Gloria Steinem, who just died, said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” Hear, hear, for the writing life, and for a woman affirming its centrality, above and beyond other goods and values, including motherhood. Incidentally, one of the really nice things about the unjustly criticized Devil Wears Prada 2 is the last scene, where Meryl Streep says to Anne Hathaway, by way of discussing the sacrifices she has made over the years for her career as a journalist and an editor, including sacrifices foisted on her children, “But boy, I love to work, don’t you?” I thought it was a gutsy way to end the movie, particularly […]
In a recent post, Jodi Dean offers the most radical analysis of AI that I’ve seen. Using a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and her theoretical smarts and humor, Dean detects a far graver significance to the loss of reading that Large Language Models are enabling and pushing, far graver than what we’ve all been fretting about with the decline of reading skills, student literacy, and all that. According to Dean, Lacan tells us that language—and, through language, we might infer reading—is what infants learn through their separation from the mother (the mother in scare quotes; it’s really whoever is the provider of care). Language is how—or a representation of the fact that—the infant learns that its mother has desires independent […]
Who was the first to come up with the “wages of whiteness” thesis, broadly construed as a theory of how racism works and functions in a hierarchical society? I’m not referring to Roediger’s book by that title, since the theory predates his book, as you can see below. I’m more interested in the general idea of it, which we can see across Europe and North America and across several centuries. For example, Ludwig Börne, a Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote this about German antisemitism in 1832: The poor Germans! Living on the bottom floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes above them, they resolve their feeling of anxiety by speaking about people who live even further below […]
Stepping back from today’s Supreme Court rulings to consider the broad cast of the year, there seem to be three main areas in which the Court significantly pushed back on Trump. They are: 1) independence of the Fed; 2) tariffs; 3) birthright citizenship. As it happens, these were three of Trump’s biggest challenges to prevailing conservative and Republican orthodoxy. And on each one, he failed. How to read that failure? I think the simplest explanation is that the Roberts Court is, above all, a neoliberal Court. Trump’s challenge to free trade and independent monetary policy—as well as the idea of the United States being a nation of the people who are born there, not a nation of blood but a […]
In a probing Substack, John Judis writes, “In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as ‘democratic socialist’ in the same way it is now known widely as ‘liberal.’” Before you dismiss this as ideological patter from a political adventurer, you should know that Judis is a relentlessly unenthusiastic realist, who’s been watching and commenting on the American political scene longer than I’ve been alive. I’d like to take up his thought, with two tweaks. First, I’m less certain if the Democratic Party is going to be the vessel of this transformation. Though it may be at this point the oldest political party in the world—and, as Kevin Phillips famously called it, […]
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Categories
Economies, Political Theory, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Arthur Schlesinger, democratic socialism, John Judis, liberalism, Louis Hartz, New Deal, Philip Roth, Richard Hofstadter
Anxious about DSA’s recent victories, centrist House Democrats have issued a manifesto: “We are capitalist, not socialist.” Worried perhaps that that message may not be clear enough, Long Island Democrat Tom Suozzi elaborates in the New York Times: The people that don’t agree with their [DSA] philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized. The cocktail party circuit, in other words, has to get organized. Suozzi, by the way, represents the two peninsulas where West Egg and East Egg, of Great Gatsby fame, were set.
The BungaBunga podcast had me on to discuss my Nation review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global history. It was an excellent conversation. Both interviewers, Alex Gourevitch and Alex Hochuli, pushed me to think beyond what I had written. Among the issues we discovered in our discussion: Anyway, you can listen to it here or below.
Last week, I delivered a paper at a conference about the work of Sheldon Wolin in Lausanne, Switzerland. For those of you who don’t know the name, Wolin was a political theorist who taught at Berkeley and Princeton. I took undergraduate courses with him on modern political thought and radical political thought; many other political theorists, including Wendy Brown, Cornel West, and Hanna Pitkin, studied with him as graduate students. He was one of the most influential teachers of political theory in the United States during the second half of the twentieth-century. Though I’ve always valued him most as a reader and teacher of political theory, he also had a wide audience as a political theorist in his own right. […]
Since my review of Sven Beckert’s book on capitalism went live (and, truth be told, a few days before that), I’ve been engaged in a back and forth, sometimes bitchy, sometimes friendly, with various critics—of me, of Beckert, of capitalism, of Marxism, of Dylan Riley, of Robert Brenner. You can find many of these exchanges on my Facebook page. Others have sent me screenshots from Twitter and other social media platforms I’m not on. One of the steady drumbeats in these conversations is privilege. My privilege as a senior scholar with social media followers, Beckert’s privilege as a Harvard professor, Riley’s privilege as a male Marxist, and on and on. But there’s a kind of privilege that never gets mentioned […]
In the June issue of The Nation, I have a review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a long review, in part because it’s a long book. While I wound up being quite critical of the book, I’m more than mindful of what it takes to write such a book. I thought I owed the book, and Beckert, the courtesy of giving it its due. Hence the length. The review may be behind the paywall, so if you cannot access it, you can sign up for a subscription to the magazine or email me, and I can send you a pdf. Many thanks to readers of earlier drafts of the review, particularly Lucas Pinheiro, Joan Scott, Greg Grandin, […]
If you watch this short clip of Zohran Mamdani getting heckled, you’ll see why he’s the greatest living politician in the United States today. Without batting an eye, Mamdani says, in response to the heckler: I want that man to be able to afford to keep living in New York City. Because the day that I don’t hear him yelling at me, it means he got priced out of this place. And I don’t want that. I don’t want that for him. I don’t want that for anybody in this city. We need to make this a city where it’s affordable enough to yell at your politicians. Notice the four things Mamdani is doing. First, he remains unflappable, gracious, calm, […]
Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, doesn’t do introspection. So he tells David Senra—whose great point of pride and life achievement, according to Senra’s website and statement to Andreessen, is that “I’ve read obviously four hundred, I think now, ten [that’s 410] biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs”—in a conversation that’s been making the rounds online. Many commentators seem intent on challenging Andreeseen’s claim that he doesn’t do introspection. It is, after all, a bit of a performative contradiction, since the mere affirmation, when asked if he has any levels of introspection, “Zero, as little as possible,” would seem to require at least some introspection and stock-taking. Otherwise, how would he know? But I’ll believe Andresseen. […]
One of the more delightful innovations of the Obama era was the requirement that every full-time employee—or taxpayer, I don’t know—has to provide proof of “health insurance offering and coverage” when filing their taxes. It’s called a 1095-C form. The employer provides it to you, the employee, and you file it with your taxes. The 1095-C form is yet one more way that Americans show to the world our pitch-perfect sense of how to waste time while pretending to do something good. Instead of having the government provide everyone with healthcare or health insurance, our leaders and experts come up with some sort of nudge that somehow or another is supposed to get us somehow closer to some group of […]
One of the critical distinguishing features of the communist movement of the 19th century was its insistence, in the words of Marx, “that the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves.” Where other movements were willing to advocate on behalf of the working class or other oppressed groups, the First International demanded that it be the oppressed who liberated themselves. It may seem a leap from that vision to the fact that all New Yorkers, in the next few years, will get childcare for their two-year-olds, and once that is established, perhaps their younger children as well. But I don’t think it is as much of a leap as we sometimes think. One year ago, […]
In The Holy Family, Marx returns to his critique of Bruno Bauer, which he first mooted in his article “On the Jewish Question.” As he did in the earlier essay, Marx again accuses Bauer of a residual idealism, which he traces back to the essential Christianity (and Hegelianism) of Bauer’s thinking. In the following passage, however, Marx breaks new ground, in ways that seem relevant to the left today. It’s a long passage and more than a little confusing, but bear with me (and it). Yet Absolute Criticism [i.e., Bauer-style thinking] has learnt from Hegel’s Phänomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and […]
I’ve been working for months on a review of Sven Beckert’s new book Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a monster of a book—more than 1300 pages, with notes and the index—and I’ve had trouble writing my way into the review. When I write, I label each draft with a number. If I’m writing an article, the first draft is Article 1, the second Article 2, and so on. I put a date on each draft, too, to remind myself when I started the draft. In this review, my Article 1 has a date—October 11, 2025—and then a blank page. Which means I circled around and around the piece for months and wrote nothing that I could even keep. Then the […]
Speaking at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as mayor today, Imam Khalid Latif invoked the phrase “moral imagination.” Those of you historically inclined and theoretically attuned will instantly recognize the term. It was coined by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and beloved by midcentury writers like Lionel Trilling and Gertrude Himmelfarb. So we now have, in the twenty-first century, at the invocation for a Muslim political leader, a Muslim religious leader repurposing the words of two of New York’s greatest Jewish intellectuals from the twentieth century, who had repurposed the words of an Irishman from a Catholic family that had converted to Anglicanism in the eighteenth century. That’s quite a historical and political tapestry being woven here, no? If you stayed […]
My big decision for the coming new year: I’m getting off the electronic calendar matrix. I’ve always disliked the technology. I’ve finally decided to act upon it. Being a late adopter of the smart phone, I’ve never gotten used to looking at the electronic calendar the way I used to look to my paper planners. Before the electronic calendar, I simply kept my paper planner on my desk, next to my wallet and keys, and it was the first thing I looked at in the morning, and would take with me whenever I went out of the house, along with my wallet and keys. Then came the electronic calendar, and try as I might, I still have not developed the […]
Last Friday, I spoke on a panel at NYU on political theorist Alyssa Battistoni’s new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The room was packed, somewhat unusual for an academic book of political theory. But if you’ve read Battistoni’s book, or know of her work, you’ll understand why. The book is not only a remarkable synthesis of a variety of literatures on the environment, climate change, work, Marx, feminism, and the politics of care—if you were just looking for an excellent account of the last 50 years of political theory, plus Marx and a lot of twentieth-century economics, this would be your book—but also a brilliant intervention in these debates. It has given me all sorts of […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The State
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Tags Alyssa Battistoni, David Ricardo, Grotius, Karl Marx, Plato, Pufendorf, Sianne Ngai
If you were paying attention on election night, you might have heard Zohran make two claims in his victory speech that often code as conservative: Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception….We will leave mediocrity in our past. The minute I heard those words, and the talking heads’ murmuring that it was odd for a socialist to talk up excellence and talk down mediocrity (aren’t socialists supposed to care only about equality, and a leveling equality at that, which drives down the quality of everything), I remembered a passage in Marx’s Capital. In the last pages of his chapter on original accumulation, Marx discusses the earliest days of capitalism or last stages of feudalism, when farmers still […]
When I read Paul Heideman’s Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos in manuscript last year, I instantly recognized it as the most probing, and, likely to be, lasting, analysis of the rise of Donald Trump. The reason is simple. Unlike many analyses of Trump and the right, Heideman takes the political economy and history of big business seriously. Not capitalism, not the working class, though Heideman, as a good democratic socialist cares a great deal about both, but big business. Like no one else thus far, Heideman sees just how fractious are the divisions with the business class and how delicate are the threads binding these factions together, and how that […]
About fifteen years ago or so, in the pages of Jacobin Magazine, I coined a phrase, with the help of Freud, for what socialism is about. I was thrilled to open the New York Times this morning and see that it’s still getting play, this time as an explanation for the Mamdani movement. You can read the rest of the Times article here. And the original piece in Jacobin here.
We’re coming up, in two years, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Some of you may know of Hirschman as one of the main characters in that not-so-good, pulpy Netflix series Transatlantic, which depicts the efforts of Hirschman and others to rescue European Jewish intellectuals from the Nazis in France. If you’re a political scientist or sociologist, you may know of Hirschman for his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. If you’re a theorist, you may know his Rhetoric of Reaction. If you’re an economist or a Latin Americanist, you might know of his work in development economics. But, for me, Hirschman will always be […]
Reading this New York Times report on Eric Adams’ dropping out of the race—where Adams is described, with no sense of irony, as “politically moderate” and is quoted as warning against Mamdani’s desire to “destroy the very system we built together over generations” while Cuomo is quoted as saying, “We are facing an existential threat in an extreme radicalism that threatens the existence of this city as we know it”—it dawns on me that we on the left are being presented with a golden opportunity. An opportunity that reminds me, seriously, of something only Lincoln was able to pull off. Zohran Mamdani is running now against Andrew Cuomo, a corrupt sexual harasser, who has been aided from the start by […]
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Categories
Economies, Law, The Left, The Right
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Tags Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Cuomo, Donald Trump, Eric Adams, Greg Grandin, James Oakes, Matt Karp, Zohran Mamdani