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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Many have heard of Hitler’s ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch. It took place in Munich in 1923 and landed Hitler in jail, where he wrote Mein Kampf. Three years before the Beer Hall Putsch there was a much more serious challenge to the Weimar Republic from the right. It was called the Kapp Putsch. Centered in Berlin, led by high-ranking officers of the military, joined by monarchist and conservative elements, speaking for the Freikorps and beyond, it posed a far more immediate threat to the national government than the failed putsch of three years later. It was stopped by a general strike. That general strike was called by the President of the Weimar Republic—the fairly moderate and plodding leader of the […]
Four ICE agents walk into a Mexican restaurant in Minnesota, are served a meal, and return hours later to arrest three of its workers, walking home, in front of a Lutheran church. I can’t remember where it was that I read this, but it was less than 24 hours ago, in one of those big classic histories of the ancient world, about how hospitality cultures arise in opposition to predatory and piratical practices. (One of the genuine advantages and most welcome reforms of Athens’s Delian League was the suppression of piracy.) In seafaring communities, in particular, hospitality becomes the marker of those who are potential friends as against those who are definitive enemies. With ICE, we seem to have pioneered […]
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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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
I hate to be that guy on the left, but I’m going to be that guy on the left. One of the arguments Republicans are making tonight about the firing of Jimmy Kimmel is that while they’re unhappy and uncomfortable with the head of the FCC’s threatening to pull ABC’s license, they’d be absolutely fine if the network simply made its own decision, sans government pressure, to fire Kimmel. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said to NBC, “Well, my preference would always be to let the companies make economic market decisions.” Senator Mike Rounds, Republican from South Dakota, said, “I understand that right now it’s an employer-employee issue, and that’s the way I would approach it.” As if there were […]
Judith Butler is one of 160 faculty, students, and staff members at UC Berkeley whose name the University of California has turned over to the Trump administration to help with the federal government’s investigation into alleged antisemitism on the Berkeley campus. Let’s slow that statement down so we can understand its components more clearly. Since February, Trump’s Department of Education has been investigating universities, including Berkeley and other UC campuses, for their handling of alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In March, the Justice Department announced a separate but parallel investigation of the UC campuses. In July, a House congressional committee called three university leaders to testify about alleged antisemitism on their campuses. One of the summoned was the chancellor of […]
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Education, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Brooklyn College, CUNY, Ellen Schrecker, James Milliken, Judith Butler, McCarthyism, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of California, Zohran Mamdani
News from the world that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are making for us.
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Economies, Education, Jews, Labor/Workplace, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right
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Tags Andrew Cuomo, Brooklyn College, Eric Adams, John Deere, Lisa Cook, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Northwestern, Zohran Mamdani
One of the principles of the Zohran Mamdani campaign that is not getting sufficient attention is the second sentence of his platform: The goal is to “make life easier” for New Yorkers. I come at this from two angles. Let me start with the personal. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older—I’m now 57—and became a parent at 40, when I had less energy than I had when I was in my 20s, which wasn’t a lot to begin with. But I’ve become increasingly cognizant over the lifetime of my child and my time as a parent, just how difficult everyday life is, what a struggle it is to deal with daily needs and demands, and how much of […]
Now that Zohran Mamdani has won the New York City mayoral primary, the New York Times is asking the question, “Zohran Mamdani Says He’s a Democratic Socialist. What Does That Mean?” The article doesn’t provide much of an answer. Instead, it trots out my old bête noire, Sheri Berman, who offers up crisp nuggets of wisdom like this: “These labels are fuzzy.” If only the Times editors read their own paper. In the wake of the Bernie campaign and AOC’s election, the Times asked me to write a piece explaining the meaning of democratic socialism for a new generation. Since I think the piece holds up, and helps us understand some of the particular appeal of the Mamdani campaign—his focus […]
Where would we be without the market? The stock market, the bond market, the financial markets in general—all of these institutions, journalists tell us, are the ultimate, perhaps only, check on President Trump’s power. Esteemed scholars reassure us of the same—that the world’s oldest constitution is backstopped by Wall Street and the dollar. Investors, the argument goes, need their investments protected. The courts, independent and powerful, can provide that protection. Threaten the courts, and the markets will tumble, and the dollar will drop. It is capitalism, in other words, and not citizens or politicians, that will force the White House into compliance with the courts and the Constitution. This faith in capitalism is both novel and strange. Historically, people have feared that capitalism undermines the sovereignty of the state and […]
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Economies, Labor/Workplace, Law, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Adam Smith, Donald Trump, East India Company, Elon Musk, Michał Kalecki, William Douglas
We know two things about Trump’s administration. First, it has declared war on trans people. Second, it has declared war on the administrative state. To my knowledge, nobody has yet figured out what the precise relationship between these two wars is. Till now. In this very stylish debut at The New Yorker, Paisley Currah explains why the war on trans people is not just the “opening move in a battle against vulnerable groups” or a crude attempt to “fan the flames of right-wing moral panic.” Instead, in banning a critical yet flexible tool for deciding the sex of individuals and populations, the right understands that it can completely undermine a major portion of the modern state as we know it. […]
In Capital and Black Reconstruction in America, respectively, Marx and Du Bois devote several passages to the fraught conceptions of ownership over labor in post-emancipation societies, whether the laborer is the Black freedman in the American South or the wage laborer in Western Europe. Though many people know that after emancipation, Black people in the South endured another hundred years of slavery by another name, that whites perceived Blacks as still belonging to some entity, we’re less familiar with a version of that story in Western Europe. Pairing these two passages raises delicate issues of comparison, but there’s no doubt that a similar dynamic is at play in both societies. In both societies, the employers of labor wrestle with the […]
My wife and I saw “Drop Dead City” tonight at the IFC in Manhattan. It’s a riveting documentary about the New York City Fiscal Crisis of 1975. I know that statement sounds like a parody of a lecture in a poli sci class, but it happens to be true. The documentary is also riveting just as a cinematic experience. If you love the scene and soundscape of New York City film from the 1970s—from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to Dog Day Afternoon—you’ll love this documentary. The archival footage alone will bring you back to the feel and time of another place. For me, the film was not just political (more on that below) but also personal. Figures […]
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Economies, Labor/Workplace, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Abe Beame, Albert Shanker, Buddy Beame, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford, Hugh Carey, New York City Fiscal Crisis, Svetlana Alexievich, Woody Allen, Zohran Mamdani
There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Marx describes a critical phase of glassmaking in a manufacturing workshop. Five workers gather at “the hole” of the furnace, each focused on an individual task that, taken together, will produce a bottle. “These five specialized workers represent the individual organs of a working organism that can function only as a unit.” Those five workers can only function as a unit “when all the workers are directly cooperating with one another.” That need for working cooperatively gives each and every one of those workers a tremendous amount of power: “When one member is missing, the whole body is paralyzed.” If just one worker withdraws their cooperation, the working organism ceases to […]
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, May 13, 1953: You probably know a lot [about the Second Red Scare] from the papers. Can you see from them how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? And up to now hardly any resistance. Everything melts away like butter in the sun….It is essentially impossible to consider any specific parts of the society as set apart from it, for even where the Congressional investigating committees aren’t sticking in their dirty noses, an extremely effective self-censorship takes place. The editor of a newspaper or a magazine, for example, or the director of a business or the professors at a university will quietly conduct a purge….It all functions without […]
Apollo, speaking in Eumenides, the last part of Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia: The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life—the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps the shoot alive unless the god hurts the roots. Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: That labour constitutes a cost in a unique sense was, of course, an assumption [of the labor theory of value]. But it was an assumption born of a particular view of what was the essence of the economic problem….The crux of the economic problem, as this theory […]
It’s amazing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that at a moment when anyone and everyone who teaches or works or studies at an educational institution is under threat, that a professor at Columbia would formulate the threat in the New York Times in this particular way: “Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.” I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says […]
At the height of the Second Red Scare, Yale University covered itself in glory when Yale president Charles Seymour declared, “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches.” In other words, no McCarthyite congressional committee is going to investigate our professors because…we’ll make sure not to hire any professors who’d be investigation-worthy. That’s what they called protecting academic freedom—I kid you not—during the 1950s.* I was reminded of old Charles Seymour when I read in the New York Times that Yale Law School has suspended Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project, whose work and affiliated faculty and staff I’ve long admired and spoken with. Why was Doutaghi suspended, which, the […]
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Education, Labor/Workplace, Palestine and Israel, The State
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Tags Charles Seymour, Harvard, Helyeh Doutaghi, James Bryant Conant, James Joyce, McCarthyism, Ulysses, Yale
After reading my interview in n+1 on “Muskism and McCarthyism,” the producers at On the Media, the weekend show on NPR hosted by Brooke Gladstone, contacted me for a follow-up conversation. It’s airing this weekend. We ranged widely, from the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to how Humphrey Bogart betrayed himself to HUAC, from why the term McCarthyism is so misleading to what kind of people and institutions a regime of fear can create. At the end of the interview, Brooke reminded me of a conversation we had had, on her show, during Trump 1.0 on the question of fascism and authoritarianism. She asked me where I stood on that question today. You should have a listen. Speaking of having a […]
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Jews, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Right, The State
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Tags Brooke Gladstone, fascism, HUAC, Humphrey Bogart, Mahmoud Khalil, McCarthyism, Michel Martin, Muskism, NPR
This afternoon, a federal judge in DC issued a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s firing thousands of employees at USAID. The judge was appointed by…Trump. I’ve already written about the very real possibility that Trump’s judges may rule against Trump; they did this, after all, repeatedly during his first term. And they’re doing it again, in his second term. But I want to address here a different, more troubling, issue. In their lawsuit against Trump’s gutting of USAID, the unions that brought suit claimed that Trump had exceeded his legal and constitutional authority by firing thousands of employees. “Not a single one of defendants’ actions to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. were taken pursuant to congressional authorization,” the unions claimed. “And pursuant […]
A thousand years ago, I wrote a book called Fear: The History of a Political Idea. A big part of that book was struggling to figure out how political intimidation and fear work in America. At the time (this was the 1990s), it seemed to many like a somewhat exotic, if not quixotic, project. “No one cares about fear,” a political scientist told me. Well, time passes, as Virginia Woolf wrote in To the Lighthouse. The United States styles itself the land of the free, home of the brave. Yet, as every observer from Tocqueville to W.E.B. Du Bois has remarked, this country has often been a society of intense fear. And what has been the most persistent, common source […]
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Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, Repression, The Right, The State
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Tags Alexander Hamilton, Die Hard, Du Bois, fear, Marx, To the Lighthouse, Tocqueville, Virginia Woolf, Wall Street