarily to the police and they asked her where her phone was. They said they knew that she had it on her just minutes before. Hassan has two phones\u00a0\u2014 a work one and one for personal and political messages. She left the personal phone with a parliamentary assistant out of worries that it could be searched and the contents leaked to the press.","Such concerns were well-founded. Not long after her detention, journalists who work closely with the French police and courts posted leaked information on social media claiming that an illegal synthetic drug called 3-MMC had been found in Hassan\u2019s purse alongside legal CBD. The story made an immediate splash in French media despite the fact that it was completely unverified. Over five hundred press articles were published linking her detention to the idea that drugs had been found in her purse, Hassan\u2019s press assistant Fiona Vanston told .","Almost no outlets, Vanston said, reached out to ask for Hassan\u2019s side of the story or to find out whether she disputed the allegation. Most press inquiries, Vanston said, were about where Hassan was being held: an attempt to get photos when she was released.","The court\u2019s own tests quickly disproved the presence of the illegal drug\u00a0\u2014 it had the results by April 4. But it didn\u2019t make the results of the test public until April 9. Possible drug charges were quietly dropped because they weren\u2019t based on anything.",{"cite":"Le Canard encha\u00een\u00e9","a":["reported","X account"]},"Meanwhile, Hassan was detained for thirteen hours before being released. The detention of Hassan, whose parliamentary role in theory grants her immunity from these types of speech prosecutions, was an escalation in the judicial campaign against her. Hassan has never used this expectation of immunity as a defense\u00a0\u2014 a political statement in support of other citizens who don\u2019t enjoy similar protection.","The court circumvented this expectation of immunity by leaking the false story and justifying her detention under the idea that she was being detained in the act of committing a crime. It was the first time a member of the European Parliament (MEP) has ever been held for a tweet based on the idea that she was being caught in the act of committing a crime."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"An Internal Enemy"},"div":{"p":["Hassan\u2019s detention alternated between repeated sessions of questioning that went on for as long as an hour and a half and being locked in a small cell.","She told  that among questions about her background, she was also interrogated about her relationship with Islam, including whether she was a practicing Muslim. \u201cIt was as if they wanted to link me to radical Islamism,\u201d Hassan said.","Hassan, who never publicly discusses whether she is religious, told  that these sorts of questions were clearly racist. Hassan was born in Syria to a family of refugees who fled the Nakba. She moved to France when she was ten and got French nationality at age eighteen.","I mentioned the France Insoumise MP Thomas Portes, whom French pro-Israel politicians have also targeted with sinister accusations of links to terrorism after meetings with representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as well as an NGO that France has since accused of financing Hamas. Portes has not been charged with any crimes but was fingered in a parliamentary report last year for his connections. I asked Hassan if she thought the type of surveillance against her was an attempt to build a similar case.","Hassan said she thinks it\u2019s unlikely: nothing was found, except for the normal movements of an MEP, as well as some personal trips.","And unlike Portes, who was born French, Hassan has also come under a sustained media and political campaign calling for her to be stripped of French nationality. For Hassan, it\u2019s just as much because she\u2019s a left-wing politician who supports Palestine as it is stone-cold racism.","Last July, Marion Mar\u00e9chal, the racist politician and Marine Le Pen\u2019s niece,  she considered Hassan to be \u201cFrench on paper.\u201d It\u2019s a hardly subtle allusion to 1930s-style antisemitism that described Jews and other minorities as only formally compatriots, by dint of some document\u00a0\u2014 casting them as outsiders poisoning French political life by bringing in foreign, subversive ideas.","Hassan has also come under attack from the former Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who is now leader and presidential candidate of the once mighty conservative outfit Les R\u00e9publicains. Retailleau, formerly France\u2019s top law-enforcement chief, publicly supported stripping Hassan of her nationality over her politics. He later walked it back, though not because he had changed his mind but because doing so would leave her stateless, which would make it illegal under international law.","\u201cI\u2019m considered suspicious because of my background. It\u2019s this rhetoric of the internal enemy, in a climate of growing Islamophobia in Europe,\u201d Hassan tells me."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-3"},"header":{"h2":"International Obligations"},"div":{"p":["The government is, however, selective in its support of international law. Hassan told  that the government isn\u2019t only flouting domestic norms by targeting her for political repression. It\u2019s also systematically flouting its obligations toward Israel and Palestine under international frameworks to which it\u2019s a party, Hassan says.","She says this isn\u2019t a question of the French government having sympathy for the Palestinian people or not. Rather, it has a legal obligation to sanction Israel for its human rights violations, to try to change its behavior through diplomatic pressure, and to enforce arrest warrants against its leaders currently wanted by the International Criminal Court. Instead, France\u2019s foreign minister has repeatedly signed waivers to allow Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu to fly across French airspace, despite the government\u2019s obligation to arrest him.","Hassan says that despite all this she still believes in the rule of law. She is a member of the European Parliament, not a revolutionary. This makes the repressive tactics of the government to muzzle her particularly egregious. The goal, she says, is to demonstrate that there\u2019s a cost to speaking out to try to change the consensus on the genocide in Palestine in France."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-4"},"header":{"h2":"A Mounting Campaign"},"div":{"p":["In France, a neoconservative, \u201cwar on terror\u201d atmosphere reigns. It took over a year for the non\u2013France Insoumise left to even clearly describe Israel\u2019s actions as genocide. Mendacious allegations against the party\u2019s leader and 2027 , Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon, still crop up endlessly. A recent program attacking him on public radio station France Culture  interpolated clips as part of an argument that M\u00e9lenchon was a \u201cnew\u201d Jean-Marie Le Pen, who infamously dismissed the gas chambers of Auschwitz as a \u201cdetail of history.\u201d A professional organization for journalists at the station quickly  the program.","One of the  against Hassan involved her sharing accounts of the Israeli army training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. She was immediately accused of participating in a blood libel and roundly condemned by the French political-media class; this year, reporting by Nicolas Kristof at the  confirmed the tactic was used. A particularly repugnant pseudo-left journalist at  frequently mocks Hassan as \u201cLady Gaza.\u201d","Anasse Kazib, presidential candidate for the Trotskyist party R\u00e9volution Permanente, went to trial last week on similar charges for tweets after October 7, 2023, condemning Israeli colonialism and supporting the Palestinian right to resistance. M\u00e9lenchon appeared at a rally in front of the courthouse, and Hassan has frequently called for the charges to be dropped.","Hassan says a commitment to the Palestinian right to resistance, as well as a dedication to expanding the limits of acceptable discourse on issues like a one-state solution, are among the real reasons she\u2019s been targeted. Hassan has also shifted the consensus within France Insoumise from its historic stand for a \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d toward an openness to look at a binational state in Palestine. This, she says, threatens Israeli interests in France to limit the acceptable range of opinion."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-5"},"header":{"h2":"Watchwords"},"div":{"p":["I asked Hassan if, beyond the constant reputational attacks and lawfare against her, she ever fears for her physical safety.","\u201cNo,\u201d she replied:","Because of this, Hassan said, it\u2019s not worth second-guessing how she speaks about Palestine. Despite over forty-five hours of police questioning, she says there\u2019s really no way to know in advance what language to avoid.","\u201cI\u2019ve received complaints for the type of things that nobody would ever be able to anticipate, [like] for using the word \u2018uprising.\u2019 How can you know when you make a tweet or a statement that you can\u2019t use the word uprising because on the other side they\u2019re going to say that you mean \u2018intifada\u2019?\u201d Hassan asked.","\u201cI\u2019ve also received complaints for quoting Franz Fanon. I have his books in my house\u00a0\u2014 they\u2019re sold in bookstores in France. You can\u2019t tell yourself you have to anticipate not using words from him because you\u2019ll risk a complaint. You can see clearly the abusive character of these complaints.\u201d","But it\u2019s worth it, she says, because of the demands of the Palestinian cause. Pretty speeches about the need for \u201cpeace\u201d or gestures like Socialist-run Paris city hall\u2019s recent \u201chonorary citizenship\u201d for Palestinians don\u2019t do much.","\u201cFor me, it\u2019s a fundamental political question to understand that being in opposition, we have to accept that we will have to make sacrifices for the Palestinian cause, that we will be in the spotlight, that we will be taken to court, that we\u2019ll be smeared in the press,\u201d Hassan said. \u201cBut the people in power have responsibilities and obligations to meet.\u201d"],"blockquote":{"p":"Fear isn\u2019t in my frame of reference. I know perfectly well what the Palestinian cause demands. It demands sacrifice. You can\u2019t get involved with Palestine if you have fear. For me, the Palestinian cause\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0requires investment, a dimension of sacrifice."}}}]}},"published":"2026-07-06T13:59:10.87Z","summary":"France\u2019s political elites have made vague criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu but refused to denounce the genocide in Gaza. Now left-wing lawmaker Rima Hassan has been dragged to trial because she defends Palestinians\u2019 right to resist occupation."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/george-dc-mayor-housing-statehood","title":"DC\u2019s Next Mayor Is a Socialist Ready to Fight Trump","updated":"2026-07-05T12:55:00.106795Z","author":[{"name":"Janeese Lewis George"},{"name":"Daniel Denvir"}],"category":{"@attributes":{"label":"Politics","term":"Politics"}},"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["Janeese Lewis George just made history. On June 16, the Ward 4 councilmember and democratic socialist won the Democratic primary for mayor of Washington, DC\u00a0\u2014 decisively enough to end the race before all the votes were even counted and by the widest margin the city has seen in two decades. In the overwhelmingly Democratic city, that victory all but guarantees she\u2019ll be the next mayor, and the first with an explicitly socialist politics to lead the nation\u2019s capital.","She takes office, if elected, at an extraordinary moment: a city with federal troops in its streets, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents seizing residents off the sidewalk, and a president who has openly threatened to move against home rule itself if she won. Lewis George built her campaign on refusing to make peace with any of it\u00a0\u2014 vowing to fight where her predecessor, Muriel Bowser, chose accommodation.","For \u2019s podcast , host Daniel Denvir sat down with Lewis George shortly before the primary to talk about how growing up in a rapidly gentrifying DC\u00a0\u2014 as the daughter of a postal worker in a family displaced by the loss of tenant protections\u00a0\u2014 shaped her politics, and about what a mayor with no real power over her own National Guard can actually do to defend a city under siege. You can listen to the episode (which also features conversations with a number of other left-progressive electoral challengers) ."]},"section":{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"hr":{}},"dl":{"dt":[{"p":["Daniel Denvir","Councilwoman, how did you get involved in politics? And more specifically, how did your experience growing up in the city as the child of postal workers help forge the path that you\u2019ve taken over the years?"]},{"p":["Daniel Denvir","When I was growing up in DC in the 1980s and \u201990s, it was majority black\u00a0\u2014 I think as high as 70 percent. Today it\u2019s less than half black, and a major factor driving those changes is the rising cost of housing in the city and the resultant suburbanization of working-class and poor people. How have those sorts of upheavals impacted DC\u2019s black community?"]},{"p":["Daniel Denvir","When I was growing up in Washington, I became a DC statehood activist. But I feel like a lot of people around the country, including socialists and progressives\u00a0\u2014 who would have an interest in the plight of DC\u00a0\u2014 don\u2019t understand DC statehood and why it\u2019s necessary. How would you explain the federal oppression that DC exists under both during Donald Trump\u2019s administration and well before him? And what would you, as mayor, do to push the fight for a free DC?"]}],"dd":[{"p":["Janeese Lewis George","My mom was very involved in the American Postal Workers Union. She started working nights and then worked her way to working during the day. As a single mom raising me, my brother, and my sister, she often needed to make sure she could take leave to care for my brother who had really bad asthma when we were younger. She just needed more accommodation and more benefits, and those things mattered.","I grew up going to her local office. I was there with my mom in late-night meetings and around organizing that was happening. I always tell people I was responsible for probably breaking the copy machine a couple times, but I had the opportunity to really experience that\u00a0\u2014 just how important it was to be able to have a good-paying job and also have the health benefits and supports that go along with it, and to have the leave to care for families and children. As I got older, one of the biggest, most devastating things for me growing up in DC is just seeing how much the city has changed and how black residents have been displaced as a result.","That really struck home for me\u00a0\u2014 when I came back after college and a service year to learn that our family was losing our home. And my mom had this good-paying union job that always has sustained us, right? She raised three kids on it, and it was now not enough for us to be able to afford stay in our home any longer.","It\u2019s really just the conversation around who this city is built for. Who can afford to live here and stay here? And what does that mean for our greater community as a whole? I grew up where a transit worker, a bus driver next door, Mr Taylor, lived, and two seniors next door, Mr and Mrs Wallace, were aging in place, and my seventh grade history teacher lived across the street. For us to then start seeing the displacement that was happening in our neighborhood, and then to be victims of it really centered what my mom really had centered my whole life, which is that we all deserve to be able to afford to live in this city, have our basic needs met, and be able to take care of our families and our children."]},{"p":["Janeese Lewis George","DC experienced mass gentrification more aggressively, and it happened more rapidly than any other city. That\u2019s not just happenstance, right? It wasn\u2019t just attracting new residents to the city\u00a0\u2014 it was the gutting of tenants\u2019 rights across the city that really opened the door to this. We used to have the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), and those were opportunities for residents who rented homes, who were tenants in buildings. One of the most devastating cuts originated with TOPA, which was just for the single-family residences, and my family happened to be one of those families who were renters in the city. Again, another tale of policies. My mom tried to get mortgages that were declined because of mortgage discrimination\u00a0\u2014 again, another policy that doesn\u2019t help black families be able to stay. Our TOPA rights are something that the city decided to take away from single-family residences all the way back in, I believe, 2016. That allowed for more black residents to be displaced. And utilizing TOPA rights is actually how my family was able to not be displaced from the second home that we found, and the seller said, \u201cLook, the gentrification is hot. I can flip my home, make all this money. You guys gotta go,\u201d which was happening massively across the city. We leveraged our tenants\u2019 rights to keep us here.","And then the DC Council got rid of those rights six months later. And as a result, approximately twelve thousand residents were displaced. So something that I could use as leverage to have an \u00a0\u2014 that\u2019s the second word of \u201cTenant Opportunity to Purchase,\u201d right?\u00a0\u2014 to have an opportunity to build and ground a family and build wealth in the city, completely wiped out and taken away because developers and realtors wanted to be able to flip homes really quickly and not have to deal with long-term DC black residents.","One of the reasons I\u2019m running is that we gutted tenants\u2019 rights again. Small family-unit buildings were now taken into account as a result of that. And that\u2019s because we were doing this big development around RFK. And again, they have all the small family-unit buildings around there, and they want to make it easier to flip those properties and make more money and create condos and buildings that people can\u2019t afford.","It\u2019s really important that people understand that when we take away and gut tenants\u2019 rights across the board, and their leverage and opportunity, that leads to massive displacement of DC residents. That\u2019s what it meant for us. We lost DC: we lost housing, we lost small businesses, we lost faith communities, because everybody\u2019s trying to make a buck and profit off this but not realizing that the cost of that profit or making a buck is the loss of DC culture and DC black families. The very heart of DC. And the very heart of what makes DC great. The Lincoln Theater and the home of the arts and Thurgood Marshall, right? This black music, black arts, black culture were all curated right here in DC. My mom\u2019s family grew up on 13th and T Street, and my dad\u2019s generation right in the heart of what was the U Street Corridor. I used to go to flea markets on Saturdays with my grandma, right around the corner from there. At that time, it was all black families. People could afford to live there. When gentrification happened, my grandfather and my grandmother\u2019s house was sold for $51,000. It is now worth, at this moment, $2.3 million.","So property taxes rise. Who can afford those property taxes? Long-term black senior DC residents on fixed incomes can\u2019t afford those things. That\u2019s why when we think about what has happened, we have to understand housing policies like rent stabilization have to be a part of the conversation, where we make a difference in families\u2019 lives and create the stability and the certainty between housing providers and tenants. So expanding rent stabilization is important. It\u2019s why the city has to take on social housing. Because we are in the hole on deeply affordable housing. We\u2019ve spent over $1.4 billion and are now ten years later deeper in the hole in creating deeply affordable housing than we were when we spent those billions of dollars. We can\u2019t rely on a market, because the market is centering profit, but we as a government have the ability to center housing as a public good and a human right. That\u2019s what is important, and that\u2019s what this race means to me, really recognizing how we can do that and preserve DC\u2019s residents and DC\u2019s culture."]},{"p":["Janeese Lewis George","Great question. We pay federal taxes, and we don\u2019t have representation in Congress. Even our sitting congresswoman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who\u2019s been our warrior on the Hill, does not actually have a real vote in Congress. We don\u2019t have two senators. And it\u2019s personal because my grandfather fought in the wars. I mean, he\u2019s actually buried at Arlington Cemetery and the gravestone says, \u201c\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0of the District of Columbia.\u201d And guess what his family  do? Have representation in Congress. So we pay our taxes. We pay more taxes than in some of our states. We fight in wars. We do everything we\u2019re supposed to do as American citizens. This country was literally founded on the idea that we weren\u2019t colonies, right? That we would have home rule. And so people need to understand.","We\u2019re a very young city. I mean, we\u2019re only about fifty years old, and that is a very small fifty years of a bit of autonomy from the DC Home Rule Act. That was enacted and allowed us to have our own elected mayor and our own elected councilmembers, yet every single budget we pass has to go through Congress. And so Congress takes things out. And this goes back years. This impacts our ability for health and education and so many things. I remember when we were at the height of HIV\/AIDS, and we were just trying to do needle exchanges, which we know were working across the country. Congress actually stopped us from being able to do needle exchanges because Republicans didn\u2019t want us to move forward on that, so we couldn\u2019t do it.","So our lack of statehood, our lack of autonomy and this limited home rule that we have leaves us vulnerable as a district in a very real way. We do not get a real say over how we get to govern, how we get to lead, how our taxes are spent, and it has a devastating impact on our ability to move progress forward in our community. And it impacts health and education, transportation, and so many other sectors across our city. And what I need people to understand at this moment, the reason why DC is so vulnerable to Donald Trump is because we lack autonomy through the Home Rule charter and through our lack of statehood. For example, we are the only city where the National Guard doesn\u2019t respond to our mayor like the National Guard responds to other governors in other states. The DC National Guard answers to the president of the United States, not our mayor, not any governorship. We answer to them. We have to give our resources. In the Home Rule statute it says, \u201cThe president can request\u00a0\u2014 \u201d and \u201cthe district shall\u00a0\u2014 \u201d","So we are literally at the whim of whoever the president is at that moment. People didn\u2019t take it too seriously before, when DC had been fighting for statehood, when we had a Democratic president and the House and the Senate and said, \u201cMove DC statehood.\u201d But now people get to see that we have been left vulnerable.","And now we have become a testing ground for the Trump administration\u2019s actions. We were the first to have federal troops lining our streets, and those federal troops are still lining our streets. And we have states from all over the country sending troops to our city because they can. We were one of the first to have ICE agents kidnapping people off our streets. I had an opportunity to witness at least two of my neighbors be kidnapped by ICE while they were leaving their homes just to go to work, or while they were doing work\u00a0\u2014 kidnapped off our streets. So now we are this testing ground for the Trump administration and the spread of fascism, and we don\u2019t get a robust response to that. Our DC Home Rule charter limits our ability to say no, and actually makes us take affirmative actions, and it leaves us vulnerable to be this testing ground, and then they take what they do here and do it in every other city across our country.","We are a capital city left vulnerable by our lack of autonomy and statehood, and that\u2019s why it takes a mayor at this moment to say, \u201cHey, we are not a free DC right now, and we\u2019re a Democratic stronghold.\u201d The next time we have a Democratic president and a House and a Senate, DC statehood has to be number one on the priority list\u00a0\u2014 or we\u2019re gonna be vulnerable again to whoever is the president of the United States."]}]}}}},"published":"2026-07-05T12:55:00.106795Z","summary":"Janeese Lewis George, the democratic socialist who just won DC\u2019s mayoral primary, talks tenants\u2019 rights, gentrification, and what home rule can\u2019t protect against."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/documentary-martel-nuestra-tierra-indigenous-peoples","title":"In Nuestra Tierra, Collective Identity Is Built in Struggle","updated":"2026-07-05T12:50:00.125819Z","author":{"name":"Marianela D\u2019Aprile"},"category":{"@attributes":{"label":"Film and TV","term":"Film and TV"}},"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"p":["The Spanish language has a single word, , that can mean both \u201chistory\u201d and \u201cstory.\u201d In Argentina, where the military dictatorship that disappeared thirty thousand people between 1976 and 1983 remains prominent in collective memory, the reconstruction of democracy has depended on an ongoing public and political negotiation between \u2019s two meanings\u00a0\u2014 one more stable and objective, the other more malleable. Revisiting, amending, and correcting official narratives is a familiar element of public discourse; one of the earliest artistic incarnations of this negotiation is the Oscar-winning 1985 film , which depicts the discovery by a middle-class woman of the fact that her adoptive daughter had been stolen from a woman imprisoned, and likely later killed, by the military. By pressing it up against the authoritative, totalizing adjective \u201cofficial,\u201d the film\u2019s title surfaces the word\u2019s ambiguity.","Argentine director Lucrecia Martel\u2019s latest feature film,  (), is similarly concerned with \u2019s inherent instability, training its focus on a less-examined part of Argentina\u2019s past: the colonial era and its impact on the country\u2019s indigenous population.","The film follows the 2018 trial for the murder of Javier Chocobar, an indigenous leader and activist of the Chuschagasta community in the Tucum\u00e1n province in the north of Argentina. Chocobar was killed by a bullet that ruptured his femoral artery in 2009 during a confrontation between a group of Chuschagastas and three businessmen who had shown up on their land to make good on a specious claim to it. One of these men, the one who fired the fatal shot, wanted to mine the land for slab stone.","These facts are established quickly, early in the film. But before we get to any of that, Martel sets the tone with a heroic opening shot of the Earth from outer space. This is how it starts: thousands of miles away, our point of view floating next to a satellite, then descending, registering the way untouched landscape gives way to parceled plots, and then, finally, to a soccer field where young Chuschagasta women play soccer. We\u2019re in a specific place, the camera says, but what we\u2019re about to see happens all over the world.","Martel began working on  in 2010, after seeing a video of Chocobar\u2019s murder on YouTube; Dar\u00edo Am\u00edn, the man with the putative deed to the land and the gun in his hand, had recorded the raid and then, for some reason, uploaded the incriminating footage to the then\u2013five-year-old website. This clip shows up early in the film, as do the accused: Am\u00edn, as well as former police officers Luis Humberto G\u00f3mez and Eduardo Jos\u00e9 Valdivieso. Martel shoots them mostly from the back, and when we do see their faces, they look scared and angry; they cow to the judge and condescend to their accusers.","The official story, according to them, is simple: Am\u00edn\u2019s family was one of several in the region with land titles dating back to Argentina\u2019s colonial era; on that day in 2009, he was simply taking back what was rightfully his. They went peacefully, the men say, apparently not perceiving any discrepancy between this assertion and the fact that they were armed, G\u00f3mez with not one but two guns hidden on his body. Martel doesn\u2019t have to do much to set them up as the villains; they readily tell on themselves and the systems that created them, G\u00f3mez at one point affirming that \u201cthe Argentinian state taught [him] to do that\u201d (\u201cthat\u201d being attack an unarmed person who stepped toward him with his arms open and his palms facing outward). Like all villains, they suffer from inferiority complexes\u00a0\u2014 \u201cMy weapon is large! My gun is large!\u201d Valdivieso yells at one point during the trial\u00a0\u2014 and premise their might on crude and ill-constructed power structures, namely the postcolonial processes through which the Argentinian state disenfranchised indigenous people not only from their land but from their very identity.","This last point\u00a0\u2014 unlike the facts of the case, which Martel establishes quickly and efficiently\u00a0\u2014 is developed slowly and carefully throughout , in a considered, deliberate tone that mirrors the process of making the film itself. Martel spent years forming relationships with the Chuschagasta community; it is from this effort that the film\u2019s central revelation starts to emerge. The question at the heart of the trial is not whether or not Am\u00edn, G\u00f3mez, and Valdivieso were responsible for Chocobar\u2019s death, or even who had a claim to the land. It is whether or not the Chuschagastas exist.","While Am\u00edn and co.\u2019s lawyers mount a defense that rests on the assertion by a  historian that the Chuschagastas were wiped out entirely by 1807, Martel shows the community as they are: in their houses, on their land, at work. An elderly Chuschagasta woman spreads out hundreds of photographs on a table in front of her, an archive of community memory and proof, since proof is necessary, that they\u2019ve long been living on the disputed land. Martel stages conversations between community members during which the extent of their losses becomes clear, as does the still-nascent process of grieving their lost identity.","\u201cRealizing that we come from our ancestors has been hard for me,\u201d says one Chuschagasta. \u201cNo one ever explained to us that we were indigenous,\u201d says another. He continues: \u201cAnd few people said that we were here, now.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019ve taken from us even our way of speaking,\u201d another Chuschagasta man retorts, referencing the Cac\u00e1n language, likely extinct since the seventeenth century.","Martel puts these moments together with a light but deliberate hand, montaging sound and image in the evocative and often disturbing way that has become a hallmark of her work. Microphone static starts off quietly and then becomes deafeningly loud, right before the verdict is read; a coasting, swiveling drone acts as our eyes on the land, its incessant whirring making it impossible to forget the fact of its imposition on the territory; when a bird smashes into it, we shake and spin along with it and then float up again, our perspective now turned upside down. Martel exploits film\u2019s disorienting and accretive capacities to suggest that truth might be more complex and harder to pin down than official historical narratives would have us believe.","In one particularly nauseating moment, she layers a sound bite of one of the trial lawyers citing the work of Carlos Paez de la Torre, the historian who claimed that the Chuschagastas were wiped out by 1807, over a shot of Paez de la Torre himself, who, after the layered sound bite concludes, callously quips: \u201cI wrote that? Ha. If I had to research every day to write one of these things, I\u2019d die.\u201d Elena Perelli de Colombres, the other historian referenced by the defense, is similarly obtuse in her assessment of the Chuschagasta community: \u201cHow could they prove what they are? They haven\u2019t preserved their language, not even their own names; they don\u2019t have any distinguishing physical features.\u201d Martel plays this last sentence over a shot of a group of Chuschagastas sitting together in the courtroom, looking strikingly alike.","The continued denial of the existence of a whole group of people who are sitting right there in the courtroom, who live on the land Am\u00edn wants, who are keeping him from taking it for himself, is maddening. And it takes a lot to sustain: laws, educational curricula, land titles, textbooks, signatures, notaries.  pokes hole after hole in this framework, revealing its rigidity and fragility to be bound up inextricably with one another.","Film, with its affordances for fragments and overlap, can produce a more capacious, and likely more accurate, version of events and simultaneously demonstrates how brittle linear narratives can be.  doesn\u2019t try to fight colonial logic on its own terms but rather fights it on the terms of the Chuschagastas. How is collective identity constructed, when the official story insists on denying it? A clue might lie in one of the last shots of the film, which shows the Chuschagastas rallying to demand justice for Chocobar; together in struggle, their existence becomes undeniable."],"div":{"iframe":{"@attributes":{"allow":"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share","allowfullscreen":"","frameborder":"0","height":"315","referrerpolicy":"strict-origin-when-cross-origin","src":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yPQRXpzx55o?feature=oembed","title":"Nuestra Tierra | Trailer | Lucrecia Martel","width":"560"}}}}},"published":"2026-07-05T12:50:00.125819Z","summary":"Lucrecia Martel\u2019s latest film, Nuestra Tierra, the director\u2019s first documentary, juxtaposes the fragility of colonial narratives with the strength of indigenous peoples\u2019 collective identity formed through fighting the dispossession of their land."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/gaza-genocide-holocaust-studies-repression","title":"Holocaust and Genocide Scholars Are Navigating a Minefield","updated":"2026-07-06T16:15:20.274698Z","author":{"name":"Grant Morgan"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Education","term":"Education"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"War and Imperialism","term":"War and Imperialism"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["Since Hamas\u2019s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel\u2019s ensuing war on Gaza, few academic fields have experienced more internal upheaval than Holocaust and genocide studies. Scholars who once shared broad institutional consensus now find themselves divided over whether Gaza constitutes genocide, whether antisemitism and Holocaust memory are being politically weaponized, and whether universities can still be said to permit open debate on critical and contentious questions.","Broad and often subtle effects have begun to structurally transform how research, engagement, and intellectual debate within these fields are processed and legitimized. Jobs are increasingly insecure, research funding is harder to come by, and academics are facing micromanagement and harassment from forces both internal and external. These broader trends are dovetailing with the political climate to create a uniquely thick atmosphere of trepidation in Holocaust and genocide studies.","In an effort to understand how these fields are navigating this juncture,  spoke with a diverse array of scholars and experts. Despite the mounting pressures, I found many of them to be optimistic. New organizations devoted to debate and academic freedom have emerged, as have new conversations and paradigms that years ago would\u2019ve been deemed unrealistic or problematic. The current moment is indeed dire, but it also offers glimmers of potential for those willing to look past sensational headlines."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"The Big Chill"},"div":{"p":["Within our current environment of controversy around Gaza and Israel, many have observed a chilling effect, where any deviation from strict pro-Israel boosterism is met with opprobrium and official censure. Since 2023, professors and students have been routinely  by pro-Israeli groups. Professors have been , suspended, or demoted for statements or works. Speakers have been canceled or harshly  for their actions during commencement speeches or course-related events. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) even  that in the year after October 7, \u201cstudents, faculty, and invited speakers faced retaliation nearly every single day\u201d for political speech related to the controversy. While a handful of examples involved pro-Israel speech, the overwhelming majority were targeted at pro-Palestine speech.","This phenomenon has been widely covered. What has not been adequately addressed is how this chilling effect has evolved in the years since the October 7 attacks. Since the earlier days of high-profile cancellations and firings, repression has grown more subtle, enacted through the various internal institutional hoops and hurdles that characterize contemporary academia.","Research funding and the ability to publish essays, chapters, and full-length books are extremely important for professional security. Tenure-track positions come with strings attached and often require professors to conduct original research that will expand knowledge in their field. Meeting these requirements is not something an academic can do in a vacuum; there are always many cooks in the kitchen, from administrators to publishers to boards and committees.","These burdensome procedural areas create an environment rife for quiet repression on a granular level. Sandra Babcock, a clinical professor who teaches international human rights at Cornell University, recalled being forced to jump through various hurdles for a live interview relating to a report on apartheid in Israel. Before the interview, she was instructed to make clear that her views were not affiliated with Cornell. The university then banned her from using the traditional digital backdrop showing an aerial view of the campus, Babcock said, which appears in virtually all videos shot at the studio. The studio director, she said, \u201chad to take pictures of his own apartment because he didn\u2019t have any other backdrops because this had never happened before.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 We had to use pictures of the venetian blinds in his apartment.\u201d","Work pertaining to Palestine, Israel, or related areas carries with it a unique possibility for reprisal or pressure, which causes academics to shy away entirely when it\u2019s not central to their area of expertise. In conversation with , many scholars described having to fill in for certain courses because the professor on duty was hesitant to address contentious subjects.","Political disputes have also made the research funding landscape noticeably harder to navigate. \u201cImagine you\u2019re a younger scholar who studies comparative genocide,\u201d said Eric Kurlander, a professor of history and Jewish studies at Stetson University. \u201cYou say, I\u2019m going to look at the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the genocide in Cambodia. And suddenly doing that work at a particular school or funding institute means you\u2019re antisemitic because you\u2019re comparing the Holocaust to other genocides.\u201d","Kurlander added that these allegations have now even been applied to simple statements of fact or, at the very least, empirically defensible points of view within academic debate. \u201cLet\u2019s say you study the Middle East and you\u2019re giving lectures on what Israel may have done that\u2019s oppressive or colonialist [toward the Palestinians], and now that\u2019s seen as antisemitic,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, in those cases, there have been problems, often from university administrations, sometimes from Jewish studies programs, trying to maintain a certain kind of narrative.\u201d","Research questions, even those which are far removed from public areas of contention, have faced expanded pressure. At the same time, academics have been forced to adapt to political trends\u00a0\u2014 and to situations where departmental narratives directly contradict their own research. Want tenure? Make sure to play ball with your department. Want an easier time finding funding? Use language that circumvents certain phrases or ideas.","Applying for funding for entire swaths of research now requires much more caution, and attention to contentious terminology and debate has especially emerged as something which must be tracked constantly. In 2025 alone, the Trump administration withheld billions in funds for various schools that were alleged to have antisemitism problems on campus.","Several of those I spoke with found conducting their research increasingly difficult, and even more interviewees expressed concern about the decline of real and honest discussions within their field. Concerning recent divisions, Professor Deb\u00f3rah Dwork, a historian of the Holocaust and the founding director of the City University of New York\u2019s Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, told me:","Several of the Holocaust experts I spoke with described increased friction with colleagues, departmental narratives, and, especially, with vital institutions that have been cornerstones of research and debate for decades. Among those mentioned were the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Center for Jewish History in New York City, and other smaller archives and museums.","These have long provided pivotal support to young researchers and established academics, aiding them in critically examining questions and concerns within their fields. But some within the field have begun to take more critical stances against what they described as increasingly hypocritical behavior from these institutions. They charge these organizations and others with failing to adequately address the genocide in Gaza and even earlier forms of ethnic cleansing and violence that have occurred since the Nakba.","Genocide scholar Marianne Hirsch, a Columbia University professor emerita who has suspended her classroom teaching in protest of the university\u2019s adoption of a broad definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Israel speech, put this issue quite succinctly. \u201cI think all these institutions have basically failed us because they\u2019re spouting a lot of hypocritical lies,\u201d she told . \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of denial. There\u2019s a lot of unwillingness to look at the reality of what\u2019s happening on the ground.\u201d","These disagreements with institutions, departments, and campus administrators have eroded trust and brought about a crisis of legitimacy. Scholars emphasized that antisemitism was now being routinely weaponized against those who were critical of Israel, especially against professors who align themselves with the Left. Many expressed shock at the readiness to condemn even Jewish professors as antisemites.","People I spoke to described the repression as directly impacting departments and their output. Increased pressure from both the government and private groups led universities to restrict and regulate curricula. Terms and contentious topics, such as the Nakba or the war in Gaza, suddenly, as a matter of campus policy, became unfit for teaching because of their ability to generate protest and reprisal. Most vitally, federal funding and grants were paused and threatened as a form of soft\u00a0\u2014 or sometimes not-so-soft\u00a0\u2014 censorship.","As this new reality took hold, many vital clinics and courses have suffered as their scope of work has been limited and their activities surveilled. Core institutional guardrails have taken serious hits, including tenure-track jobs, free speech protections, harassment protections, and access to funding. If current trends continue, political pressure and institutional incentives threaten to gradually reshape research agendas as new generations compete for funding, job security, and personal safety in a post\u2013October 7 world."],"blockquote":{"p":"The Holocaust history field is split, with some of my colleagues denying that a genocide did occur and is occurring in Gaza. They base their arguments on the allegation that a successor state of the Holocaust could not possibly be perpetrators. And what I find remarkable is that it is as if Auschwitz and the history of Auschwitz operate like a lens that distorts their view. It\u2019s not a lens that offers them a nuanced view. On the contrary: applying the Auschwitz lens, perfectly rational people become irrational on this subject."}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"The Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network"},"div":{"p":["What was most surprising to me in surveying the terrain of these disciplines was how optimistic everyone I spoke to remained, despite many causes for demoralization. Rather than acquiesce, a solid majority have even created and engaged with organizations devoted to bolstering free speech, protecting academics, and preserving institutional legitimacy. The most substantial of these that I came across was the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network (GHSCN), made up of hundreds of academics trying to save their fields from repression and structural degradation.","The network has drafted and signed letters challenging university practices that they believe harm academic expression and research. A key concern has been the growing adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance\u2019s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which equates antisemitism with criticism of Israel\u00a0\u2014 the same definition Hirsch protested at Columbia.","\u201cWe wrote a letter that was signed by something like 1,200 scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies,\u201d Brett Ashley Kaplan of the University of Illinois told , \u201cwhich said that this definition has a chilling effect on free speech and that people should be allowed to express themselves.\u201d","The network is also engaged in the difficult academic and moral questions currently facing these fields. Especially within Holocaust studies, two professors I spoke with highlighted a growing need to reconcile the horrors of the Holocaust with the reality that the oppressed can become the oppressor, and that this warrants a greater degree of discussion around the memory of the Holocaust and what \u201cNever Again\u201d means in the context of Gaza.","Others highlighted the weaponization of not only antisemitism broadly but also of the specific memory of Holocaust. They emphasized a need to remember the horrors and lessons of the Holocaust without also justifying or trivializing modern-day ethnonationalist violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Most important within these criticisms was a growing call to view the Holocaust\u2019s place in history differently, as a story not just about one particular episode but instead about the ultimate trajectory of political currents that maintain influence today. Dwork described these ongoing critiques quite succinctly, telling :","Some scholars have begun to construct and argue new paradigms for their departments. Professor Barry Trachtenberg of Wake Forest University, for example, brought to my attention the Liberatory Jewish Studies Network, comprised of students and professors who have begun to imagine what the field of Jewish studies can be outside of Zionism and other long-held paradigms.","Importantly, during my many conversations, no one described the long-dominant assumptions and orientations within Holocaust and genocide studies as evil, nor did they describe them in exaggerated terms. Instead, these scholars encouraged the emergence and debate and the permission of other areas of thought. The terms non-Zionist, post-Zionist, and anti-Zionist emerged frequently, as did ways of thinking that call for attention to previous genocides and systems of oppression that are often misunderstood or never discussed at all. New lines of inquiry, debate, and focus are in development as dissenting networks try to create a steadfast institutional bulwark against democratic decline and the erosion of academic legitimacy.","Everyone I spoke to remarked on the profound chilling effect, its negative impact on colleagues, and the enormous systemic hurdles that are emerging for younger scholars willing to challenge orthodoxy. But they also sounded a hopeful note about the field\u2019s future and the prospects for open debate. They spoke of protecting the right of all scholars, regardless of political persuasion, to pursue their areas of concern without pressure or censorship, and of the growing need to study fraught questions without fear of reprisal. Their message was one of democratic resistance by means of academic rigor and free inquiry, offering an optimistic suggestion for how the field can survive and thrive."],"blockquote":{"p":"There are others, all too many others, who view the Holocaust as if it were only about the murder of the Jews of Europe. And if it were a unique event, what would be the point of studying it? It would be relevant to nothing, so I think that\u2019s a dead-end argument."}}}]}},"published":"2026-07-05T12:45:00.422Z","summary":"Since October 7, academic institutions have applied overt and covert pressure to discourage Holocaust and genocide scholars from criticizing Israel\u2019s actions in Gaza. Still, many academics are organizing new networks to defend free inquiry."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/gambling-reddit-advertising-youth-addiction","title":"Fake Accounts Crying Jackpot Are Selling the iGambling Dream","updated":"2026-07-06T16:12:15.613472Z","author":{"name":"Laura O\u2019Connor"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Society","term":"Society"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Inequality","term":"Inequality"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["Between August 2025 and the present, over 330 Reddit posts have appeared on forums made for working-class people and teenagers. The posts purported to chronicle users stumbling across small windfalls of cash through , the multibillion-dollar online casino (currently headquartered in Cura\u00e7ao) that dominates the  digital gambling realm. The posts were largely made by now-deleted accounts that buried mention of Stake between seemingly innocuous discussions on struggling to pay for  or the crushing weight of , often using the Cyrillic alphabet to avoid detection by AI moderators.","These formulaic posts, with their consistent, covert mention of Stake, clearly intended to circumvent moderation. Together, they point to a disturbing tactic: a giant in the online gambling world\u00a0\u2014 or its \u00a0\u2014 appears to be targeting poor people and teenagers by pretending to be one of them. Stake did not reply to \u2019s request for comment.","Online gambling has grown  over the past year, thanks to  and  across the United States.  recently legalized iCasinos, and states like  and  are facing pressure to do the same.","In April and May, Donald Trump  AI-generated images of himself and close friend , president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), bearing the Stake logo on Truth Social. The Trump administration has remained silent on the numerous lawsuits against gambling companies like Stake. At the same time, White and UFC have partnered with Stake since at least 2022, when it was  as UFC\u2019s \u201cofficial betting partner with Latin America and Asia.\u201d","The Trump administration has enforced some of the  to public benefit programs ever, while simultaneously endorsing a rampant and predatory gambling industry that disproportionately targets working-class people. In that context, predatory marketing from companies like Stake is both dangerous and alarmingly unsurprising."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"Jackpot Fairy Tales"},"div":{"p":["In a subreddit for teenagers,  describes a user saving their earnings from winning at Plinko on Stake and buying their girlfriend an Abercrombie hoodie. Stake is currently being sued in  and  for luring minors to gamble online. Other posts are from accounts posing as recent high school graduates helping siblings and friends. But the number of posts targeting poor and working-class people\u00a0\u2014 the population at greatest risk of gambling \u00a0\u2014 is far greater than those aimed at teenagers.","A post to r\/PovertyFinance\u00a0\u2014 a forum dedicated to working-class people exchanging money advice and stories\u00a0\u2014 reads:","Similar posts are found in antiwork forums made for workers to discuss workplace issues and abuses, forums for first-time home buyers, self-declared \u201cfrugal\u201d people, renters, middle class finance discussions, work reform organizing, student loan borrowers, and those suffering social anxiety.","\u201cThis marketing tactic appears to be becoming more pervasive in the age of large language models and Google\u2019s special treatment of Reddit posts in search results. Someone searching Google for information about Stake or online gambling in general may see these posts,\u201d says Brian Pempus, founder of , an organization he founded after working in the gambling industry for over fifteen years. \u201cRegarding the content of these posts, they may severely harm young people who are especially vulnerable to get-rich-quick schemes in our era of decaying capitalism, where the future appears bleaker with each new generation.\u201d","The posts often use a Cyrillic  or  when spelling \u201cStake\u201d in a bid to avoid detection by AI moderators. Many of these posts\u00a0\u2014 including  in which a user discusses finally being able to move out of their mother\u2019s home\u00a0\u2014 have since been deleted, often after the account itself has been deleted. Of the ones that remain online, most have hidden post histories. But many commentators appear to accept these posts as genuine, congratulating or giving advice to these ostensible teenagers, workers, or working-class people making money off of Stake."],"blockquote":{"p":"Just moved into my own apartment last month and cooking for myself has been a game changer. Been surviving on cheap mac and cheese and whatever garbage frozen meals I could afford for way too long. I could finally scrape together the security and first month after I got lucky on Stake US."}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"The Gospel of the Long Shot"},"div":{"p":["One user, Jamie,  the trend on gambling addiction forums to warn users after his partner first noticed some of these posts. Within one minute, however, the post received over one hundred downvotes. The volume and speed of the downvotes suggest that bots may have targeted it, potentially because of its criticism of Stake. Jamie has since moved the findings to a website he made called , but hasn\u2019t been able to match the traction that these covert Stake posts have garnered on over 330 posts across eighty-five forums.","\u201cTo be fair to Stake, it is no worse as a money-making platform than any other parasitic gambling platform that advertises itself as a way to score a life-changing windfall,\u201d says Pempus. What Pempus is referring to is the growing ecosystem of iCasinos that operate in legal grey areas, enabled by a Trump administration that continues to  to the digital gambling sector even as public health experts  that safeguards have failed to keep pace. In April, three of Stake\u2019s largest competitors\u00a0\u2014 FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics\u00a0\u2014  a new PAC, \u201cWin for America.\u201d The companies poured $41 million into the committee as they began lobbying efforts in states including Georgia and Texas.","Because Stake is a Cura\u00e7ao-based company that operates its US-facing wing from Cyprus and is not licensed in any of the eight states that currently allow online gambling (others, like , have recently banned sweepstakes casinos like Stake entirely), it is less able to form PACs or contribute directly to US elections. \u201cStates either lack the tools or the will to do anything about advertising from unregulated platforms like Stake,\u201d says Pempus.","Stake\u2019s cofounder, however, is a key donor to the MAGA administration. Bijan Tehrani, based in Australia, cofounded Stake in 2017 with Ed Craven. In 2024, he donated  to Donald Trump, and this spring, he donated another $1 million. Tehrani is a billionaire whose fortune comes from both Stake and Kick.com, the streaming platform he cofounded as an alternative to platforms like Twitch, with lighter moderation and a strong emphasis on the livestreaming of online gambling. Viral streamers on the platform include Adin Ross (who live streamed with  himself last year) and , both of whom regularly live stream themselves gambling on Stake."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-3"},"header":{"h2":"Selling the Mirage of Stability "},"div":{"p":["President Trump, who has spoken  about the perils of addiction, has deepened his administration\u2019s coziness to the gambling industry by expressing interest in entering into it himself last autumn. In October of 2025, Trump Media announced its plans to launch Truth Predict, a cryptocurrency predictive market platform.","\u201cFor too long, global elites have closely controlled these markets\u00a0\u2014 with Truth Predict, we\u2019re democratizing information and empowering everyday Americans to harness the wisdom of the crowd, turning free speech into actionable foresight,\u201d said Devin Nunes,  chairman and CEO of Trump Media (and chair of the president\u2019s ), as reported by . This sentiment of anti-elitism is difficult to reconcile with evidence that poor Americans are  to suffer problem gambling habits than their wealthy counterparts, with homeless individuals being nine times more likely to suffer gambling addictions than the general population.","The flow of \u201cBig Gambling\u201d money toward far-right politicians\u00a0\u2014 and to pro-gambling Democrats, like Nevada\u2019s , who argued Trump had been too harsh on casinos\u00a0\u2014 has been accompanied by massive waves of digital marketing. The industry\u2019s pitch has been both covert and explicit, spreading through platforms like Reddit, Kick, and YouTube. These Reddit posts are deliberately casual but aspirational. Their message is simple: ordinary users have, by chance, discovered a sum of money that made their mealtimes easier and allowed them to give gifts to loved ones. As wealth gaps increase and young people feel increasingly hopeless about their economic future, the marketing is working: problem gambling continues to hit  among young working-class people online.","Pempus says he has witnessed the spike in gambling firsthand and its disproportionate impact on poorer communities, catalyzed by illegal and quasi-legal marketing tactics that mercilessly target the most vulnerable:","The promise being made is not one of luxury but of basic necessities. Instead of exhortations to covet Rolexes or diamonds, users are told stories about groceries bought and rent made. With economic insecurity worsening, this is a disturbingly effective siren song."],"blockquote":{"p":"The ruthlessness of marketing tactics can vary by brand, but taken as a whole, the vast online gambling sector parasitizes on the hopes and dreams of financial stability that many people cling to. We truly live in the age of scams, and gambling is a main attraction. This is not to say that people with wealth can\u2019t also become addicted and ruined by platforms such as Stake. But predominantly, the harm is done to people with already little wealth."}}}]}},"published":"2026-07-05T12:40:00.113Z","summary":"Online gambling operators are no longer selling the promise of luxury but the promise of stability. Through fake Reddit accounts, they peddle stories of groceries bought and rent paid, all supposedly made possible by a lucky break."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/independence-day-trump-1776-project","title":"In Defense of the Fourth of July","updated":"2026-07-04T16:32:08.176588Z","author":{"name":"Ryan Zickgraf"},"category":{"@attributes":{"label":"History","term":"History"}},"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["\u201cI like the Fourth of July, it breathes a spirit of revolution,\u201d said Eugene V. Debs in a 1901 Independence Day speech. The socialist firebrand was far from blindly patriotic (\u201cI am not of those who worship the flag,\u201d he added in the same speech), but throughout his life, Debs refused to let the American flag, the Fourth, or the revolutionary inheritance of 1776 fully fall into the hands of reactionaries.","Debs consistently cast himself as an heir to a native tradition of dissent, invoking not only John Brown, Thaddeus Stevens, Susan B. Anthony, but also Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln. For Debs, these figures were not just ancestors cast in marble, but unfinished business. The American Revolution had announced a principle that capitalism, racial hierarchy, and class rule had betrayed. Socialism, in Debs\u2019s telling, was not some foreign poison poured into the American bloodstream but the next democratic demand made by the same revolutionary spirit that had once waged a war on monarchy itself. Why abandon the American democratic promise when you ask it to live up to its own ideals?","Yet, \u201cI like the Fourth of July\u201d is not a popular take on the Left in the twenty-first century. This is a mistake. It\u2019s one thing to say the American Revolution was compromised. It is another to say it is useless. The Left has increasingly confused the two. As Debs proves, it\u2019s entirely possible to separate the art from the artist."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"Growing Paines"},"div":{"p":["The socialist case for 1776 is not that the Revolution was some pure emancipatory rebellion, but that it was historically progressive\u00a0\u2014 far more than just a tax revolt by annoyed Boston merchants. It was a sustained, often genuinely radical argument\u00a0\u2014 argued in pamphlets, sermons, town meetings, and taverns before it reached the battlefield\u00a0\u2014 against the idea that some people are born to rule others. The British Empire represented monarchy, aristocracy, and imperial rule. Certainly, the Founders were not secular saints: many were slaveholders, speculators, creditors, pursuers of Native displacement, and men of property whose idea of liberty often stopped at the edge of their own class interests. But the colonies, for all their contradictions, were also fighting for self-government, national independence, and a wider democratic horizon.","Anti-imperial revolt against a distant, extractive metropole; a refusal of aristocratic privilege; a claim to popular sovereignty against rule by birthright\u00a0\u2014 these are not incidentally compatible with left politics.","Just ask Thomas Paine, America\u2019s original left-wing populist, who criticized monarchy in language so blunt it still practically draws blood. In , he called England\u2019s king \u201cthe Royal Brute of Britain,\u201d who \u201chath wickedly broken through every moral and human obligation, trampled nature and conscience beneath his feet, and by a steady and constitutional spirit of insolence and cruelty procured for himself a universal hatred.\u201d He understood that the point of republican politics was not simply to replace one bad king with wiser administrators. It was to destroy the idea that anyone had a natural right to rule. That\u2019s why Paine wasn\u2019t just offended by the British ruler, but monarchs in general, calling them absurd, useless\u00a0\u2014 even evil. Monarchy \u201cwas the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry,\u201d he wrote.","It\u2019s hard to overstate how much Paine\u2019s words helped shape the political ideology of the Revolution, even if it also served the Founders\u2019 self-interest. , published in January 1776, perhaps sold somewhere north of 100,000 copies in its first few months in a colonial population of perhaps two and a half million free adults\u00a0\u2014 proportionally the best-selling book in American history. In 1776, Paine\u2019s searing words were crucial to inspiring the American Revolution. \u201cWithout the pen of the author of ,\u201d John Adams is alleged to have said, \u201cthe sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.\u201d","Then there are the words of the Declaration of Independence itself, which have done more damage to hierarchy than almost any political sentence in the English language. \u201cAll men are created equal\u201d was written by a slaveholder, which is both the central American hypocrisy and the reason the line has never stopped burning. Its power lies partly in the gap between who wrote it and what it said. Jefferson did not live up to it, nor did the republic he helped found. But the words transcended him almost immediately. Abolitionists invoked it relentlessly, and Frederick Douglass didn\u2019t reject the Declaration of Independence in his famous 1852 speech (\u201cWhat, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?\u201d)\u00a0\u2014 he beat the country over the head with it, demanding it mean what it said. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at Seneca Falls in 1848, also didn\u2019t write a new manifesto. Instead, she sat down and rewrote the Declaration, replacing \u201cKing George\u201d with \u201cman\u201d and insisting that the self-evident truths be self-evident.","Even the Black Panthers, who were not exactly in danger of being mistaken for Daughters of the American Revolution docents, understood this. Their Ten-Point Program concluded with a lengthy quotation from the Declaration of Independence. They used the language of rights, grievances, and the right to alter or abolish oppressive government because they knew American power could be indicted in the language it claimed for itself."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"The Unfinished Revolution"},"div":{"p":["For the past half-century, since the bicentennial, the Left has treated the American project not as unfinished but as inherently fraudulent. In doing so, it\u2019s fully ceded 1776 to conservatives who have reduced the Revolution to conservative kitsch: tricorn hats, powdered-wig memes, patriotic lesson plans, decorative muskets, and the general conviction that America was born perfect until the universities came along and spilled Foucault all over the parchment.","The notion that 1776 is a solidly conservative property was formalized by Donald Trump, who, in his first term, convened a  to draft a so-called \u201cpatriotic education\u201d to counter what he called the \u201cleft-wing indoctrination\u201d of American schoolchildren. The commission\u2019s report was a thin, ahistorical pamphlet, more interested in flattering the Founders than understanding them. It also goes to great lengths to make villains out of progressivism, communism, and identity politics as \u201cfalse theories\u201d that betray the ideals of the founding of America.","Yet, the 1776 Commission had a perfect foil. Two years earlier, the  had published the 1619 Project, which relocated the country\u2019s true founding to the arrival of the first slave ship at Point Comfort, Virginia, and recast the Revolution itself as, in part, a counterrevolution waged to protect slavery from a supposedly abolitionist Britain. Historians    apart fairly thoroughly. But the project\u2019s deeper argument\u00a0\u2014 that 1776 is best understood as original sin rather than founding myth persists.","The 1619 Project wasn\u2019t wrong to insist that slavery sits at the center of American history rather than its footnotes. But it was wrong to treat that as the whole story\u00a0\u2014 as though Paine\u2019s antimonarchical argument was simply a cover for slaveholders\u2019 property interests, rather than a genuinely separate current that abolitionists spent the next eighty years dragging toward its logical conclusion. The point isn\u2019t to adjudicate which tradition was more \u201cauthentically\u201d American. It\u2019s that two things can be true at once: the Revolution was deeply compromised, and the language of the Revolution has always been the most effective instrument the American left has ever wielded.","It\u2019s why, when Karl Marx wrote Abraham Lincoln on behalf of the First International during the Civil War, he told the president that \u201cas the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.\u201d The Revolution represented by 1776 didn\u2019t truly end when King George surrendered; the claim that \u201call men are created equal\u201d was a promise to be fulfilled by future generations.","The Left\u2019s posture has changed from \u201cAmerica hasn\u2019t lived up to its ideals\u201d to \u201cAmerica\u2019s ideals are themselves the problem,\u201d which might appear as radicalization. It\u2019s actually a retreat\u00a0\u2014 unilateral disarmament from a weapon that has worked in American politics for a moral purity that has nowhere to go."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-3"},"header":{"h2":"Reclaiming the Day"},"div":{"p":["Today, the invocation of the Revolution has shifted once again, this time toward older mainstream liberals defying Trump in the streets under the slogan \u201cNo Kings.\u201d It\u2019s common to go to a No Kings protest and hear liberals clad in American Revolution costumes chanting for limits on executive authority (\u201cNo Kings, No Tyrants!\u201d) and waving the kind of  flags that, a decade ago, were flown by libertarians.","That the old Tea Party costume box has been passed to the resistance libs is, in one sense, comic. But it is also revealing. \u201cNo Kings\u201d works because it touches something deeper than anti-Trump proceduralism. It does what all the best American radical language does: it converts a specific political crisis into a simple republican principle. No kings. No rulers by birthright. No presidents as sovereigns. No executive who treats law as a nuisance, office as property, and loyalty as the highest civic virtue. The slogan is almost childish, which is why it is so effective. It reaches beneath the bloodless vocabulary of norms and institutions and hits the nerve center of American politics.","The Left\u2019s job isn\u2019t to compete with the liberals for ownership of the wig-and-bayonet aesthetic. It\u2019s to insist on the more radical reading\u00a0\u2014 one that asks not just \u201cis this constitutional?\u201d but \u201cwho has power over whom, and why?\u201d A genuine left 1776 Project would say that the Revolution\u2019s core claim\u00a0\u2014 that no one is born with the right to rule anyone else\u00a0\u2014 doesn\u2019t stop at the White House. It applies to the boss, the landlord, the monopoly, and the creditor just as much as the king. That was Debs\u2019s argument. The Revolution as a permanent demand, not a founding moment encased in glass.","America\u2019s 250th anniversary is here, and Trump is busy acting like the Second Coming of King George. What would Thomas Paine do?"]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-04T16:32:08.176588Z","summary":"The Declaration of Independence has been quoted by abolitionists, suffragists, socialists, civil rights activists, and the Black Panthers. Why should conservatives get to own it now?"},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/american-exceptionalism-founding-class-democracy","title":"The 250-Year Decline of American Exceptionalism","updated":"2026-07-04T12:55:00.312314Z","author":{"name":"Nelson Lichtenstein"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Ideology","term":"Ideology"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"History","term":"History"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["It is impossible to revisit the American Revolution without raising the question: Did that late eighteenth-century conflict create a truly new kind of society, an \u201cexceptional\u201d nation that has ameliorated class conflict and sustained capitalist hegemony for more than 250 years? With Donald Trump in the White House and MAGA in power on so many fronts, has the idea of an \u201cAmerican exceptionalism,\u201d which originated even before the colonials stacked their muskets, been finally reduced and debased to little more than a belief that Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and a robust, unfettered capitalism have become definitional identities after 250 years of American history?","In his six-part documentary on the largely military history of the revolution, filmmaker Ken Burns sought to subvert such self-congratulatory chauvinism. A variegated set of scholars representing an expansive, twenty-first-century sense of what has constituted political and social history, offered a defiantly anti-Trumpian way of thinking about that 250-year-old upheaval. Multiple voices, among them those of indigenous people, enslaved African Americans, British loyalists, and \u201cpatriots\u201d of various classes, genders, and regions gave to the Burns documentary a multisided complexity far removed from the textbook and TV tales of several decades ago or the one-dimensional revisionism coming out of the contemporary White House.","Like so many anti-colonial movements of more recent years, the American Revolution was a civil war within a global context, where each fraction and party sought advantage either by resisting or allying with more dominant forces that may or may not have served as faithful compatriots. Indigenous Americans, well organized into a set of politically sophisticated and militarily engaged tribes, were clearly the greatest losers during and after the conflict, betrayed in almost equal measure by both the patriots and their British adversaries. Likewise, the British sought to entice enslaved Americans to their side with promises of eventual freedom.","The maintenance of slavery may not have been a prime cause of the revolution, a hypothesis put forward by the \u2019 1619 Project, but the question of American slavery became of increasing salience as the war dragged on. As historian Bernard Bailyn observed in one of the talking-head comments, the fate of American slavery was rarely a subject of public debate before the revolution, but afterward, there was never a year in which it was not a contentious topic.","One virtue of the Burns documentary was to make George Washington something other than a marble icon. The fact that he was a slave owner, a land speculator, and a product of and advocate for the colonial elite has been explored by historians for generations. But as leader of the Continental Army, Washington\u2019s military strategy was not all that different from that of the set of far more radical insurgents championing twentieth-century anti-colonial movements.","Like Ho Chi Mihn, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Fidel Castro, Washington\u2019s prime task was not to defeat the army of the oppressor in open combat but instead to keep his own forces intact and in the field, ready for a military engagement when and if opportunity arose. Given the fiscal weakness of the new Congress and the fragmented character of the militias from which Washington had to assemble his regiments, this was a most difficult task, but also the most vital. I think this explains why, in our conventional patriotic memory, the winter his army spent at Valley Forge, where disintegration was a real possibility, has long remained the iconic military engagement of the Revolutionary War, celebrated even more than the defeat and capture of a British army at Saratoga in 1777 or even the penultimate victory by the forces of France and the Americans at Yorktown in 1781.","And yet, despite all the new voices and perspectives Burns assembled, his documentary leaves the viewer with an exceptionalist perspective very much intact. While the American Revolution was certainly but one upheaval among many in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it remains the first, and from an economic and geographical standpoint, by far the most successful. Both the French Revolution and that of the Bolsheviks were far more radical, and at various times and places, fervently emulated by those seeking an overthrow of the old order. But whatever the luminary and universalist language embodied in the Declaration of Independence, I don\u2019t think its reach would have been so great without the development of an exceptionalist ideology, in varying degrees myth and reality, that has persisted, sometimes on the Right and sometimes on the Left, for 250 years."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"The Emergence of American Exceptionalism"},"div":{"p":["There were two aspects of this development. First was the idea that white male heads of household, chiefly farmers during the nation\u2019s first century, were far better off than their European cousins. And that observation was tightly linked to the argument that the new nation was born as a bourgeois republic, with feudal structures and ideas largely absent. The American Revolution, as historian Louis Hartz would argue in his once influential  (1955), was from this perspective no revolution at all. What happened in the War for Independence merely codified what had previously been taken for granted in English North America.","The French immigrant J. Hector St John de Cr\u00e8vecoeur made both these points as early as 1782 in his , when he wrote that the new nation","This species of American exceptionalism had a century-long life. President Thomas Jefferson saw the Louisiana Purchase as an enormous body of land suitable for yeoman cultivation, an \u201cEmpire for Liberty.\u201d That idea was ratified and refined by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, who marveled at relatively high levels of social egalitarianism, economic productivity, and social mobility, alongside the strength of popular religion, the weakness of a central state, and the propensity of Americans to form voluntary associations.","In the \u201cfrontier thesis\u201d that Frederick Jackson Turner codified in 1893, the historian claimed that the continuous westward expansion of Americans into a body of virtually free land was the single most vital factor in shaping the exceptional character of American democratic life and culture. That the social worlds so lauded by De Cr\u00e8vecoeur, De Tocqueville, and Turner were in fact settler colonialisms based on the violent expropriation of native American land and resources is an indictment that would have to await a new century and new historians to begin a reckoning.","Turner\u2019s thesis also had a downside as he first deployed it. At the end of the nineteenth century, the frontier was no more, and Turner, along with figures ranging from Teddy Roosevelt to Karl Marx, thought that American social and economic conditions would soon resemble those of Europe\u2019s class-bound societies. Marxists welcomed all that. Indeed, they thought that with the astounding growth of American industry and the proletariat necessary for its continuous reproduction, the United States was overripe for socialism. The nation was still exceptional, but now because it stood in the vein of economic transformation as Marx and Friedrich Engels had postulated.","In the preface to , Marx wrote that \u201cthe country that is more developed industrially shows to the less developed the image of their future.\u201d In agreement, H. M. Hyndman, a British Marxist, noted in 1904 that \u201cjust as North America is today the most advanced country economically and socially, so it will be the first in which Socialism will find open and legal expression.\u201d Likewise, wrote August Bebel in 1907, the political leader of the German Social Democrats, \u201cAmericans will be the first to usher in a Socialist republic.\u201d"],"blockquote":{"p":"is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. We are a people of cultivators\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself."}}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"The Communist View of American Exceptionalism"},"div":{"p":["By the early twentieth century, industrial conflict in the United States was as intense as anything in Europe, and yet neither class consciousness nor socialism won much purchase. Unions were often militant but hardly leftist in any programmatic sense, and even at the height of its popularity, Eugene Debs\u2019s Socialist Party was neither revolutionary nor capable of winning the allegiance of a working-class majority. Although Werner Sombart, a German academic of Social Democratic views, had once argued that the working class in the US would inevitably turn socialist, he famously answered the query put forward in the title of his 1906 book, ?, by declaring that in the United States \u201call socialist utopias come to grief on roast beef and apple pie.\u201d That was an exceedingly crude formulation, and Sombart undoubtedly knew that in both Germany and the United States, many of the most class-conscious workers were among the highly skilled and well-paid strata of the proletariat.","The more sophisticated and resonant answer returned to the idea that America was born bourgeois in which an extensive franchise, an ethnically fragmented populace, and a thoroughgoing capitalist hegemony proved an obstacle to the growth of class consciousness, whatever the standard of living of workers themselves. In 1892, Engels noted that it was \u201cquite natural, that in such a young country, which has never known feudalism and has grown up on a bourgeois basis from the first, bourgeois prejudices should also be so strongly rooted in the working class.\u201d","That was an idea that some communists themselves came to accept. We\u2019ve seen that the idea that America was in some sense exceptional had been around since the founding, but the concept of \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d as applied to the consciousness and organization of the working class only came into widespread radical usage and debate in 1929\u00a0\u2014 first in Moscow, during a celebrated conflict between Joseph Stalin and Jay Lovestone, the American Communist leader of that time.","Years later, Lovestone would become a violent anti-communist in league with the CIA and the most conservative of American trade unionists. But in 1929, he was a battle-tested Communist seeking to make his small party relevant to a union movement well battered in the years after World War I. Thus when Stalin proclaimed a \u201cthird period\u201d of revolutionary militancy for the worldwide Communist movement, Lovestone objected, arguing that social and ideological conditions in the United States made for an \u201cAmerican exceptionalism.\u201d Lovestone\u2019s opponents, led by William Z. Foster, a leader of the Great Steel Strike of 1919, argued to the contrary. That dispute soon animated a Moscow meeting of the Comintern where Stalin condemned the \u201cheresy of American exceptionalism.\u201d By the time Lovestone and his faction returned to the US later in the year, Stalinists in Moscow and New York had expelled them from the Communist Party."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-3"},"header":{"h2":"The Explanation"},"div":{"p":["As a left-wing group, the influence of the Lovestoneites soon faded, but the phrase \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d garnered strength when a cohort of intellectuals, all former radicals conversant with the ideological battles of the 1930s, redeployed the phrase to explain and defend American politics and culture in the early Cold War era. How had the United States avoided the conflicts that generated mass fascist or communist movements in Europe, making for what Arthur Schlesinger called a \u201cvital center\u201d politics in America? The key seemed to come down to the relative absence of class consciousness and the resultant conflict that sensibility might generate.","By the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, Henry Nash Smith, and so many others, founders of the academic school labeled \u201cAmerican studies,\u201d were de facto Lovestoneites. As Daniel Bell wrote in his essay collection , while ideas of social transformation might still animate anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in the Third World, in the United States and other industrial countries that followed in her footsteps, such radical ideologies could achieve no purpose. The whole world was becoming \u201cexceptionalist.\u201d","In the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the New Left, and the war in Vietnam put a big dent in such liberal complacency. A consensual interpretation of American history, such as that advanced by Hartz and Hofstadter, could not withstand an historical profession increasingly focused on the divisions engendered by slavery and Jim Crow, gender inequality, and the raw power and brutality of capitalist enterprise unfettered by either working-class organization or governmental regulation. In her book , the sociologist Karen Orren postulated that when it came to law and culture governing employment relations in the United States, bourgeois norms were entirely absent for most of American history, replaced by late medieval \u201cmaster and servant\u201d conceptualizations imported from Europe.","The idea of American exceptionalism did not die but migrated firmly toward the Right, where Ronald Reagan, his successors, and a neoconservative set of ideologues sought to use an exceptionalist ideology to project American power abroad. Less than fifteen years ago, Peggy Noonan, Reagan\u2019s favorite speechwriter, declared, presumably with a straight face, that \u201cAmerica is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world. It attempts to be a force for good because it is exceptional.\u201d","But as social myth, even that self-serving formulation has collapsed in the face of Donald Trump\u2019s crude transactionalism and oligarchic corruption. Today the idea of an American exceptionalism unfurls its colors not so much as a useful fiction but as a reigning nightmare. To awake from its embrace, we\u2019ll need to abandon the conceits that have sustained that mythos for 250 years and in its place put forth a radical universalism linking our fate to that of entire world."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-04T12:55:00.312314Z","summary":"American exceptionalism has always had an absurd and self-serving character to it. But any pretense justifying it has collapsed in the face of Donald Trump\u2019s cruelty and oligarchic corruption."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/burn-the-constitution-once-again","title":"Burn the Constitution Once Again","updated":"2026-07-03T19:44:42.412639Z","author":{"name":"Seth Ackerman"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"State","term":"State"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Law","term":"Law"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["In a 1988 memoir recounting his thirty-year tenure as chief Washington correspondent of the , the British journalist Henry Brandon recalled the flicker of disquiet he felt in 1964 as he watched the chaos and extremism of Barry Goldwater\u2019s hard-right presidential campaign. He had wondered, at the time, if it was an omen of things to come.","But looking back at the Goldwater interlude from the sunny vantage point of the Reagan years merely underscored, for Brandon, the fundamental placidity and moderation of American politics. \u201cDespite the outward appearance of disorder and confusion, bordering on turmoil and chaos,\u201d he reflected, \u201cin reality the political shifts as usual were only minor. It was another example of the remarkable stability of the American political scene.\u201d","\u201cThe remarkable stability of the American political scene\u201d is not a phrase one is apt to hear these days from British journalists. More typical is what Edward Luce, veteran Washington correspondent of the , wrote in a recent column on the Trump administration\u2019s penchant for \u201cincinerating America\u2019s traditions of law, civility and restraint\u201d: \u201cAs America prepares to commemorate its 250th anniversary,\u201d he warned, \u201cthe republic is flirting with its own funeral.\u201d","It\u2019s been a long time coming. The following essay appeared in the second issue of  back in the spring of 2011, two years into the Obama era and just a few months before Occupy Wall Street sprang up in Zuccotti Park.","The last fifteen years of American politics have only bolstered the case made here: the Constitution is, in fact, \u201ca charter for plutocracy.\u201d And now, upon the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we see evidence every single day of its hasty prescription. Despite the egalitarian sentiments that helped propel the American cause to victory in 1783, the Constitution that resulted has been a remarkably relentless barrier to the development of social democracy in the United States. Mass discontent, even when paired with dogged political organization, has long met its match in its pages. In the Gilded Age. In the New Deal era. And, as we all experienced soon after this essay was first published, under Barack Obama as well.","American politics was born in this contradiction\u00a0\u2014 the fieriest of revolutionary discontent yielding only the tiniest of incremental shifts. It\u2019s long been this way. With its abundance of \u201cfree\u201d land, its lack of a feudal caste, and its revolutionary origins, the new republic found it impossible to sustain the kind of culture of popular deference to traditional elites that still prevailed in England. Yet the old elite of merchants, planters, and speculators, having played a leading role in the revolution, emerged from the struggle economically intact, socially entrenched, and determined to keep public policy under its control.","This founding contradiction, between a highly stratified political economy and a highly democratic political culture\u00a0\u2014 between a rambunctious, literate, and heavily armed polity that insisted on nothing less than popular sovereignty and a wealthy and resourceful elite with the power to shape events\u00a0\u2014 pushed the ruling class to seek a solution in what Virginia\u2019s Edmund Randolph called \u201cthe science of constitutions and confederacies\u201d: the clever design of institutions to retain a facade of democratic rule while insulating policy from popular control.","In the 1780s, as America\u2019s propertied classes warred with its plebeians over who would bear the cost of war debts, political engineering became the obsession of the Founding generation. \u201cLike most other sciences,\u201d wrote Alexander Hamilton, the \u201cscience of politics\u201d had made rapid progress in recent years: there were \u201cwholly new discoveries\u201d\u00a0\u2014 such as \u201cthe regular distribution of power into distinct departments\u201d and \u201cthe introduction of legislative balances and checks\u201d\u00a0\u2014 that \u201cwere either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients,\u201d but that now offered \u201cpowerful means\u201d to remedy the \u201cimperfections\u201d of republican government.","Behind all these mechanisms lay a single, devious principle: divide and rule. As James Madison, the founding elite\u2019s premier political engineer, baldly admitted in a letter to Thomas Jefferson summarizing the thesis of his Federalist No. 10: \u201cDivide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain qualifications, the only policy, by which a republic can be administered on just principles.\u201d","The best remembered of the Madisonian devices, which appear more or less explicitly in the Constitution, are the famous checks and balances and separation of powers: the creation of a plutocratic Senate, a presidential veto, and judicial review, all intended to crimp the power of the democratic House of Representatives, leaving popular majorities unable to obtain changes in national policy without the concurrence of elites. (Of course, the multiple veto points, intended to check popular government, always carried the danger of stymieing any coherent governance at all.)","But there was another avenue for divide-and-rule political engineering that the Framers saw as, if anything, even more potentially effective than the mutual frustration of divided government. This was the principle that came to be called the \u201cextended republic\u201d: in an era when long-distance communication and transportation were difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, expanding the geographical and jurisdictional terrain of politics could give a decisive advantage to the rich, who could better afford the means of political coordination.","It is this legacy of the \u201cextended republic\u201d that haunts us today."]},"section":{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"hr":{}},"div":{"p":["The worldwide revolutionary turmoil of the years just after World War I witnessed the single biggest leap in labor\u2019s long forward march. At least, it did in most places.","But while general strikes were panicking European elites into making sweeping concessions to their working classes, here in America, the Wilson administration was swiftly reprivatizing the economy and dismantling the progressive wartime labor codes\u00a0\u2014 prompting Felix Frankfurter to render a despairing judgment: the United States, he wrote, appeared to be \u201cthe most reactionary country in the world.\u201d When the unimpeded rule of the plutocrats was confirmed by Calvin Coolidge\u2019s election six years later, William Howard Taft concluded with satisfaction that Frankfurter had been right: \u201cThis country is no country for radicalism. I think it is really the most conservative country in the world.\u201d","But why was that so? There were many theories. The patrician editors of the  had given this matter some thought, and on Constitution Day, 1921, they provided one plausible explanation: \u201cIf it is true, as there is much evidence to prove, that Americans are showing themselves the most conservative nation in a turbulent world, the largest cause of it lies in our Federal Constitution.\u201d The Constitution, the editors explained, \u201cmakes the American people secure in their individual rights as citizens when these are imperiled by passing gusts of sentiment.\u201d","These dubious \u201cgusts of sentiment,\u201d in the lingo of American constitution-speak, are precisely what other societies call \u201cthe democratic will.\u201d It stands to reason that a document drafted by a coterie of gilded gentry, openly contemptuous of \u201cdemocracy\u201d and panicked by what they saw as the mob rule of the 1780s, would seek to constrict popular sovereignty to the point of strangulation.","Thus, brilliantly and subtly, the system they built rendered it virtually impossible for the electorate to obtain a concerted change in national policy by a collective act of political will. The Senate is an undemocratic monstrosity in which 84 percent of the population can be outvoted by the 16 percent living in the smallest states. The passage of legislation requires the simultaneous assent of three separate entities\u00a0\u2014 the presidency, House, and Senate\u00a0\u2014 that voters are purposely denied the opportunity to choose at one time, with two-thirds of the Senate membership left in place after each election. The illogical Electoral College gears the whole combat of presidential elections around a few almost randomly determined swing states that happen to contain evenly balanced numbers of Democrats and Republicans. And the entire system is frozen in amber by an amendment process of almost comical complexity. Whereas France can change its constitution anytime with a three-fifths vote of its Congress, and Britain could recently mandate a referendum on instant runoff voting with a simple parliamentary majority, an amendment to the US Constitution requires the consent of no less than thirty-nine different legislatures comprising roughly seventy-eight separately elected chambers.","There was a brief moment in US history when these truths were acknowledged by the Left. During the Progressive Era, the Socialist Party branded the Constitution a menace to democratic government, and a number of progressive intellectuals, including Charles A. Beard, Vernon L. Parrington, Carl L. Becker, and J. Allen Smith, lucidly recognized the document\u2019s reactionary constraints and sometimes called for their overthrow.","Beard established a committee on the federal constitution that advocated subordinating the Constitution to popular control, declaring that \u201cthe people of the United States have not control over their fundamental law at the present time, save in a minor degree. The consequence is, our institutions do not reflect the popular will, but in reality other forces over which we have only a measure of control.\u201d The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, authorizing a federal income tax and direct election of senators, were the most enduring (if inadequate) fruits of this period of ferment.","But unfortunately, it was the counterattack that proved far more lasting.","During the 1920s and 1930s, as historian Michael Kammen has demonstrated, constitutionalism \u201cassumed a more central role in American culture than it ever had before,\u201d thanks in large part to \u201cthe efflorescence of intensely partisan organizations that promoted patriotic constitutionalism as an antidote to two dreaded nemeses, governmental centralization and socialism.\u201d The National Association for Constitutional Government, the American Legion, the Constitutional Educational League, the National Security League, and the Sentinels of the Republic all came together to \u201cpledge themselves to guard the Constitution and wage war on socialism.\u201d A national Constitution Day was instituted. Local school boards were pressed to further glorify the sacred parchment.","All of this, I would argue, amounted to America\u2019s version of the antidemocratic nationalist populism that was spreading in Europe during the same years. Today\u2019s Tea Party, with its mania for constitutionalism, is the direct heir to this venerable conservative tradition that embraces the Founding Fathers\u2019 masterwork as a bulwark against democratic adventurism\u00a0\u2014 hence the congressional Republicans\u2019 ritual Constitution-reading, and their new rule requiring that specific constitutional authority be cited for each bill. Like Action Fran\u00e7aise or the anti-republican peasant leagues of Weimar Germany, the Tea Party\u2019s patriotic constitutionalism originated in the 1920s as a conservative reaction against the working-class movements that had surged forward to remake the state into the democratic instrument of popular aspirations.","It\u2019s easy to make fun of the Right\u2019s bizarro Constitution fetish. Glenn Beck\u2019s late guru, the Bircher and Mormon extremist W. Cleon Skousen, is now the main source of the Republicans\u2019 constitutional wisdom; his books like , once out of print and gathering dust, have become posthumous bestsellers.","In a takedown of Tea Party constitutionalism, Dahlia Lithwick wrote in  that \u201cthe fact that the Constitution is sufficiently open-ended to infuriate all Americans almost equally is part of its enduring genius.\u201d \u201cIt is an integrative force\u00a0\u2014 the cornerstone of our civil religion,\u201d wrote Andrew Romano in ; but \u201cthe Tea Partiers belong to a different tradition\u00a0\u2014 a tradition of divisive fundamentalism.\u201d \u201cThe Constitution is ink on parchment,\u201d wrote Jill Lepore in a  piece (\u201cThe Commandments\u201d). \u201cIt is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates\u00a0\u2014 the course of events\u00a0\u2014 over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone\u2019s.\u201d That sounds nice and awfully inclusive, but unfortunately the Constitution is much more than that: it is a charter for plutocracy."]}}}},"published":"2026-07-04T12:50:00Z","summary":"The Constitution didn\u2019t stop Trump \u2014 it made his reign possible."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/zohran-mamdani-independence-day-address","title":"Zohran Mamdani on the Promise of America","updated":"2026-07-04T15:25:22.137763Z","author":{"name":"Zohran Mamdani"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"Society","term":"Society"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"History","term":"History"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"p":["Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York Harbor. Long before the name \u201cNew York\u201d had ever been spoken, Lenape dugouts crossed these currents. It was on these waters that tall masts crested the horizon, captained by explorers like [Giovanni da] Verrazzano and [Henry] Hudson, after whom we\u2019ve named our bridges and rivers. And ever since, ships full of travelers weary from long journeys have passed through the Narrows, the winds of the Atlantic at their backs.","When those passengers lifted their heads to glimpse what lies just beyond the waves, what did they see? They saw land, lush and teeming with life. They saw men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage. They saw tenements rife with squalor. They saw industry rumbling with activity, steam and smoke rising, a city on the move. They saw a towering monument to freedom, her torch glowing worldwide welcome.","They saw New York City. They saw America.","Our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence. Two hundred and fifty years of a grand experiment in self-governance\u00a0\u2014 an experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted it would last more than a few years, let alone a quarter of a millennium.","From Lexington to Los Angeles, Selma to Seneca Falls, Morrisania to Midwood, Americans will come together for a day, just as we do each year. Families will gather around the grill. Fireworks will fill the night sky.","This will be no ordinary day of celebration. Two hundred and fifty years presents a rare opportunity for more than 340 million people to turn together\u00a0\u2014 both toward one another and toward ourselves, to take measure of who we are as a nation. When we look at America, what do we see?","Here at City Hall, as I sit behind George Washington\u2019s desk, alongside new Americans who came to this country, I cannot see all of America. But like so many who came before, I can see New York City.","The city I see today looks very different than the one that greeted George Washington. In July of 1776, our city simmered under the yoke of oppression. The British had imposed a colonial rule so repressive that 250 years ago, eighty miles south, a small group of newspaper editors, farmers, and soldiers signed their names on a document declaring truths that feel self-evident now but were revolutionary then, establishing the ideals our nation still strives to fulfill.","The British did not take it well. War broke out. And that August, as the largest battle of the Revolutionary War unfolded in Brooklyn, batteries on Governor\u2019s Island took aim at British ships anchored just offshore.","We were outgunned, we were outmanned, and we were soundly defeated. After only a few months, it appeared our fledgling attempt at democracy was on the precipice of collapse.","But that night, with the moon overhead, thousands of our soldiers silently climbed into ferries and flat-bottomed boats and escaped to Manhattan. The Continental Army survived to fight another day. Independence may have been declared in Philadelphia, but it was rescued in New York City.","George Washington was the last to leave Brooklyn. As he waited at the river\u2019s edge, the sun beginning its rise, he would have looked out over New York City\u2019s waters and seen what so many have seen in the 250 years since\u00a0\u2014 an opportunity to begin anew.","Those opportunities\u00a0\u2014 like everything in New York City\u00a0\u2014 are not given. They are won.","In 1838, eleven years after New York outlawed slavery, a recently emancipated black man by the name of James Weeks sought to begin anew as well\u00a0\u2014 and to help hundreds of others do the same. He bought property in Brooklyn, won himself the right to vote, and sold lots to others newly freed. When they landed in New York Harbor, they knew they had something waiting for them that they had never had before: a home.","Weeksville still stands today\u00a0\u2014 a living, breathing testament to what we know America to be: a place each of us has the power to make.","The harbor was busy those years, as ships poured in from around the world. Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty. Chinese sailors settled in what is today Chinatown. Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island\u00a0\u2014 Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty, Syrians seeking economic opportunity.","Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation. They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid, buildings rising into the clouds. They could not yet see the nativism they would face\u00a0\u2014 the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand. But no matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew.","Over the years that followed, despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry, despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at their very existence, immigrants made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make New York City.","That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness extends to them, too, is no relic of the past. It carried millions of black Americans north during the Great Migration, it drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after World War II, it invited countless others from the West Indies, South Asia, West Africa, and across the world. And it is what brought my family to this city when I was seven years old.","My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane. Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America\u00a0\u2014 the promise of the beautiful, patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals.","There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here.","And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.","For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.","We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence\u00a0\u2014 that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all.","It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel\u00a0\u2014 the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker but an American, too.","You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.","The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.","How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.","At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again\u00a0\u2014 including 250 years ago\u00a0\u2014 those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. As Thomas Paine once wrote, \u201cThis new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0hither have they fled.\u201d","And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted\u00a0\u2014 but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.","As we mark 250 years, what do we see?","We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world\u00a0\u2014 one where children go to sleep hungry while the world\u2019s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections.","We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands\u00a0\u2014 those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone\u00a0\u2014 and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.","Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is not all I see when we look for America. We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on an ailing neighbor.","Yes, we see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work, and still believes his country can do better by his family.","Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder. Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people.","We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors\u00a0\u2014 without asking how long they have lived here, or what papers they have\u00a0\u2014 as ICE invades our neighborhoods.","We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots.","We see America each time working people demand more\u00a0\u2014 not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans.","There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: Love it or leave it, they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time.","It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?","Today, I think not only of the Fourth of July\u00a0\u2014 I think too of the ninth of July. Five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed, it arrived here in New York City. Redcoats had disembarked on Staten Island. More than a hundred British ships loomed just offshore.","Across this city, the Continental Army prepared for an invasion. George Washington commanded his brigades to assemble just a few feet from this building. It was known then as the Commons\u00a0\u2014 today, we call it City Hall Park.","There, within range of British guns, Washington ordered his generals to read the Declaration aloud. And with the world\u2019s mightiest empire poised to attack, Washington told the people of New York City what we will celebrate tomorrow\u00a0\u2014 that we had declared our independence. That freedom was within reach.","That evening, danger loomed. Conflict was not a question but a certainty. And yet when those early New Yorkers marched toward the statue of King George III that stood in Bowling Green, a statue they would melt down into bullets for their young army, they walked in unison\u00a0\u2014 grounded not in the pursuit of plunder, but in ideals that for the first time had a name: America.","Those ideals upon which our nation was built\u00a0\u2014 they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.","Ours is a nation working each day toward the perfection in which it was conceived. A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America\u00a0\u2014 the striving, the bettering, the reaching toward perfection.","What a privilege each of us has, to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses, to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds, to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores\u00a0\u2014 the greatness that, for 250 years, has been America.","Thank you. God Bless America, God Bless New York City, and happy Fourth of July."]}},"published":"2026-07-04T12:45:00.13Z","summary":"In a speech marking the country\u2019s 250th anniversary, socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani lays out his vision of a United States of America for the many, not the few."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/the-morning-after","title":"The Founders\u2019 Own Second Thoughts","updated":"2026-07-03T19:34:27.082325Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"History","term":"History"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"Politics","term":"Politics"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"figure":[{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cIn vain was the collected wisdom of America convened at Philadelphia. In vain were the anxious labours of a Washington bestowed. Their works are regarded as nothing better than empty bubbles destined to be blown away.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cPerhaps no man in the United States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself\u00a0\u2014 and contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know from the very beginning I am still labouring to prop the frail and worthless fabric. Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for my rewards. What can I do better than withdraw from the Scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cThere is so much Rascallity, so much Venality and Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition, such a Rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to Support a Republic.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cOh my Country, how I mourn over thy follies and Vices, thine ignorance and imbecillity, Thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening Admiration of fools and Knaves!\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 The never failing effects of democracy. I once thought our Constitution was quasi a mixed Government, but they have now made it, to all intents and purposes, in Virtue, Spirit and effect a democracy. We are left without resources but in our prayers and tears.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cThe Selfishness of our Countrymen is not only Serious but melancholly, foreboding ravages of Ambition and Avarice which never were exceeded on this Selfish Globe.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 The distemper in our Nation is so general, and so certainly incurable.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cI have duly recieved your favor of Dec. 31 and fear with you all the evils which the present lowering aspect of our political horison so ominously portends. That, at some future day, which I hoped to be very distant, the free principles of our government might change, with the change of circumstances, was to be expected. But I certainly did not expect that they would not over-live the generation which established them.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cThe difficulty of finding an unexceptionable process for appointing the Executive Organ of a Government such as that of the US [Electoral College] was deeply felt by the Convention; and as the final arrangement of it took place in the latter stage of the Session, it was not exempt from a degree of the hurrying influence produced by fatigue and impatience in all such Bodies.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 The part of the arrangement which casts the eventual appointment on the House of Reps. voting by States, was, as you presume, an accommodation to the anxiety of the smaller States for their sovereign equality, and to the jealousy of the larger towards the cumulative functions of the Senate.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cA party exists in the United States, formed by a combination of causes, who oppose the government in all its measures, and are determined (as all their conduct evinces) by clogging its wheels, indirectly to change the nature of it, and to subvert the Constitution.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cI feel pain when I am reminded of my exertions in the cause of what we called liberty; and sometimes wish I could erase my name from the declaration of Independence. In Case of a rupture with Britain or France\u00a0\u2014 what shall we fight for?\u00a0\u2014 for our Constitution? I cannot meet with a man who loves it. It is considered as too weak, by an half of our Citizens, and too strong by the Other half.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cI consider the cause of good government as having been put to an issue and the verdict against it.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cAvarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cOur dear Americans perhaps have as much [public spirit] as any Nation now existing, and New England perhaps has more than the rest of America. But I have seen all along my Life, Such Selfishness, and Littleness even in New England, that I sometimes tremble to think that, altho We are engaged in the best Cause that ever employed the Human Heart, yet the Prospect of success is doubtfull not for Want of Power or of Wisdom, but of Virtue.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cI yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that our Constitution cannot last.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 The union has been prolonged thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cThe new Governments we are assuming, in every Part, will require a Purification from our Vices, and an Augmentation of our Virtues or they will be no Blessings. The People will have unbounded Power. And the People are extreamly addicted to Corruption and Venality, as well as the Great.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cIf ambition and avarice are not as strong in this Country, as in others, my observations have been inaccurate. If intrigues and manuevres in Elections have not been practised, and are not now practising, I have been misinformed; and if the people are not every day deceived by artifice and falsehood, I have no understanding.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cInstead of the most enlightened people, I fear we Americans shall soon have the character of the silliest people under Heaven.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cThe great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like Gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulphing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cCivilisation, commerce and science have done their utmost to produce national happiness without success. The last experiment to make man happy without his God is now trying by means of liberty. It will certainly fail. It has already disappointed the expectations of its most sanguine and ardent friends.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "},{"blockquote":{"p":"\u201cI feel pain when I am reminded of my exertions in the cause of what we called liberty; and sometimes wish I could erase my name from the declaration of Independence. In Case of a rupture with Britain or France\u00a0\u2014 what shall we fight for?\u00a0\u2014 for our Constitution? I cannot meet with a man who loves it. It is considered as too weak, by an half of our Citizens, and too strong by the Other half.\u201d"},"figcaption":"\u2014 "}]}},"published":"2026-07-04T12:40:00Z","summary":"Even the Founding Fathers had second thoughts about the system they had created."},{"id":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/07\/spain-habsburgs-decline-empire-trump","title":"America\u2019s Empire Is Ending Much Like Spain\u2019s Did","updated":"2026-07-03T18:52:44.158589Z","author":{"name":"Logan McMillen"},"category":[{"@attributes":{"label":"History","term":"History"}},{"@attributes":{"label":"War and Imperialism","term":"War and Imperialism"}}],"content":{"@attributes":{"type":"xhtml"},"div":{"div":{"p":["An often forgotten historical truth about the American Revolution is the crucial role that Spain played in providing financing, logistical support, and supplies. As Greg Grandin details in , in late 1776, Benjamin Franklin entered secret talks with the Bourbon Court to plead support for the revolutionaries\u2019 cause. Spain eventually agreed, sending envoys \u201cto manage the distribution of its aid, supplying the Continental Army with blankets, boots, gunpowder, and other necessities.\u201d By 1779, Spain itself had declared war on England, launching naval campaigns up the Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast.","In 1782, at the negotiations that eventually produced the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish diplomat the Count of Aranda was among the first to recognize the Crown\u2019s strategic blunder. Spain would have been better off, Aranda argued, had they left England and its colonists to fight one another. Instead it had financed a power that would eventually threaten its possessions in Florida, New Orleans, and Mexico. Today the United States has a lot in common with the declining Spanish Empire that it eventually replaced."]},"section":[{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-1"},"header":{"h2":"A Golden Age?"},"div":{"p":["In the century before, Diego Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s 1635 painting  depicts the Spanish General Ambrogio Spinola graciously accepting the keys to the Dutch town in 1625. This moment was the crowning achievement of imperial Spain\u2019s so-called . In the span of just a few months, King Philip IV\u2019s forces achieved a string of stunning military victories: relieving Genoa, defending C\u00e1diz, recapturing Bahia, and winning a ten-month siege at Breda. This proved to the Habsburg Court that Spain had shaken off the cobwebs of the Twelve Years\u2019 Truce, leading royal favorite Gaspar de Guzm\u00e1n the Count-Duke of Olivares (who led a notoriously hawkish faction) to pen one of the most famous pronouncements from early modern history: \u201cGod is Spanish and fights for Spain.\u201d","But the canvas belies a more complicated truth. Spinola remained with the Army of Flanders for three years following the surrender of Breda, advocating to the Council of State for a negotiated peace with the Dutch. As a military realist, Spinola knew that what we now call the Eighty Years\u2019 War was unwinnable and that the treasury was empty.","When he returned to Madrid in 1628, Spinola was blamed by Olivares for unpreventable setbacks (including the Crown stiffing his soldiers) and was reassigned to the governorship of Milan\u00a0\u2014 leading Spanish forces in the War of the Mantuan Succession. This regional war with France over a small Italian duchy was a strategic disaster for the Habsburg Court, contributing to a local outbreak of the bubonic plague, which then tore through Spinola\u2019s forces. Olivares stripped him of his diplomatic authority in 1630, and Spinola took refuge at a nearby castle, where, on his deathbed, he is said to have screamed relentlessly about his honor being stolen from him.","When he commissioned Vel\u00e1zquez to paint  a few years later, Olivares was facing intense domestic backlash against what we might now call his \u201ctotal war\u201d policies under the 1626 Union of Arms. Olivares demanded a permanent standing army of 140,000 men, with every province and kingdom contributing under a strict proportional tax quota. This broke with centuries of tradition under the system of , whereby local elites exercised a great deal of political and economic autonomy. To distract the Habsburg Court from this political disaster, Olivares quickly financed the Buen Retiro Palace by regressive taxation, the sale of noble titles, and the shaking down of local municipalities.","It was constructed out of cheap materials, with some contemporaneous accounts referring to it as a chicken coop. In an ornate Hall of Realms, the coats of arms for each of Spain\u2019s twenty-four provinces and kingdoms were prominently displayed, along with twelve patriotic battle scenes, including . Here Spinola is immortalized as the embodiment of chivalrous Spanish virtues, which did not protect him from the conspiracies of his chief political rival or the foreign policy missteps of his king.","As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, the Trump administration is force-feeding the public a sort of chauvinistic, dime-store version of the Buen Retiro Palace, complete with drywall monuments, schlock art, and military brass playing patriotic songs to an empty National Mall. So as we celebrate the Fourth of July weekend, it is worth reflecting on the decline of the empire that the United States replaced in the Americas, a descent that began long before the American Revolution.","By 1637, two years after Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s painting was commissioned, the town of Breda was back in the hands of the Dutch; the Habsburg Court was bankrupt and alienated from its regional allies; France had officially entered the Thirty Years\u2019 War; and Olivares was putting down a local rebellion in Catalonia. These crises boiled over, and by 1640\u201341, Catalonia had officially seceded from Spain and named King Louis XIII of France the Count of Barcelona. Spain eventually won the Reaper\u2019s War in 1652, but amid the chaos permanently lost Portugal\u2019s territories and, with it, its status as the uncontested hegemon in the Americas.","By 1670, the siege of Breda was a distant memory. The Netherlands was an independent state, Olivares had been banished from the court and died, and the Regency Council of King Charles II (Phillip IV\u2019s son and the last of the Spanish Habsburgs) was forced to recognize England\u2019s claim to Jamaica. This, in turn, led to the economic and legal integration of the Thirteen Colonies with the British West Indies, and the events that gave rise to the American Revolutionary War and the state so many of us call home today."]}},{"@attributes":{"id":"sec-2"},"header":{"h2":"From One Declining Empire to Another"},"div":{"p":["For over a century, galleons groaning with the weight of Andean silver from Potos\u00ed, in modern-day Bolivia, were shipped into the port of Seville, bringing the Habsburg Court previously unimaginable wealth. The quantity of precious metals was so vast that it triggered the first ever wave of global inflation. Foreign imports, which were comparatively cheap, slowly bankrupted domestic manufacturers and, specifically, Spain\u2019s once famous Merino wool and textile industry. Manufacturing centers entered long declines, and Castile, the heart of Spain, was depopulated.","The modern US equivalent of Potos\u00ed silver isn\u2019t any single commodity but the US dollar itself, given its function as the world\u2019s reserve currency. For decades, the American empire has relied on dollar hegemony to absorb global surpluses, forcing its trading partners to subsidize American consumption. Wall Street\u2019s mind-boggling array of financial instruments function a bit like the Spanish treasure fleets: they conjure vast centralized wealth that is actively hostile to domestic production, which\u00a0\u2014 when combined with contractionary monetary policy\u00a0\u2014 has led to the sort of abstracted economic and class warfare whose results are visible as day in the former industrial towns and cities of Rockford, Flint, Youngstown, and countless others across the Midwest.","To maintain its hegemony over trade in the Americas while simultaneously fighting ideological wars far from home, the Spanish Empire adopted financially ruinous military policies. The Army of Flanders was the world\u2019s first permanent mercenary force, and it had to be continually resupplied in the Spanish Netherlands by way of a highly contested road that started in northern Italy and wound through Switzerland and Germany. The Spanish treasure fleet and armadas were frequently targeted and sunk by state and nonstate actors alike, including Ottoman, Dutch, and British privateers. To finance these expenses, Philip IV relied heavily on the  system, issuing short-term, high-interest bonds to foreigners. Genoese bankers loaned the Habsburg Court cash to pay for mercenaries and shipbuilders, securing the debt against future Castilian taxes and inbound silver from the Americas.","By the 1620s, virtually all of Spain\u2019s new wealth was consumed by debt service. The United States is currently locked in a similar debt spiral, functioning as a sort of garrison to secure supply chains for transnational capital. The US military\u2019s over eight hundred overseas bases, command structures (like AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM), as well as its subsidization of sub-imperial proxies (like Israel and Saudi Arabia) drive the Pentagon\u2019s staggering annual budget, which is almost entirely financed by debt issuance.","To state the obvious, the United States does not deploy carrier strike groups to the Strait of Hormuz because it\u2019s close to America\u2019s borders. It\u2019s the logistical requirement of the neoliberal economic order and is used to enforce  and police maritime choke points to keep global capital flowing. Today a rapidly growing share of America\u2019s tax revenues (19 percent in 2026) goes to service the interest on its debt.","By the 1620s, the Spanish Empire, like the United States today, was dealing with a crisis of elite overproduction. The ranks of the aristocracy and  swelled as its bases of local industry and the peasantry shrank, a process accelerated by the aforementioned practice of selling noble titles to raise quick cash. The number of elites vastly outpaced the empire\u2019s ability to provide the land and patronage they expected, giving rise to the , the lower noble, a unique class synthesis famously immortalized in .","The contest between Olivares and Spinola played out in the upper echelons of this conflict. Slowly, the bloated overclass turned on itself, triggering factional wars for control of Spain, then a composite state of multiple provinces and kingdoms, and leading to its brief establishment as a semi-unitary state under Olivares.","Contemporary America is contending with a similar crisis. Over the last four decades, the neoliberal order has given rise to a massive debt-encumbered and downwardly mobile white-collar class. Increasingly, this class has resorted to cannibalizing the state through austerity policies and graft to maintain its status. Institutional rot has become a polite fiction to ignore, as elite competition has devolved into a factional war over the United States\u2019 decaying economic and political consensus.","As the Spanish Empire\u2019s economic engine sputtered, its ruling classes also retreated into exclusionary nationalism. Incapable (or unwilling) to improve local fortunes, the Crown obsessively regulated who was afforded economic and political rights, manifesting in the development and enforcement of blood purity laws. By redefining citizenship, the semi-unitary state strictly limited internal migration and social mobility to protect the privileges of the \u201cOld Christian\u201d Castilian elites. Entire communities were marginalized to ensure the few remaining spoils of empire flowed to increasingly narrow subsets of the population.","Today the United States is using a strikingly similar approach by way of aggressive immigration enforcement (\u201csurges,\u201d raids, etc.) and lawfare against individual communities (think Haitian Temporary Protected Status holders, who were recently stripped of their status, and the recent  to ). As the neoliberal economic model continually fails to deliver broad-based prosperity, the state must actively weaponize the concept of citizenship to manage domestic fallout. By expanding the definition of an \u201cillegal\u201d resident, the federal government can strip economic rights from millions of workers, further depressing wages while handing a useless symbolic gift to the privileged \u201creal Americans\u201d (what W. E. B. Du Bois called a \u201c\u201d).","To state the obvious, an empire producing nothing while collecting rents, sacrificing its interior to enrich a bloated coastal elite, and barricading the doors to exploit a vulnerable racialized underclass is not on a positive trajectory. Today the Trump administration is consumed by the same delusion that gripped the Habsburg Court four hundred years ago, leading to a rapid decline in the Spanish Empire as an uncontested global hegemon.","A forty-five-year-old  in 1670 would have lived through the whole sequence: the , the establishment of the Union of Arms, the loss of the Eighty Years\u2019 War and the rise of an independent Netherlands, the Reaper\u2019s War and the loss of Portuguese territories, and the legal recognition of English territory in the Americas. This  could have even traveled to Madrid to see Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s , conceived in a proud two-year blip of an otherwise downward historical trend.","Yes, the United States could somehow reopen the Strait of Hormuz for global capital on . Yes, it might succeed in stealing assets from Venezuela and Cuba. But continued imperial violence will not usher in a new American century, lift up the political and economic fortunes of its people, or live up to the  the American Revolution inspired.","Recent events have shown us that socialism in America is a , supported by everyone from progressive reformists to anarcho-communists (and everything in between). One thing they appear to have in common on America\u2019s 250th anniversary is the following: the belief that We the People have the absolute right to dismantle a failed economic and political order that has immiserated the domestic working classes while killing, displacing, and otherwise victimizing millions abroad. This is a consensus not of decline but renewal."]}}]}},"published":"2026-07-03T18:52:44.158589Z","summary":"As the US celebrates its 250th, it has begun to resemble the decadent Spanish Empire it replaced: producing nothing while collecting rents, sacrificing its interior to enrich a bloated elite, and embracing exclusionary nationalism to exploit its underclass."}]}