Working for the Weekend

Putting full employment at the center of a new left-wing strategy. Last spring, as the U.S. economy entered another period of slowdown and unemployment levels in the Eurozone hit record highs, a Internet meme called “Old Economy Steven” started making rounds. Most memes are frivolous endeavors, devoted to exploiting cats for comedic purposes or projecting [...]

An Incomplete Legacy

We’ve lost the ability to talk about social democracy (much less socialism) not simply because of a crisis of faith. It’s because the institutions with the ability to articulate an alternative discursive framework have been defeated as real political alternatives. This points to the fundamental limitation of social democracy, or “socialist capitalism,” as Michael Harrington more accurately described it. It’s a compromise between socialism and capitalism, but one that’s made on capitalism’s terms.

The State of Our Unions

In what has become something of a masochistic ritual, for the last week I have been eagerly awaiting the release of the annual report on union membership in the U.S., which the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases every year at the end of January. To my surprise, this year’s report was not as grim as I had expected it to be. In [...]

Cuomo’s New Clothes?

If you want evidence that the Occupy Wall Street protests have already had a salutary effect on politics and policy making in the U.S., look no further than the state where the movement was born: New York. In a surprising development, Gov. Andrew Cuomo will convene a special legislative session this week to work toward [...]

“We Won’t Pay”

Peter Frase’s great post on some of the issues raised in the Graeber-Henwood exchange on debt reminded me of a point that kept cropping up in their discussion. The moral and political dimensions of the debtor-creditor relationship, Graeber observed, do not possess the same characteristics in all times and places. They are mediated by the [...]

A Movement Grows in Brooklyn

The entrance to the building was surrounded by a high wrought iron fence, reinforced by a dense lattice of chicken wire. Its porch was almost completely enclosed by high wooden panels painted an imposing dark gray. The home of Mary Lee Ward at 320 Tompkins Avenue, in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, [...]

Diagnosing Consciousness

In the body of Marxist thought, there are probably few concepts that have come in for more criticism than the so-called “correspondence theory” of consciousness, which Marx articulated most explicitly in his 1845 essay The German Ideology. In this famous attack on the idealism that dominated German philosophy in the early part of the 19th century, [...]

Letter to the Next Left

C. Wright Mills died in 1962 at age 45, from the last of a string of heart attacks. The author of such enduring classics as The Power Elite, White Collar, The New Men of Power, and The Sociological Imagination, he was one of the world’s foremost social scientists as well as the leading intellectual influence [...]

Chris Maisano

Chris Maisano is the chair of the Democratic Socialists of America's New York City local and a Jacobin contributing editor.