Don’t Talk To Me About Solutions
It’s 2024 and I’m suspicious of “solutions”. Solutions to what, exactly? The excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that have already seen us breach the 1.5 degree limit set by the Paris Agreement?...
View ArticleSocial Relations as Symbolic Violence
Power Relations Inscribed in Narratives Among the concepts the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, developed is symbolic violence. It is an extension of the term “violence” to include various modes...
View ArticleBella Ciao, Bella Ciao… Hope Comes from the Young for a World-Weary Socialist
An Invitation and a Conundrum! When the announcement and the invitation reached my inbox, I read it in a state of contained excitement. The Academy of Democratic Modernity (ADM) had invited me (and...
View ArticleDon’t Fear “Collectivism”
The capacity of the reactionary mind to invent catchall signifiers of supposed left-wing depravity often seems limitless. But in the canon of conservative epithets, there is probably none more common...
View ArticleThe Society of Conformism
The last hundred years have been years of intense conflict that have resulted in countless wars, in addition to the two world wars. The classes and social groups that intervened in these conflicts did...
View ArticleW.E.B. Du Bois’ Study ‘The Philadelphia Negro’ at 125 Still Explains Roots of...
W.E.B. Du Bois is widely known for his civil rights activism, but many sociologists argue that he has yet to receive due recognition as the founding father of American sociology. His groundbreaking...
View ArticleWhat Is Left? Rebecca Solnit on the Perennial Divisions of the American Left
In late 1936 George Orwell, like so many young idealists from Europe and the USA, went off to fight fascism in Spain. By the spring of 1937 he realized he was in a war with not two but three sides. The...
View ArticleThe Concept “Privilege”: Barrier or Bridge to Social Justice
I recently participated in a brief email exchange about “privilege” and it made me think a broader discussion might prove worthwhile. Does using the concept privilege as in “white privilege,” “male...
View ArticleWould Frantz Fanon Have Supported the Oct. 7 Massacre? His Biographer Isn’t...
On the morning of October 7, as images of the torn fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel proliferated on social media, so too did quotations by Frantz Fanon. The writings of this Martinique-born...
View ArticleJavier Milei’s Freak Show Act Is a Taste of Things to Come
Javier Milei’s warm welcome at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos was the latest stage in the seemingly baffling rise of radical right-wing libertarianism to political respectability. The...
View ArticleTo Be Or Not To Be Marxist?
A recent Jacobin article about how Karl Marx first got radicalized included these two sentences: “Today, many young people are marching leftward in [Marx’s] footsteps from a passion for freedom to a...
View ArticleThe Left Has a Great Story to Share About Alternatives to Capitalism—But...
For radical socialists, one of the most frustrating political experiences in the post-Cold War era is witnessing the dramatic deterioration of socio-economic conditions throughout the developed world...
View ArticleMarxism As Our Guide? ft Michael Albert
Is Marxism alone, enough to understand the current plight of people under capitalism? We discuss with Michael Albert
View ArticleGaza: A Ghastly Window into the Crisis of Global Capitalism
As the world watches in horror over the mounting death toll of Palestinian civilians and Israel faces charges before the International Court of Justice for the Crime of Genocide, the carnage in Gaza...
View ArticleWe Need Better Tools
The pursuit of a better future involves questioning the very foundations of our current society, including the forms of technology that uphold it. Today we explore Ivan Illich’s concept of an...
View ArticleBeware Lifestyle Fascism
The first thing to know about Bryan Johnson is that there are two of him. One is Bryan with a “y,” the forty-six-year-old founder of the Blueprint life-extension system. This Bryan Johnson spends his...
View ArticleFrom Chile to Grenada, Socialism Is What Capitalists Are Really Afraid Of
Today, we too often study Salvador Allende’s government nostalgically, as a tale of heroic struggle and martyrdom. But Allende shouldn’t be remembered as someone who believed in a vague progressive...
View ArticleWhat’s Driving Former Progressives to the Right?
In a new essay in the progressive magazine In These Times, the writers Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet grapple with the contemporary version of an old phenomenon: erstwhile leftists decamping to the...
View ArticleAre Political Labels a Farce? The Case of the (non-)Radical Left
Political labels, more than any other time in the late modern history, which traditionally begins with the French Revolution of 1789, not only have lost their former relevance but have become a poor...
View ArticleThe Long Transition to Socialism
There has been a lot of talk about democratic socialism in the last ten or so years. Mostly, socialism is used as a label for a political tendency (Bernie + the Squad + Democratic Socialists of...
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