Class Archives - Page 2 of 3

Feature

The Order is Rapidly Fadin’

Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize

October 17, 2016 • by Emily Edwards

The Internet has been ablaze with celebration and criticism as the news broke that musician Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s win against traditional novelists and poets is both surprising and significant, but the importance of the Nobel prize has little to do with Dylan ...

Feature

Class and Culture at the Republican and Democratic Conventions

September 29, 2016 • by Jo Freeman

Walking around the conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia one could see that there have been many changes in class and culture both inside and outside of the parties in the last fifty years. In Cleveland I was able to tour the Q while it was still being turned from a sports ...

Class and Culture at the Republican and Democratic Conventions

Feature

Hannah Arendt on American “Social Slavery”

June 30, 2016 • by Steve Cucharo

A few years after fleeing the fascist tidal wave in Europe and finding refuge in New York City, Hannah Arendt penned a letter to her mentor and confidant Karl Jaspers, commenting briefly on the peculiarities of American politics and society. She remarked, “The fundamental contradiction of the country is political ...

Hannah Arendt on American “Social Slavery”

Uncategorized

Class, Gender and Creative Industries

June 1, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

The fate of cultural studies in the United States appears to be twofold. On the one hand, it still generates moral panic. Right-wing nut-jobbers think that "cultural Marxism" is some insidious, decadent creed, probably created by Jews and Blacks to destroy America. On the other hand, it has finally become ...

Feature

Resisting Acts of Resistance

Precarious citizenship against the militarized police

May 10, 2016 • by Mayra Cotta

In Brazil, police officers are rarely held accountable for murderous attacks on citizens. Whenever a member of the police shoots someone, the agent responsible can easily claim that he was counteracting resistance. An “act of resistance” is then written and immediately filed. This institutional and legal justification -- which needs ...

Feature

The IMF Makes Class Warriors of Us All

April 22, 2016 • by Tithi Bhattacharya

On October 24, 1973, the Egyptian military, under the command of General Hosni Mubarak, and under instructions from President Anwar Sadat, dealt an unprecedented blow to the most powerful regime in the Middle East: Israel. As the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal and established bridgeheads in the Sinai peninsula, ...

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Erik Olin Wright & Class Today

February 9, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

------ What if we tried a thought experiment? Just for shits and giggles? The thought experiment runs as follows: What if this was no longer capitalism, but something worse? Could we start by describing relations of exploitation and domination in the present, starting with the newest features, and work back and ...

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Mr. Clinton’s Lament

January 11, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

In 2014, when the editorial staff of The New Republic resigned en masse to protest its looming corporatization by a publisher aiming to convert it to “a vertically integrated digital media company,” I was a bit smug in my surprise. Ironic, I thought: the magazine, which lurched from “popular front” ...

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The Return of Gilded Feminism?

Alva Belmont vs. the Glam-SAHMs

June 8, 2015 • by David Huyssen and Mary Reynolds

[S]ome of us are the wives or sisters of employers of large numbers of factory operatives, or perhaps ourselves are owners and stockholders in companies. Should not the woman who spends the money which the employees help to provide, take a special interest in their welfare, especially in that of ...

Race

Capitalism and the Problem of Intersectionality

April 24, 2015 • by Alyssa Adamson

What does it mean to do “intersectional” analysis? Generally it is taken to mean that more than one sort of oppression dynamic is being accounted for (e.g. race and class or gender and race and class), and in that case, it is meant to be an improvement over analyses that only take into consideration one dynamic. ...

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Feminism, Marxism and Social Transformation: Beyond Economic Monism

March 2, 2015 • by Derek Baron

Friedrich Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) has been a central text for Marxist-feminist thinkers in the 20th century and up until the present. But its centrality is not marked by a universal acceptance or agreement with the central tenets of Engels’ elaboration of Lewis ...

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Classical Sociology and the Social Condition

February 8, 2015 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

In last week’s meeting of the social condition class, we reviewed classical sociological studies, considering how they reveal or conceal the dilemmas and tensions built into the social fabric, how they illuminate or obfuscate the social condition. We looked closely at the closing pages of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethnic and ...