Party Lines
From Swords to Ploughshares
We’re held hostage by a political and military elite that exploits us to fuel its endless wars.
- Summer 2019
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War Is a Racket
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
Front Matters
Basic training.
The Soapbox
Letters + The Internet Speaks
What happened to all the angry letters?
Struggle Session
Dismantling the School-to-Soldier Pipeline
Inside the fight against JROTC, a Pentagon program that targets working-class teenagers at public schools.
Friends & Foes
The Defector
How Rory Fanning went from Army Ranger to war resister.
Breaking the Chains of Command
Far from simply a question of foreign policy, the fight against militarism is a battle to undermine the basis of ruling-class power.
Means of Deduction
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
Uneven & Combined
The Armored Archipelago
The United States has 800 military installations in dozens of countries around the world. They all must be dismantled.
Transitions
Death Drive
Eighty years of American nuclear weapons policy.
The Vulgar Empiricist
British Health Care Lives in America
Despite underfunding, the Veterans Health Administration is the United States’ largest health care system. And it could be the foundation of a truly socialist alternative to private care.
Reading Materiel
Declassified but redacted for national security.
Canon Fodder
An Empty Tale
The foreign policy establishment is responding to Trump-era brutalities by demanding more, not less, aggression and empire.
Canon Fodder
Ike & Hayek
Eisenhower’s warning about the “military-industrial complex” marked an era when the American right feared militarism could bankrupt the country and plunge it into socialism.
Field Notes
The Wolfowitz Doctrine
In 1992, the Cold War was over. But the Defense Department was already planning for the next one.
The Online Left Goes to War
Stefan Bertram-Lee was an internet leftist. And then they went to Rojava and got a gun.
All Dad’s Armies
British politics have become a strange form of World War II cosplay, where the European Union are the Nazis, 1945 is a betrayal, and Boris Johnson is the new Winston Churchill.
Cultural Capital
Wholesome and patriotic entertainment.
Red Channels
Broken Barry
On HBO’s new tragicomedy, a veteran plumbs the depths of his combat record for the stage — but ends up painting a portrait of middle-American desolation.
Red Channels
Hollywood and the Pentagon
Some of your favorite movies were probably made with help from the Department of Defense.
Now we know which ones.
Bass & Superstructure
Who Cares What Army?
Though their time as a band was brief, the Monks represent a “what if” of the convergence between GI resistance and the 1960s counterculture.
Ways of Seeing
The GI Bill Made Art
The GI Bill is proof: if people have access to education and the means to live, they’ll create meaningful art.
Ways of Seeing
Once Upon a Time ... in Kashmir
We journey to Indian-occupied Kashmir, where the cinemas have been turned into torture chambers.
The Endless Frontier
The military sets the agenda for scientific research.
The University of Phoenix Army
For-profit colleges are making Wall Street firms even richer. Bush’s 2008 GI Bill helped make that possible.
The Tumbrel
Improving troop morale.
The Worst Estate
Selling Tony Blair’s War
Working people knew the war in Iraq was a mistake — but they didn’t have a media to speak for them.
Girondins
Elizabeth Warren’s Lean Green Fighting Machine
The way to cut military climate emissions is to scale back the United States’ enormous empire. Elizabeth Warren has no plan for that.
Girondins
UN Peacekeepers Are Not Your Friends
Even for the United Nations, bombs and troops are increasingly the solution to problems created by an unjust global economy.
Thermidor
Camera in One Hand, Gun in the Other
With its celebration of mercs rampaging through Africa, no healthy society could produce a magazine like Soldier of Fortune.
Thermidor
Finding the Lesser Evil
Taking stock of the Democratic field on US empire.
The 7th-Inning Stretch Under Socialism
It’s possible to elevate the working class without the jingoism.
Leftovers
Military surplus.
The Dustbin
The First March on Washington
A. Philip Randolph called for a March on Washington to force President Roosevelt to abolish Jim Crow in the war effort, and shaped the trajectory of the postwar left.
Means & Ends
We Were Made for This Moment
Democratic socialism is on the rise — Jacobin is here to help it along.
The Dustbin
War Is a Racket
The life and times of Smedley Butler.
