Spring 2025

A moral being looks on other human beings as ends and not means. Is there such a thing as a moral being? Shrewd behavior implies inducing another to do what suits me. The other’s intention is to get me to …

Of all the historical phenomena discussed by Karl Marx, his treatment of nationalism, nationalist movements, and the emergence of the nation-state is the least satisfactory. It also left a problematic heritage to the socialist movement, with a veritable “black hole” …

The events in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as in the rest of Eastern Europe, have come at a time when the world market dominates as never before the various national economies. The reign of capital is today less open …

Dear X This is a letter to help clear my head with respect to the ideas we chatted about last night. I am eager to pursue them as far as they lead, although I am not at all easy about …

In the eighties, the idea of the market triumphed. From Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain to the crumbling economies of the Soviet bloc, the “market” became a mantra for all occasions. Chanted long enough it would bring freedom, choice, prosperity, …

Headlines in late spring announced that at least half the states had started cutting government food allotments in the WIC program (Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, Children), which provides milk, cereal, cheese, and juice for poor women and …

If we could afford a democratic economic program, both in fiscal and resource terms, wouldn’t redistribution of income from the top to the middle and bottom throw cold water on people’s economic initiative? Do we not need the stakes of …

The Reagan era has bequeathed to us much, including, ironically, a new version of the materialist theory of the politics of culture. The essential claim of this theory is seductively simple: cultural expression reproduces, through all the appropriate “mediations,” the …

From Ladies to Women: The Organized Struggle for Woman’s Rights in the Reconstruction Era by Israel Kugler Greenwood Press, 221 pp. In the era of U.S. history that began with abolitionism and ended with the defeat of radical Reconstruction, a …

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. Those old enough to have been students in 1960 remember the shock waves it caused. As one writer “under thirty” put it, at last someone from the older …

This may seem an odd time to be thinking about socialism in the 1990s and in the West. The collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe has been so much the most interesting political event of the 1980s, and …

Martin Kilson is arguing with a phantom of his own making. Yet I am grateful for his letter because it so vividly illustrates the distorting powers of the enemy-memory that I discussed in my essay. One will note in his …

Glut is the four-letter word that has plagued capitalism from the moment of its birth. It is an endemic disease that turns epidemic when ignored. It started several centuries ago in Europe. Today it is global, threatening the economic and …

A new genre of economic analysis chronicles the slow decay of key American industries. “There was a time,” this sort of tale begins, “when the United States was an example for the rest of the world. The (fill in the …