Tag: Capitalism
Bernie Sanders: Anti-Union Capitalism Is Wrecking America
Eugene Victor Debs, the railroad workers’ union leader who was the Socialist Party’s great organizer and presidential candidate in the first decades of the 20th century, has been my hero since I was a young man, when I took to heart his message that “the very moment a workingman begins to do his
Nuclear Fusion Isn’t the Silver Bullet We Want It to Be
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Was the True Meaning of Capitalism Forgotten?
So often we take the meaning of terms for granted without knowing their complicated histories and changing definitions. “Capitalism” is one such example. In his new book, Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word, Michael Sonenscher argues that the term remains difficult to define, even though it has myriad associations. A historian of political thought at Cambridge University, Sonenscher observes that we may link it to industrial organization, technical specialization, producers, competition, or markets. The main
The United States’ Global Power Is Fading Fast
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The Contradictions of Adam Smith
The Rise and Fall of the Mall
The shopping mall has a great many antecedents: the opulent markets of Victorian London, the arcades of Paris, and the department stores in the United States that could swallow an entire city block. But the mall as we know it has only one daddy: the architect Victor Gruen. A Viennese socialist, Gruen had established a tidy practice designing residential projects and shops before the Nazis seized Austria in 1938. Gruen’s forte was
Nancy Fraser’s Lessons From the Long History of Capitalism
Theories of capitalism have always also been theories of crisis. John Maynard Keynes linked the instability of capitalism to the instability of aggregate demand, and Marxist thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that capitalism depends on noncapitalist markets to survive but disavows and destroys them. In her new book, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It, Nancy Fraser—one of the best-known feminist political theorists working
The Civil War’s Economic Shadow
A number of years ago, in his book Yankee Leviathan, the political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel insisted that the relationship between the federal government and finance capital that was forged during the Civil War “mortgaged a radical Reconstruction” before the conflict had even ended. It is an arresting argument, and a relevant one. The idea that wars make states—because governments have to create the capacity to wage
Cash Is Never Neutral: A Conversation on the Politics of Money
When it comes to understanding the nature of money, times of political tranquility can prove deceptive. The relatively stable order of things gives money the appearance of being natural and neutral—somehow beyond politics. Yet in his new book, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money From Aristotle to Keynes, Stefan Eich, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, shows how economic crises reveal the inherently political nature of money.
“The Class War Never Ends, the Master Never Relents”: An Interview With Noam Chomsky
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