This Is Not Populism
Since Trump’s election, mainstream commentary has generally avoided the question of fascism or neofascism, preferring instead to apply the vaguer, safer notion of “populism.” In today’s political context, however, it is crucial to understand not only how the failures of neoliberalism give rise to neofascist movements, but also to connect these to the structural crisis of concentrated, financialized, and globalized capitalism.… | more…
Consider these but you won’t
Consider the child with curly brown / hair sleeping with her dog in the back / of an old SUV while her parents doze / in scruffy front seats tilted back.…
The Origins of American Fascism
What can a class analysis tell us about fascism’s national particularities and early forms? Why was there no mass movement for a separate fascist party in the United States? The lessons of several now-forgotten works of scholarship from the 1930s are critical to our understanding of American fascism—not only for what they tell us about its history, but also about how to fight it today.… | more…
Old Malbec in New Bottles
Argentina has long been plagued by cycles of economic mismanagement, including multiple failed neoliberal experiments. Before his election as president, Mauricio Macri promised resumed growth, an export boom, lower inflation, a smaller budget deficit, and less poverty. Since then, has the new neoliberalism outperformed the old?… | more…
What Happened at CCSF?
Did the accreditation crisis and subsequent labor struggle at City College of San Francisco represent a failure of union democracy, or a hard-won victory against corporate education reform? Rick Baum’s recent article on this question, “A Teachers Union Against Itself” (published the April 2017 issue of Monthly Review) prompted a lively response from AFT Local 2121 members and supporters. This correspondence article collects their letters, as well as a reply by Baum.… | more…
A Progressive City Fights Back
In 2014, after years of grassroots organizing, a coalition of progressives transformed Richmond, California into the largest city in the United States governed by a Green Party mayor. But Richmond is not just Anytown: its economy and government has been dominated for a century by a giant Chevron refinery, and by a racist political machine determined to keep the city’s working-class and nonwhite majority out of power.… | more…
May 2017 (Volume 69, Number 1)
The fact that alt-right figures are playing key roles in the Trump administration, while circumventing the Senate confirmation process, is an ominous indication of the wider effort by the administration to construct a new political order, further concentrating power in the White House and bringing the rest of the state into line.… | more…
An Eco-Revolutionary Tipping Point?
To solve the climate crisis, we need a system in which working people and their communities collectively and democratically regulate production and other interactions with their material and social environment. To deny that this crisis is hardwired into capitalism, and that we need a new system to deal with it, is just as misleading and dangerous as to deny the existence of human-induced global warming.… | more…
Trump’s America
With the rise of Donald Trump, U.S. politics has descended, like never before, into a theater of the absurd. Unbridled anti-intellectualism, deception, and “vindictive chaos” recall a morally reprehensible past in the guise of “making America great again.” But despite his populist posturing, Trump’s contempt for democratic processes is matched by his commitment to economic policies that favor the financial elite.… | more…
Nature, Labor, and the Rise of Capitalism
Capitalism was a radical break with the past: for the first time, production of basic goods was driven by the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and not primarily to satisfy human needs. Likewise, we are alienated from the natural world, as the products of our own labor are no longer under our control. Our very perception of nature is shaped by an economic system that treats “the environment” as a collection of commodities to be exploited.… | more…
A Radical Invitation for Latin America
Admired, followed, criticized, denounced, and rediscovered, “The Development of Underdevelopment” deserves a place among the key documents of postwar radical political economy. More than fifty years on, its ideas still illuminate aspects of recent struggles and shortcomings among left-of-center governments in Latin America. Most importantly, Frank’s work poses a bold postcolonial challenge that has yet to be fully met by Latin American scholars and social movements.… | more…