Love in the Time of Capital
Marx’s understanding of love tells us a lot about his interpretation of capital.
Spring 2025
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Ron Paul and the New Libertarianism 
WHY is Ron Paul so popular? His moment as a serious presidential contender has come and gone, but in 2012 the twelve-term libertarian congressman from Texas put in his best showing yet during the Republican primaries, emerging as a crowd-pleasing …
Nature as an Ally: An Interview with Wendell Berry
Each generational wave of environmental concern seems to lap at Wendell Berry’s doorstep. He gave up teaching and writing in New York in the sixties to return to Kentucky, establishing a small farm at Lanes Landing near Port Royal, and …
Introduction: Food and the Body Politic
Americans are in the midst of a food-consciousness revival: on television, in the mouth of the First Lady, in endless articles celebrating urban agriculture can be found a sudden enthusiasm for the politically and, perhaps, spiritually curated dinner table. In …
Hired Guns on Astroturf: How to Buy and Sell School Reform
For the last decade and more, a generation of self-proclaimed “ed reformers” has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools. Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money…
Flashpoint in Health-Care Reform
Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States by Richard Kirsch Rockefeller Institute Press, 2012, 416 pp. Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform by Paul Starr …
High-End Food, Low-Wage Labor
Some people work in restaurants as a lifestyle choice: they love the fast pace, the quick jokes, the often easy-flowing booze. At the height of a busy shift, if everything’s going right, a team of skilled cooks and waiters can …
Indebted
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber Melville House, 2011, 554 pp. As recently as a year ago, the anthropologist David Graeber was well respected within his academic discipline but little-known outside of it. His sole brush with public …
Letters
Alinsky’s Ghost Editors: Nelson Lichtenstein’s otherwise excellent review of Frank Bardacke’s otherwise extraordinary book on Cesar Chavez and the farm workers union (Winter 2012) repeats Bardacke’s misreading of Saul Alinsky’s ideas about organizers and leaders and the relationship of each …
Introduction
On September 24, 2011, Michael Kazin published an important essay in the New York Times, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” In it he examined the “populist left’s” historic role in shaping politics and policy discussions in the United States, …
Workers’ Rights and the Distributive Constitution
Progressives have forgotten how to think about the constitutional dimensions of economic life. Work, livelihood, and opportunity; material security and insecurity; poverty and dependency; union organizing, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy: for generations of American reformers, the constitutional importance of …
The Specter Still Haunts: Revisiting 1989
In January 2010, I met a Bulgarian friend for dinner in a Georgetown pizza parlor. This friend, whom I will call Svetozara, had recently immigrated to the United States and was looking for a job in D.C. Recently divorced after …
Left Internationalism
However the French presidential elections turn out in the coming weeks, the campaign has produced one memorable moment—when François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, delivered a sharp critique of the austerity measures imposed on Greece by the European Union and the …
Prêt-à-Manger: Why the French Have Their Cake and Eat It, Too
Even if you weren’t aware of the rising intensity of debates over food politics in recent years, the face-off between Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama probably caught your attention. One of Michelle Obama’s most high profile acts as First Lady …
Gilded Age India
The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India by Siddhartha Deb Faber and Faber, 2011, 272 pp. In referring to his book as “a portrait of the New India,” Siddhartha Deb has opted to engage in a …
