This article will be released in full online August 18, 2025.
Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson outlines the ongoing projects and objectives of the Mississippi-based collective Cooperation Jackson. Akuno enumerates the many ways Cooperation Jackson has worked toward improving material conditions and building dual power in support of the Black working and peasant classes in the Mississippi Delta region. | more…
This article will be released in full online August 25, 2025.
Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi elucidate the history of China’s People’s Communes as told through the lens of three present-day rural villages. In these villages, they observe the effects of the project’s dismantling and diminishing collective ownership and land management, with the conclusion that a return to collectivism is vital for carrying forward the socialist project. | more…
In an age of cutting-edge medical science, how do the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies stifle innovation in order to juice profits and remain competitive in the international markets? The answer, Jia Liu writes, can be found in the concept of monopoly capitalism. This brand of “intellectual monopoly capitalism,” she notes, contributes to “a logic of expropriation and rent-seeking,” leading in turn to “closed science and declining medical innovation.” | more…
Pranay Somayajula dives deep into how the idea of decolonization has taken hold both theoretically and practically, showing how its deployment by the fascist Hindutva movement to justify anti-Muslim oppression reveals a latent threat: potential cooptation by actors seeking to promote nationalist identities in postcolonial contexts. Somayajula concludes that what is needed is a “return to a materially grounded understanding of empire and resistance,” adding that “Any version of decolonization…placing a greater importance than the abstract than the material is a ‘decolonization’ that has lost its way.” | more…
Torkil Lauesen delves into the legacy of celebrated Arghiri Emmanuel, whose theory of unequal exchange resonates well into the twenty-first century. Introduced in 1962, Emmanuel’s critique of Ricardian and neoliberal capitalism further illuminated the Marxist concept value as it relates to global exchange and the ongoing exploitation of the Global South by the Global North. | more…
Since the 2016 upsurge in enthusiasm for electoral organizing and party-building, the terrain has shifted. It was not so long ago that a new wave of democratic socialist organizing exploded onto the scene – but the defeat of candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, following on the crumbling of the “new parties” in Europe, had a deflating effect. As Greece’s Syriza, Spain’s Podemos, and Portugal’s Bloco let down the leftist movements that brought them to power, those inspired by Hugo Chavez in Latin America also saw the Bolivarian revolutions hit an impasse. We find socialist strategy again at a crossroads, pressed by the
One century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald invited us into the lives of the “rotten crowd,” Jazz Age Americans with far more money than morals. In “A Rotten Crowd”: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby, John Marsh welcomes us back to Fitzgerald’s world to examine the rich and their reckless approach to human relationships, their poor taste in friends, and the harm they cause. Marsh leads us to wonder: What kinds of waste—economic, environmental, emotional—accompany a culture of wealth? What kinds of relationships do the wealthy form with those they rely upon to maintain their power—and how does capitalism and the need
As the atrocities visited by Israel upon the Palestinian people continue to multiply, this month’s “Notes from the Editors is a forceful condemnation of not only the Zionist entity, but the entire U.S.-led neoliberal world order. Israel’s relentless pursuit of genocide in Palestine “has destroyed any pretense of a commitment to universal human rights on the part of the West,” undeniably revealing “imperialism and settler colonialism in their most brutal forms” as the entire world watches. | more…
Say Burgin reviews Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey, an account of the fight for Black Power as told through the Simmons family, and particularly, Michael and Zoharah Simmons, from their first meeting during SNCC’s Atlanta Project to their later painful struggles as a family. The story that shines through, Burgin writes, is a story of Black Power that is deeply personal, often messy, and, above all, a refreshing challenge to popular narratives that serve to demonize the history of Black Power and the radicals who devoted their lives to the struggle. | more…
In this review of Bit Tyrants by Rob Larson, Mateo Crossa finds and expands on how the powerful actors of Silicon Valley have fashioned themselves into the new, unapologetic robber barons, operating in the shadows of political lobbying to maintain their monopolistic practices in the Global North while shamelessly engaging in the naked exploitation of the workers in the Global South. Crossa echoes Larson’s call for liberation from these tyrants, bringing attention to the necessity of socialism—both on- and offline—to agitate for democratic control over the technology and Internet platforms that increasingly penetrate our daily lives. | more…
