The American public is rightly horrified by the traumas that US wars inflict on its soldiers. But the Vietnam War era connected that trauma to the broader brutality of war and its foreign victims — and to the healing power of antiwar activism.
Gary Gerstle’s new book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order tackles important questions of the last century about democracy, economy, and war. But it fails to answer a basic question: why governments in capitalist democracies are compelled to serve capital.
The Saudi state is packaging its heritage industry as a mode of citizen participation. It’s an attempt to paper over a fundamental fact: the regime remains a dictatorship that maintains its rule by violently clamping down on opposition.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
An alternative, powerful new account of the Constitution foregrounds democratic politics as a constraint on capital and its forms of domination. Understanding the nature of this domination is essential for overcoming the oligarchical dangers the book bemoans.