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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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