Real Power? Real Money?

A reflection on Participatory Budgeting in New York

On a recent evening in New York City, I met with eight other people in my City Council Member’s local office, down the block from City College in Harlem. We were the community delegates tasked with discussing over 150 projects proposed at neighborhood assemblies. Our assignment was to score the ...
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Real Power?  Real Money?

On Not Giving Up

In the Wake of Donald Trump’s Victory

During the weeks leading up to the election, I must have seen Tammy Duckworth’s TV ads hundreds of times. One of her punchlines, a line that was supposed to sum up her generous democratic egalitarianism and contrast it with the punitive austerity of her opponent, was this: “If you don’t ...
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On Not Giving Up

Maximizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Changing World

Notes on Volatility in Cultures of Finance

One of the most remarkable contemporary developments has been the rise of what might be called a “politics of volatility” in which volatility is deliberately produced to take advantage of the uncertainty it creates. Its current embodiment is Donald Trump. Like the efficient market that he embraces, in the primaries, ...
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Maximizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Changing World

Why The Free Market Is No Longer Free

Rent Control in the Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area is in a state of emergency where teachers, janitors, and engineers are living in RVs or commuting hours to get to their jobs. Unchecked rent increases and unjust evictions are putting people into the streets. California has 115,000 homeless residents at last count, and the ...
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Why The Free Market Is No Longer Free

Dividuum

On Gerald Raunig

Like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, who was so surprised to learn that all these years he has been speaking prose, people are often shocked to learn that they think in concepts. It’s not just us theorists who make up funny meanings for funny words. Take the word individual. It seems ordinary enough. ...
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Dividuum

Saint Simone

Simone Weil and Revolutionary Politics

In the November 1933 issue of the dissident communist journal La Critique Sociale, two nonconformists of the French left took sharply opposed positions on the “catastrophic” character of revolutionary struggle. Both connected to the Communist Democratic Circle, both friends of its founder Boris Souvarine, they disagreed about action. And they ...
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Saint Simone

The Smartest Places on Earth

Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation

For nearly four decades, the manufacturing centers of the industrialized world have been in decline, their once mighty engines of mass productivity decommissioned and rendered into silent, rusting hulks. Waves of capital and (mostly white) people have streamed out of the central cities, leaving ruined landscapes in their wake. Recently ...

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The Smartest Places on Earth

Fearing the Foreign on Europe’s Streets

After last weekend’s local elections in Berlin, my more optimistic friends celebrate what they consider to be the victory of the left, while the pessimists (or realists, depending on who you ask) bemoan the ascent of the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) who received 14.2% of the votes. At a ...
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Fearing the Foreign on Europe’s Streets

Thoughts on the Hungarian and Polish New Right in Power

Eviscerating the Constitutional Court and purging the judiciary, complete politicization of the civil service, turning public media into a government mouthpiece, restricting opposition prerogatives in parliament, unilateral wholesale change of the Constitution or plain violation of it, official tolerance and even promotion of racism and bigotry, administrative assertion of traditional ...

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Thoughts on the Hungarian and Polish New Right in Power