The Wage and Productivity Effects of Internet Trolling
Ask not for whom Yggy trolls, he trolls for thee.
The Red and the Black
The economics of a feasible socialism.
“The Shift From the Unions”
A Twitter-friend and I have been batting around an analogy between the 1920s and the era we’re living through now. There’s the brief rise of a white Protestant right-populist movement (the KKK then, Tea Party now). There’s the likeness between Obama’s conservative brand of progressivism and that of Herbert Hoover – an analogy that was [...]
The Twinkie Defense, or What Does “Uncompetitive” Mean?
Comrade Frase offered his thoughts on the Hostess collapse the other day, and while I have my differences with his take, that’s not what I want to talk about here. What fascinates me about the the bakery workers’ strike are all the reactions to it, and what they reveal about the worldview underlying our free [...]
On Strike Debt: An Exchange with Andrew Ross
Dear Andrew, One of the things Occupy has been criticized for—and I’ll admit, I’ve been one of the critics—is a lack of focus on strategy or organizing. The debt campaign seems like a real effort to grapple with those problems—to figure out how the movement can expand its numbers and strength so it might force [...]
Liberals and Teachers: An “Examination on the Merits”
Matt Yglesias has a judicious take on teachers unions. Responding to a post by Doug Henwood asking why it is that liberals seem to hate organized teachers, Yglesias denies anything of the sort. what baffles me about these discussions is the tendency of labor’s alleged friends to simply refuse to look this reality in the face [...]
Good Debt, Bad Debt
Let me inaugurate this, my blog, my very own blog, by pointing you to this excellent comment thread at Crooked Timber — which is such an ideal speech community that it actually features somebody named “Substance McGravitas” — where Mike Beggs’ review of David Graeber’s Debt is being debated as we speak. Having come to the [...]
American Jacobins
Why has the American left neglected this revolutionary inheritance?
Anarchy at the Fed!
Doug Henwood has the story: The central bankers [staff economists at the New York Federal Reserve] recently had David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, down to talk to them, where he told them about the need for debt relief. He reports that they were very receptive to his message, fearing another economic [...]
The work of anti-work: a response to Peter Frase
I want to rejoin a debate I’ve engaged in on and off with my colleague Peter Frase, about his signature issues of work and unemployment. In his latest post, Peter summarizes the debate pretty well. He has long argued, as he reiterates, “that in the quest for full employment, we ought to be less obsessed [...]
Seth Ackerman
Seth Ackerman, a doctoral candidate in History at Cornell, is an editor at Jacobin. He has written for Harper’s and In These Times, and was a media critic with Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.