Grace Blakeley is one of the left’s leading economic thinkers. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism, Blakeley explains how capitalism really works and gives a crucial primer on the modern economy. She joins today to explain why conceiving of “free markets” and “government planning” as opposites is highly misleading, because our neoliberal “market-based” economy involves many deep ties between the state and corporations. Instead of thinking of “capitalism” and “socialism” as a spectrum that runs from markets to government, Blakeley says we should focus our analysis on who owns and controls prod ..read more

The term “first-world problem” is used to describe the type of minor nuisance that occupies the minds of the bourgeoisie. You dropped an AirPod in the urinal. You spilled chardonnay on the divan. Whole Foods was out of pomegranates. And so forth. These are perfectly real frustrations, but they only afflict the comfortable. We might define a parallel quandary in the field of moral philosophy: the first-world ethical problem. These are dilemmas about right and wrong that don’t actually touch any of the major ethical crises of our time, or the issues of structural injustice. They’re problems tha ..read more

The New York Times print edition today carries an op-ed from former Vice President Mike Pence entitled “Now Is Not The Time To Surrender Ground in the Fight For Life.”1 In it, Pence says that helping to end Roe v. Wade was the proudest accomplishment of his time in office and calls to build on that achievement by enacting a nationwide prohibition on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The unborn are “created in the image of God, the same as you or me,” says Pence, who prays that Donald Trump “will rediscover the passion for life that defined our four years in office.”   The op-ed ..read more

Economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has written a provocative new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, in which he argues that our 21st-century economic system should not really be described as “capitalism” anymore but as a kind of “techno-feudalism” in which the owners of platforms extract rent in the same way that feudal lords did. We present an excerpt from Varoufakis’s book here. Note that the book is written in the form of an extended letter to Varoufakis’s father. What would it take for capitalism to die? In your youth you had a definitive answer: capi ..read more

 At an extraordinary hearing in Congress this week, government officials grilled the president of a private university, pressing her to commit to firing professors and disciplining students over their political speech. Instead of telling the government forcefully that speech on college campuses is not a matter for the U.S. Congress to be involved with, the university president in question—Minouche Shafik of Columbia University—groveled and promised to do better. It was a depressing moment, because it showed that freedom of speech and academic freedom are still, as in previous times of wa ..read more

Journalist Josie Cox is the author of the new book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality, a history of the 20th century women’s movement that documents the remarkable courage of the women who gave us suffrage, abortion rights, and greater equality across many dimensions of social and economic life. Today she joins to discuss how those gains were made, but also the failures (such as the story of the Equal Rights Amendment). She also talks about how many of the striking victories for women’s equality are now under serious threat of rollback.  Nathan J. Robinson  I ..read more

The veteran labor organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey recently announced that she is near the end of her life, after having been diagnosed in 2021 with incurable cancer. Losing McAlevey will be a major blow to the American left. As the New Yorker put it last year, she has been credited with transforming the U.S. labor movement, contributing to the rebirth of union organizing in our time after a long period of stagnation. Her work should be carefully studied, because she has done as much as anyone else to clearly explain the problem with the distribution of power in this country, and show prac ..read more

 I don’t care for the name of the “security dilemma,” since it’s not very evocative of what it describes, but I wish everyone understood the basic concept. It is, as Chinese political scientist Shiping Tang explains, “one of the most important theoretical ideas in international relations.” It refers to the way that countries can take actions they perceive as defensive, but which are perceived by other countries as aggressive, and which create a spiral of hostility that can end in war. Tang describes two states, neither of which intends to threaten the other and both of whom want to live ..read more

In his examination of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, the late anthropologist David Graeber argues that superhero comics are essentially fascist. This analysis is based on the power relations involved: comics, Graeber says, represent an anarchic universe, where the only real laws are the ones created “on the basis of force.” He might have added that they also play a role in socialization. Comics teach budding members of society what to expect of the world outside their doors.  Growing up in an immigrant household, I missed out on the spandexed heroes that make up the canon of American ..read more

Zoë Schiffer is the author of the new book Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter, which tells the full story of how the richest man in the world took over a major piece of the 21st century “public square.” Schiffer does not take a nostalgic view of pre-Musk Twitter, showing that the company was in many ways poorly run and Twitter highly dysfunctional. But she shows how Musk’s capricious, self-aggrandizing approach to running the platform have altered it. We discuss the role of Twitter in 21st century America, Musk’s political radicalization and embrace of “anti-woke” politics, and th ..read more