Vol 6 No 3
Fall 2022The Market and Workplace in a Democratic Socialism
This paper lays out a model that seeks to marry firm-level democracy with macroeconomic growth and solidaristic wage policy.
Where Did the Bullshit Jobs Go?
Does capitalism in fact produce bullshit jobs? This essay examines David Graeber’s influential argument that it does and suggests it is flawed in important respects.
The Panthers Can Save Us Now
This essay argues that the Black Panthers ought to be considered exemplars of the socialist rejection of elite identity politics.
The Young Lords and Their Legacy
The Young Lords played a critical role in the Puerto Rican and broader Latino movement in the 1970s, taking their inspiration in part from the Black Panthers. We consider how the Lords tried to catalyze broad Puerto Rican unity, the class tensions within the movement, and its eventual eclipse by a more elite identity politics.
A Literary International?
During the interwar years, the Communist International promoted the development of a literary wing of the international communist movement, bringing together writers from the capitalist core as well as the colonial world. Even while official Communism was becoming narrower and more rigid in its political doctrine, the goal of supporting a literature that was “proletarian in content, national in form” met with considerable success.
Raymond Geuss Is Missing the Politics of Class
As a philosopher, Raymond Geuss usually insists on highlighting the effects of structures of power. But his examination of work in the age of climate crisis is impoverished without analyzing the politics of capitalist production.
A Working-Class Memoir Challenges the “Culture Wars”
Adam Theron-Lee Rensch’s memoir is a deep examination of the meaning of class in America’s postindustrial hinterlands that shows how it is distorted by useless and misleading culture talk. Foregrounding economic disparities and class politics is now a matter of survival for the Left.
The Third World Demanded Global Redistribution in the 1970s
The New International Economic Order in the Global South forced American policy elites to engage with the demands of economic redistribution. But as a new global regime of IMF austerity and market-driven politics descended around the world, those demands couldn’t take hold.
The Marxism of Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams was a Marxist whose politics were deeply anchored in radical working-class and internationalist traditions. Recent postcolonial critics have accused him of ignoring the realities of empire. Examining his body of work shows this is wrong.
The Fed Is Rescuing Capitalists Again
The Federal Reserve is now perpetually rescuing the American economy. Even when it had to change the formula during the COVID pandemic, its class loyalties were clear: intervene for the benefit of big capital.
Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionary Reading
Britain’s foremost Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton, accounts for the intellectual achievements, as well as the ideological and critical limitations, of a formative strand of British literary humanism.