Neoliberalism is usually thought of as a purely economic philosophy, stemming from the work of the arch-conservative economist Friedrich hayek and other twentieth century economist (particularly those associated with the University of Chicago), and involving an attempt to construct a much more complete justification for a pure, self-regulating market economy than could be found in […]
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Virtual Capitalism
One of the great technological myths of our time is that the entire system of organized capitalism dating back to the Industrial Revolution (and even earlier), is being displaced by a new age of “the electronic republic” rooted in the technology of the Information Revolution.
For a Zapatista Style Postmodernist Perspective
The left is on the brink of collapse. It has very little influence in the arena of mass politics while fewer and fewer people are interested in Marxist journals, books, and intellectual discourses. In 1982 Michael Ryan, in a book written to find common ground between Marxism and postmodernism, noted that “millions have been killed […]
Ecology and Human Freedom
We live at a time when it is reasonable to speak of the possibility of complete ecological destruction, in virtually the same sense that critics of nuclear armaments have often referred to the possibility of complete nuclear destruction. Both human society and the survival of the planet as we know it are now at risk.
Marx and the Environment
It has become fashionable in recent years, in the words of one critic, to identify the growth of ecological consciousness with “the current postmodernist interrogation of the metanarrative of the Enlightenment.” Green thinking, we are frequently told, is distinguished by its postmodern, post-Enlightenment perspective. Nowhere is this fashion more evident than in certain criticisms directed […]
Global Ecology and the Common Good
Over the course of the twentieth century human population has increased more than threefold and gross world product perhaps twentyfold. Such expansion has placed increasing pressure on the ecology of the planet. Everywhere we look—in the atmosphere, oceans, watersheds, forests, soil, etc.—it is now clear that rapid ecological decline is setting in.
“Introduction to Special Issue Commemorating the Twentieth Anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital”
It is a measure of the influence of Harry Braverman and radical labor process analysts generally that only two decades after the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) it is difficult to recall the absolute confidence with which the orthodox view of work relations was espoused […]
Multiculturalism and the American Revolution of 1776
Many Americans of European ancestry, like me, now see the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere as invasion, conquest, and genocide. Many have grave misgivings about the constitutional settlement that protected trade in slaves, committed government to helping slave catchers, and gave extra votes in Congress to slave owners. The moral perceptions that underlie those […]
A Terrible Omission
Review of Marx’s Capital: A Student Edition by C. J. Arthur.
Introduction to a Symposium on The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought
In the decade before his death Raymond Williams frequently referred to the need for “resources for a journey of hope” that would enable socialists to continue the “shared search” for human emancipation in spite of all the obstacles posed by the reality of capitalism and of the first attempts to create socialism. In Cornel West’s […]