Contemporary American leftists do not, as a rule, think kindly about the history of the nation they inhabit. Centuries of slavery, the bloody conquest of Indian and Mexican lands, and two long imperial wars in East Asia sullied, if not …
Making Capitalism Fit for Society by Colin Crouch Polity Press, 2013, 216 pp. Europe is going through its most difficult period since the Great Depression and the Second World War. Growth rates for the Eurozone overall have been flat this …
As Margaret Gray chronicles in her remarkable new book, Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic, the small- and medium-sized family farms that the food movement has championed are often sites of appalling labor abuses.
There is nothing novel about the impact of technology on labor markets. So why do so many pundits insist on blaming computers and robots for today’s inequality?
Karl Polanyi, whose ideas took form in 1920s Vienna in direct opposition to the free-market orthodoxy of Ludwig von Mises, has gained belated recognition as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His central argument, contra von Mises, is that a self-regulating economic system is a completely imaginary construction, impossible to achieve or maintain.
Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, in many ways, is about men talking and making art, and about the ways that women experience men’s art, or become the object of it.
In the castle-like San Francisco Armory, the Internet porn production company Kink.com hosts live-streamed sex parties where unpaid “guests” are invited to perform S&M scenes for the camera. What happens when performances that once commanded a fee are done for free—and even the producers regard them not as work, but as sexual expression?
Not so long ago, the social contract between workers, government, and employers made college a calculable bet. We built a university system for the way we worked. What happens to college when that social contract is broken—when we work not just differently but for less? And what if the crisis in higher education is related to the broader failures that have left so many workers struggling?
At first glance the runways of New York and the factories of Bangladesh couldn’t seem farther apart. But they are part of the same $1.5 trillion industry, where the work is overwhelmingly performed by young women and girls. Can a new wave of organizing, from the sweatshop floor to the offices of Condé Nast, turn that industry around?
“In sub-Saharan Africa,” a video at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show announces, “there is war that feeds off of global demand for electronics. The place is the DRC—the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The region is ground zero for conflict minerals.” Tech giants including Intel and Apple are now working with NGOs to clean up their supply chains and help promote peace in the region. But will their proposed solutions challenge the deeper patterns of exploitation plaguing the DRC?
Is there such a thing as a leftist foreign policy? What are the characteristic views of the left about the world abroad? When have leftists, rightly or wrongly, defended the use of force?
“Is there racism against drones?” asked an audience member at the Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference in New York City last autumn. Drone hobbyists are seeking to divorce their toys from images of war and bloodshed. But even hobbyist drones are the product of extremely powerful institutions with a keen interest in maintaining that power.
The art campaign Wages for Facebook is an attempt to unsettle the digital marketization of our relationships that many of us have already come to accept as normal.
The National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) emerged out of the opposition to Honduras’s 2009 coup and quickly developed into the largest social movement in Honduran history. Will it be able to turn things around in a country known for having the worst poverty and inequality in Latin America?
In the tech community, the plight of homeless people has gone from being an unnoticed barnacle of urban life to a cause at once mourned, criticized, and celebrated. For many in Silicon Valley, homeless people are the “noble savages” of today.
