Top Menu

Shipping containers in Montreal, Canada (May 16, 2017)

Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism

The popular narrative that capitalism has led to a general improvement in human well-being over the last two hundred years is, historical data show, not supported by evidence. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan enumerate the empirical and methodological problems on which this narrative is built and explore the potential benchmarks for truly understanding human welfare. | more…

2023, Volume 75, Number 03 (July-August 2023)
Continue Reading
Ferdinand Smith and Earl Dickerson meeting with Donald Nelson to promote African-American man-power in war production (circa 1945)

Planning an Ecologically Sustainable and Democratic Economy: Challenges and Tasks

As the impending planetary crisis looms ever-closer, Martin Hart-Landsberg proposes a new focus on the Second World War industrial conversion experience, in which production and consumption were guided by central planning agencies. These successes and pitfalls of this period provide many useful lessons for activists and organizers working toward planned degrowth. | more…

2023, Volume 75, Number 03 (July-August 2023)
Continue Reading
Construction workers complete electrical connections on phase 2 of a solar microgrid project at Fort Hunter Liggett, CA (March 12, 2013)

Planning and the Ecosocialist Mode of Cooperation

Economic planning, Nicolas Graham writes, was not, perhaps a major theme in Capital. However, Marx’s understanding of such planning—as yet unrealized societal capability—yields great insight into how we might reorient modes of production toward cooperation and coordination. “Despite bourgeois and neoliberal ideology,” he writes, “planning is both an urgent necessity and a liberatory potentiality.” | more…

2023, Volume 75, Number 03 (July-August 2023)
Continue Reading
Demonstration against the EPR, Lyon, March 17, 2007, Place Bellecour

Democratic Planning for Degrowth

Degrowth promises to liberate society from the imperative of capital accumulation. “So how,” Matthas Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth wonder, “might planning beyond growth look?” It is not, they write, only a proposal for a postcapitalist society, but for a radical transformation of our institutions and social relations to create a more sustainable and just world. | more…

2023, Volume 75, Number 03 (July-August 2023)
Continue Reading
THE ONLY SUSTAINABLE GROWTH IS DEGROWTH

Degrowth—What’s in a Name? Assessing Degrowth’s Political Implications

“Degrowth” may often be associated with the left, but can also have conservative—even ecofascist—implications. What do proponents and critics mean by “degrowth”? How do these differences play out ideologically? Ying Chen writes that, for radicals, the answer is to place the economic system at the center of the degrowth narrative, thus naming the system that must be replaced with a more just and equitable socialist society. | more…

2023, Volume 75, Number 03 (July-August 2023)
Continue Reading
France: Sorbonne occupied by students

The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback

In popular thought, the youth and student movements of France May 1968 have been linked with the thinkers of what is known as French theory. Gabriel Rockhill considers the actual, less-than-revolutionary actions of these popular philosophers in the student revolts, then turns our attention to a deeper question: Who benefits from drawing these tenuous connections? | more…

2023, Volume 75, Number 02 (June 2023)
Continue Reading