The Present in History, 2021
The job of socialists is to engage with public policy from a class perspective, informed by a Marxist understanding of contemporary capitalism—not to reform it, but to abolish it. | more…
Keeping the Challenges Before Us
The Reissuing of 'Reluctant Reformers' and Its Contemporary Implications
The reissuing of Reluctant Reformers can inform our attempts to grapple with how the unity of the oppressed can be forged in such a way that the interests of the historically marginalized do not continue to get…well, marginalized. | more…
COVID, Disablement, and the “Return to Normal”
For many disabled people, the “abnormal” state of things over the last year and a half is not such an estranged discontinuity from the previous state of things. Certainly, just like everyone, pandemic life for disabled people has been exceedingly difficult, painful, oppressive, and deadly. But the “normal” of pre-pandemic life was also exceedingly difficult, painful, oppressive, and deadly. | more…
The South African Pandemic of Racial Capitalism
South Africa’s COVID-19 pandemic is one of racial capitalism, entangled with histories of imperial state formation, settler colonialism, and a hierarchical, global-neoliberal public policy architecture. | more…
The legacy
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
Herd impunity?
A new poem by Black Agenda Report poet-in-residence Raymond Nat Turner. | more…
Not a Nation of Immigrants
“Nation of immigrants” discourse is generally used to counter xenophobic fears, but the ideology behind it also works to erase the scourge of settler colonialism, the lives of Indigenous people, and the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants. | more…
COVID-19 in the Two Koreas
The two Koreas—sharing a language, cultural traditions, history of imperial conquest and war, and interrupted family connections—both have mostly succeeded in controlling the pandemic, within different political-economic systems and with markedly different methods. | more…
Legacies of Definancialization and Defending Real Economy in China
Confronting the triple trap of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic downturn, and ecological crisis, the Chinese leadership has reiterated that “China puts the people’s interests first—nothing is more precious than people’s lives.” This kind of people-centered governance philosophy is ostensibly meant to protect the lives and health of the people, while defending people’s property under the basic system of collective ownership. | more…
From Sandstorm and Smog to Sustainability and Justice: China’s Challenges
In China, the orientation toward “ecological civilization” has been proposed for some years. But if the hard core of developmentalism and modernization continues to be the guiding principle, China will continue to be challenged by social injustice and environmental devastation. | more…
June 2021 (Volume 73, Number 2)
Where capitalism itself is concerned, the dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis constitutes a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under control. This received view, however, is incorrect on all counts. | more…
Capital and the Ecology of Disease
The death of Salvador Allende in 1973 marked, simultaneously, not only the demise of one of the great socialist experiments, and the launching of neoliberalism; it also represented the loss in Allende of one of the great figures in social medicine. Nowhere has neoliberalism had more devastating effects than in the destruction of public health and social medicine initiatives throughout the world. | more…