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On Four Global Contradictions
Having an analytical framework to understand the key relationships that define the social conditions and political battles we face can guide us in formulating our strategy and tactics on every...
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Bananas for Socialism
Will there be bananas under socialism? The question recently swept the internet, started with a tweet from Malcolm Harris, communist and author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and...
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How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?
Organizing is not a process of ideological matchmaking. Most people’s politics will not mirror our own, and even people who identify with us strongly on some points will often differ sharply on others....
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How Ideology Can Help (Or Hurt) Movements Trying To Build Power
What is ideology? And why does it matter in social movements? In comparison with their counterparts in Europe, Latin America and other parts of the world, movements in the United States have tended to...
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The Emerging Coalition That Could Revitalize Our Politics
Nearly 30 years ago, in 1996, Columbia University hosted a conference called “The Fight for America’s Future: A Teach-in With the Labor Movement.” Speakers included the feminist activist Betty Friedan,...
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The Recent Decade of Revolt – Anarchy vs. Lenin
Perhaps it was not quite a revolution but the last decade or so – from 2010 to 2022 – has seen an upsurge of mass movements, revolts, and some might even say, a revolutions. It all began in Tunisia...
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South Africa’s Transition to Democracy Left Neoliberalism in Place
South Africa’s transition from an apartheid state to a democratic republic did not inaugurate an era of either prosperity or egalitarianism. This year, South Africa has seen its worst period of planned...
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Capitalism Isn’t Just Buying and Selling Things. It’s a System of Domination.
The video essay opens with battling citations of environmental activist Greta Thunberg and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. She says, “Capitalism will kill us all.” He says, “Free...
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What is a Political Psychopath?
Unhealthy societies tend to develop unhealthy people. 20th century philosopher Adorno once said, wrong life cannot be lived rightly. One indication of such a wrong life as well as an unhealthy and...
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The 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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Are 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...
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What’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...
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From 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...
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Beware 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...
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We 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...
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Gaza: 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...
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Marxism As Our Guide? ft Michael Albert
Is Marxism alone, enough to understand the current plight of people under capitalism? We discuss with Michael Albert
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The 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...
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To 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...
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Javier 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...
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Would 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...
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The 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...
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What 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...
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W.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...
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The 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...
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Don’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...
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Bella 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...
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Social 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...
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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?...
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Non-Alignment Today
The original non-alignment movement occured in 1961 following the Bandung Conference (Indonesia) held in 1955, which was attended by 29 countries, almost all of which had recently been liberated from...
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