Vol 8 No 2

Summer 2024
  • Edwin F. Ackerman

Mexico Rising

Is the success of the electoral left in contemporary Mexico linked to the emergence of a new social pact? This article outlines the trajectory of the electoral left, parsing out its understanding of neoliberalism as a political economy of corruption and the budding features of actually existing post-neoliberalism in the country.

  • Dina Rizk Khoury

Migrancy in the Petrostates

The Gulf states are transit states because migrants constitute a majority of their populations. The politics of labor control is central to the organization of these states and to the predominance of their political and capitalist classes. The contradiction of Gulf labor politics lies in the autocratic nature of rule based on nonmarket forms of labor control and the continuous demand of the market for a willing labor force.

  • Christopher W. Shaw

Nationalize the Banks

During the first half of the twentieth century, millions of American workers and farmers wanted to socialize banking. In a nation where socialist principles supposedly lacked appeal, grassroots support for public banks revealed the prevalence and popularity of economic ideas that intersected and overlapped with socialism. Banking politics also presents a potential source of working-class political mobilization today.

  • Jacopo Custodi

For a Rooted Cosmopolitanism

Embracing national belonging strategically and redefining it with inclusive, progressive values can boost consensus and counter the Right’s dominance. However, this approach is neither straightforward nor without risks, which must be carefully considered.

  • Anna Vaninskaya

Orwell’s Ethics

George Orwell’s ethics of equality deserve careful consideration from general readers and academic moral philosophers alike. A new book offers a spirited defense of Orwell as a philosophical outsider but fails to historicize his socialist egalitarianism.

Review

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Culture Can’t Explain the Arab Revolts

Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising shows how the Arab revolts empowered democratic citizenship. But a focus on vibrant cultural creativity is no substitute for concrete analysis of political agency and economic structure.