Socialism
NEW LEFTS
My book, New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition, will be released by Princeton University Press on September 7, 2021.
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Assembling a New Left
What social forces exist under neoliberal capitalism that might form the basis for a new left? How should that new left organize itself politically – as a socialist party, one big union, a spontaneous assembly, or all of the above? See my essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Assembly (2017), the most general appraisal yet of post-2008 radical left politics in the Read More
The Socialist Minimum
What would it take to build a global challenge to neoliberal capitalism? How might socialists from different countries join together and devise collective solutions to problems that transcend national borders? Talbot C. Imlay provides a historical answer to these questions in his important new book The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914-1960 (OUP, 2018). Check out my review essay in H-Diplo. It turns out that pragmatic Read More
New Beginning: Sketch for a Conceptual History
The new year inevitably brings with it a spate of new year’s resolutions. While the timing of these life decisions — vowing to exercise more, to spend less money, to find a partner or new job, etc. — is somewhat arbitrary and their results often short-lived, the symbolic importance of the new year and its seemingly infinite possibilities is undeniable. Baby New Year is a common personification of this collective Read More
The Austere Option
Matt Taibbi, blogging for Rolling Stone, recently posted a thoughtful critique of European and American calls for “austerity” in response to the global economic crisis. His basic point is that the burden of proposed austerity measures — cuts to welfare, public services, and government spending in general — falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the lower and middle classes, leaving wealthy bankers and financial institutions virtually untouched. “If there’s going Read More
Soviet Russia’s “New Generation”
The American Scholar has published an English translation of “The New Generation,” a short story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that is part of a new collection of the author’s works, Apricot Jam, and Other Stories (Counterpoint, 2011). Set in the 1920s and early 30s, the story recounts the parallel experiences of Anatoly Pavlovich Vozdvizhensky, an engineer and professor at Rostov State University, and Lyoshka Konoplyov, his working-class student who can’t make Read More