Tag: Socialism
How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities
The Roman god Janus was possessed of two faces, one pointing toward the future and one looking backward into the past, and it is tempting to imagine that these faces must also have worn contrasting expressions, one brighter and hopeful, the other rueful or even aghast. Supposing you knew such a person, how would you go about introducing him? Which of the two faces—enthusiastic or downcast—should be presented first? The problem poses itself immediately when it comes to “Chevengur,” Andrei
Socialism and Disney Are Incompatible
December 11, 2023
Our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.
A statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse stands in front of Cinderella’s castle at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.
(Matt Stroshane / Bloomberg News)
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This year marks the anniversaries of two
50 Years After “the Other 9/11”: Remembering the Chilean Coup
September 11, 2023
Some personal reflections on history, memory, and the survival of democracies.
At precisely 13:50 on September 11, 1973, Gen. Javier Palacios sent a succinct message of six words from the Presidential Palace of La Moneda in Santiago de Chile to his superiors in the Armed Forces who had, that
A Longtime Political Organizer in AOC’s District Says She’s the Real Deal
Politics
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August 2, 2023
She has used her skills to win concrete, historic political victories.
Today’s socialist movement is the US’s strongest in generations, thanks mainly to the 81,000 member strong Democratic Socialists of America. The highly engaged of the DSA base has elected over 100 openly declared socialists to local, state, and federal offices.
As a longtime DSA organizer living in
Cornel West: The Christian Socialist Running for President
What Can Happen When Young Socialist Elected Officials Gather for a Weekend of Lessons and Solidarity?
“The more I’m in government, the more I realize how corrupt it is.”
Janeese Lewis George is sitting in the lobby of the Kellogg Conference Hotel at Washington, D.C.’s Gallaudet University, telling me about the last three years. It hasn’t been easy for the 35-year-old since she became the only democratic socialist elected to the overwhelmingly Democratic D.C. City Council in 2020. She’s clashed with a mayor she calls a “borderline Republican” and been stifled by the council
C.L.R. James, Man of Paradox
Cyril Lionel Robert James was a man of paradox. The Trinidadian-born revolutionary was a lanky 6-foot-3—“lean as a pole,” with “long pianist fingers” that one could easily imagine flying across a typewriter keyboard as well. However, as we learn in John Williams’s new biography, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries, he “never learned to type and relied on women to type up his handwritten articles and manuscripts,” of which there was a veritable tsunami.
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
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 Life and Afterlife of the Paris Commune
We generally don’t see Paris as a city scarred by war. It is not like London and Berlin, where the drab modern architecture of the urban centers offers silent reminders of past aerial bombardment. It is not like Warsaw and Frankfurt, where the “old towns” are modern re-creations, erected over cleared fields of corpse-filled rubble. Despite revolutions, sieges, World War I shelling, and World War II bombings, Paris still possesses a remarkable architectural unity. The