John Womack’s labor strategy is about workers finding the capacity to "wound capital to make it yield anything.” But the massive challenge in today’s deindustrialized economy is locating where that leverage actually lies.
Why was New Labour “intensely relaxed” about “people getting filthy rich”? The answer lies in a comprehensive analysis and critique of Labourism itself, which the new book Futures of Socialism fails to deliver.
Austerity policies have their roots in efforts by economic elites to crush working-class power after WWI and redistribute income upward. To reverse austerity, democratic control over economic policymaking is essential.
British literary responses to the Paris Commune of 1871 expressed shock and fear about the collapse of the bourgeois social order. But they also registered sympathy with the Communards and their revolutionary aspirations.
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.
Settler colonialism is often described as a singular, transnational mode of domination. But it’s impossible to understand colonialism without political economy and material interests.
What kind of revolutionary filmmaker was Jean-Luc Godard? This is not an easy question to answer in periods when the divide between art and politics is hard to bridge in practice.
In No Politics but Class Politics, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed show how an identity politics that obscures class politics and ignores economic inequality only makes the many miseries around us worse.
The ideas of John Rawls, perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, have much to teach the Left. But Rawls’s theories failed to grapple adequately with the fundamental obstacles capitalism imposes to realizing a just society.
The case against the neoliberal privatization of public institutions is based on the harmful effects it has on workers and citizens. But the case for public ownership needs more: the legitimacy of democratic governance.