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.
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 […]
The New York Times asked me to write something on socialism and its current appeal. I did, and it’s running as this weekend’s cover story in The Sunday Review. Here are some brief excerpts: The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival. … The stories of […]
Last week I met with a group of ten interns at a magazine. The magazine runs periodic seminars where interns get to meet with a journalist, writer, intellectual, academic of their choosing. We talked about politics, writing, and so on. But in the course of our conversation, one startling social fact became plain. Although all of these young men and women had some combination of writerly dreams, none of them—not one—had any plan for, even an ambition of, a career. Not just in the economic sense but in the existential sense of a lifelong vocation or pursuit that might find some practical expression or social validation in the form of paid work. Not because they didn’t want a career but because there was no career to be […]