Tag: Capitalism
“The Class War Never Ends, the Master Never Relents”: An Interview With Noam Chomsky
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The Mysteries of Adam Smith
Adam Smith is not who you think he is. Long hailed as the founder of modern economics and the father of capitalism, the 18th-century Scottish thinker was not only an economist and the author of The Wealth of Nations; he was also a moral philosopher and the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith considered his work in moral philosophy every bit as important as his work in economics (if not more so),
The War Over Public Water in Pennsylvania
The Myth of Libertarian Exit
How Bleak Is the Future of the Art World?
While the goings-on of the art world might appear to be a secondary concern amid the various crises of capitalism we face, in Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy, critic Ben Davis exposes the crucial ways art can absorb, reflect, and suffer from our system’s flaws. Davis—who is currently the national
Vivek Chibber on the Future of Marxist Thought
The fundamental aim of Vivek Chibber’s latest book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn, is to restore the central role that economic and structural forces play in studying the hierarchies of power and privilege in modern capitalism. This class-based understanding of social relations—one principally influenced by Marx, and which dominated leftist thought until the 1970s—gives pride of place to the material conditions that impose real constraints on people’s economic choices. Marx, Chibber
China’s Battle for Cultural Power Begins at the Box Office
Has Neoliberalism Really Come to an End?
The term “neoliberalism” is often used to condemn an array of economic policies associated with such ideas as deregulation, trickle-down economics, austerity, free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. As a political movement, neoliberalism is seen as experiencing its breakthrough 40 years ago with the election into office of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And since the 2007–08 financial crisis, an
Are Museums in Crisis? | The Nation
Why do we even have art museums? This was a question that Alexander Dorner began asking in the 1920s. He can’t have been the first to pose such a question, but as director of the Provincial Museum in Hanover, Germany, he was in a position to do something about it. In 1927, he commissioned Russian artist El Lissitzky to upend the conventional style of displaying
China Between Communism and Capitalism
The last few years have seen a new turn in the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the rest of the world. In the early 2000s, as China entered the World Trade Organization and made preparations for its first-ever Olympics, outsiders were optimistic that it would assimilate into a US-led world order, embracing global markets and retiring its old socialist economy.