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- Issue 36
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Political Revolution
There are those who deplore war, revolution, and rebellion. Manifestly, war is to be lamented, if it is waged to enthrone or to perpetuate wrong, but it expands to superlative grandeur if it is for the purpose of establishing justice and breaking the fetters of slavery. In such cases every blow struck for the downtrodden sends thrills of joy throughout the world. The cowering slave looks up and sees, however dimly, the dawn of a new era when he shall be free.
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Front Matters
Setting Sail
The Soapbox
Letters + #JacobinPitches
Jacobin troll Donald Hughes (@getfiscal) has been pitching us every week for two years. We’ve compiled some of the best, and our responses, without edits.
Friends and Foes
Will Big Money Defeat Bernie Sanders?
Thomas Ferguson’s work traces the history of how big money buys politics in America. He sat down with Jacobin to discuss the 2020 election and why, despite the flood of corporate cash, he thinks a Bernie Sanders White House could truly shake things up.
Means of Deduction
Navigational Charts
Uneven & Combined
Democracy, Without the Majority Class
Workers are frozen out of politics in both the United States and Britain.
Vulgar Empiricist
For the Few, Not the Many
How many votes does it take to capture the most powerful assembly in the United States? Turns out, not that many.
Transitions
We Won the Battle, They Won the War
History shows that the capitalist class will do whatever it can to undermine our reforms and oust the Left from power.
Medicare for All Is the One-in-a-Million Shot We Have to Make Happen
There’s nothing realistic about passing Medicare for All — we’re outgunned, outspent, and outmatched. And yet we have no other choice.
Illustration by Michael DeForge
Blueprint for a Political Revolution
If we’re going to change the United States, socialists will have to win the working class. And we urgently need a strategy and an organization to do just that.
Illustration by Cristina Daura
Reading Materiel
Captain’s Log
Canon Fodder
How to Be a Socialist in the Twenty-First Century
Erik Olin Wright devoted his life to figuring out ways the world could finally leave capitalism behind. His final book holds crucial lessons about which strategies belong to the past and which ones can build the bridge to a socialist future.
Canon Fodder
Common Nonsense
Extinction Rebellion’s cofounder Roger Hallam wants a mass revolt against climate change. But while his new book calls for activists to engage in “disruption” against politicians, it offers no blueprint for the workers who have the power to transform the economic structures that created our climate crisis.
Dossier
Mad Libs
Our First 100 Days Could be a Nightmare
Even if Bernie Sanders — or any other democratic socialist — had an electoral majority for our political revolution, we would have to contend with the power of capital. Investment strikes, capital flight, and the power of finance could turn the euphoria of victory into a disaster unless we have a plan to confront them.
Illustration by Oleg Buevskiy
The Deep State Strikes Back
If socialists want to take power through the ballot box, we have to be ready for when capitalists stop playing by the rules.
Cultural Capital
Desert Island Picks
Red Channels
The Death of Revolutionary Film Form
From the end of World War I through the 1970s, filmmakers around the world experimented with film form in the hopes of awakening a new political consciousness. Why did that dream die?
Bass & Superstructure
You Say You Want a Revolution
On a forgotten back-and-forth between Nina Simone and John Lennon
The Tumbrel
The Nautical Copy is Kind of Tiresome
Girondins
Jesse Jackson’s Political Revolution
Before Bernie Bros vs. the DNC, there was Jesse Jackson vs. the Atari Democrats.
The Worst Estate
Get Bernie
Trump’s inauguration set off an unprecedented dirty war from the Washington establishment. A President Sanders will face even worse.
The Worst Estate
It Wasn’t Only the Media That Defeated Jeremy Corbyn
The Labour Party’s election disaster was rooted just as much in its own errors.
Thermidor
Our Revolution Must Dismantle the National Security State
We can’t avoid confronting the Pentagon and the massive (and lucrative) security state it oversees.
Leftovers
You’re Still Reading?
Dustbin
In Defense of Democracy
The best defenders of even the narrow ideals of liberal democracy are not the elites who glorify them but the masses of people whom they so often distrust.
Popular Front
The Parties We Didn’t Build
The 2010s were meant to herald a new generation of party activism, as Europe’s austerity generation built new structures to the left of social democracy. Instead, we got short-lived surges of electoral enthusiasm — without the deeper rebuilding we so sorely needed.
Means & Ends
Are You Reading Propaganda Right Now?
Jacobin is politically committed. We’re not ashamed of that, and that’s why we need the support of our politically committed readership.
