Indigenous and African resistance and intellectual traditions provide key insights to the very nature of capitalism and how it has unfolded throughout space and time, its tentacles emanating from Europe and stretching across the globe in the forms of imperialism and colonialism. | more…
In recent years, “racial capitalism” has ascended across the humanities and social sciences. It has arisen as a conceptual framework to understand the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation, inter alia, on a global scale, in specific localities, in discrete historical moments, in the entrenchment of the carceral state, and in the era of neoliberalization and permanent war. | more…
Organized labor—based on white-exclusive and later white-dominated, though not necessarily exclusive, trade unions—formed itself as part of the settler state, not in the sense of being an apparatus of the state, but in the sense of accepting certain important precepts. The unions took for granted the nature of the settler state and, as such, conceived that the unions were to exist to serve the “legitimate” population, or at least the working class of the legitimate population. | more…
The rise to prominence of analyses of racial capitalism represents a breakthrough in Marxian theory. This has necessarily been accompanied by a critique of previous Marxian analyses, which all too often ignored or minimized the relation of slavery to capitalism. In recent years, however, these criticisms of orthodox Marxist treatments of slavery have been extended, much more problematically, to the work of Karl Marx himself. Although Marx never wrote a treatise on slavery, the issue of slave labor was woven into his analysis of social formations, both ancient and modern, and was inextricably intertwined with his treatment of wage labor. | more…
Three decades after liberal democracy replaced the military dictatorship of 1964–85, the far right in Brazil has made a comeback, most starkly with the electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Bolsonaro, however, is not an isolated individual; rather, his government is characterized by an authoritarian style of neoliberalism built on a series of alliances, a prominent one of which is with the judiciary. This coalition boasts connections with the military and police forces, the evangelical religious right, and agribusiness. | more…
In 2021, Angela Merkel’s fourth and last term as the chancellor of Germany will end. To understand Merkel’s domestic and foreign policy, one must understand the country she inherited. She came to power in 2005 following the first center-left government since 1982, the government of Gerhard Schröder, and was in the fortunate position of becoming chancellor after a coalition government of social democrats and Greens had done the devil’s bidding of implementing very unpopular neoliberal policies to the sole benefit of German capital and the rich. | more…
Lengthening hours, lessening pay, no parental leave, scant job security… Never have so many workers needed so much support. Yet the very labor unions that could garner us protections and help us speak up for ourselves are growing weaker every day. In an age of rampant inequality, of increasing social protest and strikes— and when a majority of workers say they want to be union members—why does union density continue to decline? Shaun Richman offers some answers in his book, Tell the Bosses We’re Coming. | more…
Hilary Rose, a sociologist, and Steven Rose, a neuroscientist, were two of the principal founders of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the late 1960s in London. They speak about their work as scientists and antiwar activists, particularly around the issue of Palestinian liberation. | more…
The main criticism leveled at the socialist economies was that a planned economy was inherently less efficient than a market one, due to the sheer scale of the bureaucratic task involved with planning a major economy. But the collapse of the Soviet and later the Russian economy under Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin was an economic disaster that was otherwise unprecedented during times of peace. The world’s second superpower was reduced to the status of a minor bankrupt economy with a huge decline in industrial production and in living standards. | more…
Starting in the late 1960s, the development of the productive forces of society entered a new stage: the Information Revolution, an era focused on the application of information theories such as cybernetics combined with advances in computer technology and digital communication networks, culminating in the Internet. Under capitalist conditions, this has already resulted in a knowledge economy, but the social, auto-regulatory possibilities it opens up are bound to be incompatible with the private appropriation characteristic of capitalism. | more…
My pop was always working on our house, a shack that was all my parents could afford in the great hunger for homeownership that came after the Second World War. But nothing ever quite got finished, either for lack of funds or motivation. But if he wasn’t quite a craftsman himself, he admired craft. He was moved by the effort and intricacy of how things were made. ‘Honey, look at this old wooden chest with these lovely silver handles. Think of all the work that was done to this thing by someone’s hands.’ | more…
In 1950, the mainly Mexican and Mexican-American members of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local 890 went on strike against Empire Zinc in southern New Mexico. One of the only fair-haired and pale-skinned union men in meetings and jail was Mine Mill organizer Clinton Jencks. Raymond Caballero’s study, McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks, exhaustively details how the federal government brought the entire weight of its repressive apparatus down on the heads of Jencks, his family, and his union siblings. | more…