The Safe Depository
Archives of Shawn Gude
Menu Close

Author: Shawn Gude

Non-Reformist Reforms, Defined

February 8, 2013Shawn Gude 195 Comments

French socialist Andre Gorz famously jettisoned the reform/ revolution dichotomy, instead advocating a strategy of non-reformist reformism. He defined—and, as far as I know, unveiled—the concept in Strategy for Labor and contrasted it with conventional, system-sustaining, reformist reformism: A reformist… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Socializing Finance and Other Radical Reforms

February 7, 2013Shawn Gude 105 Comments

Seth Ackerman’s essay on market socialism in Jacobin’s current issue has been receiving a good deal of attention, and rightly so. He does a fantastic job of reviewing the literature on Soviet efficiency—in other words, what were and weren’t the… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

The “democratic” in democratic socialism (Updated)

January 31, 2013Shawn Gude 217 Comments

“Today, perhaps more than ever, the very meaning of democracy needs to be clarified—its institutional norms and practices, its social and material conditions, its human and political transformative potential.” -Carl Boggs, The Socialist Tradition (1995) For democratic socialists, the qualifier—”democratic”—is… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Class—What Is It Good For?

January 26, 2013Shawn Gude 102 Comments

I recall a conversation I had a year or so ago with a friend of mine. We were comparing our political persuasions and after describing himself as solidly left of center on social issues, my friend proclaimed he was “liberal… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

The Reactionary Mind, Distilled

January 23, 2013Shawn Gude 102 Comments

Today I finished Walker Percy’s excellent novel The Moviegoer, the recipient of the 1961 1962 National Book Award. Towards the end of the book, the aristocratic aunt of the protagonist unleashes this acerbic anti-egalitarian monologue, a mighty good distillation of… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Labor Isn’t Just Another Interest Group

January 14, 2013Shawn Gude 103 Comments

After some Twitter pushback from Ned Resnikoff and yours truly, Elias Isquith is still skeptical of the claim that Jack Lew’s nomination should make lefties queasy. Isquith: One, we don’t know enough about Lew’s actions while at the NYU to… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Right to Work: A Setback, Not a Roadblock

December 16, 2012Shawn Gude 20 Comments

Breathe and exhale, union backers. A blow to organized labor, an affront to workers, disingenuous union-busting—Michigan’s new right-to-work (RTW) law is all of these. And in the birthplace of the hallowed United Auto Workers? It’s almost unfathomable. Union workers and… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Neoliberalism, Tuition Hikes, and the “Coupon State”

December 3, 2012Shawn Gude 7 Comments

The never-quite-quiescent debate between neoliberals and the traditional left is active again. I know it irks Matt Yglesias to no end, but I don’t find these discussions gratuitous. Easy to dismiss as inside baseball, they also delineate real differences that… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Walmart Workers: It’s All About Power

November 29, 2012Shawn Gude 12 Comments

Seth Ackerman, Matt Yglesias, and Doug Henwood had an interesting Twitter conversation earlier this week about boosting wages  at Walmart. As Ackerman and Yglesias note, higher pay has to come from somewhere and Walmart, a company whose munificence has always… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Class and Democratic Citizenship

November 28, 2012Shawn Gude 4 Comments

T.H. Marshall, in “Citizenship and Social Class”: Is it still true that basic equality, when enriched in substance and embodied in the formal rights of citizenship is consistent with the inequalities of social class? I shall suggest that our society… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Post navigation

← Older Articles

An Ordinary Times Blog

Recent Posts

  • Non-Reformist Reforms, Defined
  • Socializing Finance and Other Radical Reforms
  • The “democratic” in democratic socialism (Updated)
  • Class—What Is It Good For?
  • The Reactionary Mind, Distilled
  • Labor Isn’t Just Another Interest Group
  • Right to Work: A Setback, Not a Roadblock
  • Neoliberalism, Tuition Hikes, and the “Coupon State”
  • Walmart Workers: It’s All About Power
  • Class and Democratic Citizenship
  • No, I’m Not Tom Frank’s Doppelgänger—and Other Clarifications
  • Ezra Klein and “Substance”
  • The Quadrennial Conundrum
  • Why White Papers Aren’t Enough
  • Some Thoughts on the Frase-Sunkara Plan

Archives

  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012

Categories

  • Politics
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org
© 2023 The Safe Depository. All rights reserved.
Fashionista by aThemes