What Is A Woman?

This post is part of the Bodies, Gender, and Domination OOPS Series. I thought it would be cheeky to start this response with the question present in all the readings for this course -- “What is a woman?” -- but, feeling unsure, I decided to do what any sophisticated academic might ...
Read More
What Is A Woman?

Eleven Theses on American Democracy

1 The main defect of actually-existing democracy in America is that it does not actually exist. Or, rather, it exists in a stage-managed way: economic, military, and policy elites jockey for power, bypassing the citizenry, through the ubiquity of money and the subtle and not-so-subtle influence of the mainstream media, which ...
Read More
Eleven Theses on American Democracy

FEMINISMS OF THE LEFT: Politics and Strategy

There is a long and confusing collection of names for those who are both leftists and feminists: Marxist feminist, socialist feminist, materialist feminist, black feminist, feminist socialist, anarcho-feminist... and so on. And straddling the line between socialist and liberal feminists, would be social welfare feminists. In the 1960s and 1970s ...

Read More
FEMINISMS OF THE LEFT: Politics and Strategy

The End of Europe

The process of European unification is undergoing a deep crisis, certainly the deepest since it started at the beginning of the 1950s. In less than a year, the EU faced two major tests—first the Greek quarrel, then the refugee crisis -- that revealed its true face: a mixture of impotence, ...

Read More
The End of Europe

The Republicans’ Trump Problem

The Republican Party has a problem. At the time I am writing (March 24, 2016), Donald Trump enjoys a clear lead in the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination. With nearly 60% (739) of the 1,237 delegates required for the nomination, more than both of his remaining opponents, Ted ...

Read More
The Republicans’ Trump Problem

Zuckerberg & Chan Are Us

Philanthrocapitalism and the public good

Almost forty-eight years to the day before Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced the creation of their limited liability company and pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares within their lifetimes, a lawyer lectured a roomful of stockbrokers on “How to Obtain Maximum Tax Advantages by Using Securities ...

...

Read More
Placeholder

Going Backward in Argentina

A country is not a corporation

The election of Mauricio Macri on November 22, 2015, to the presidency in Argentina by a slim 51% to 49% over Governor Daniel Scioli marks a sharp break with 12 years of progressive government and the reconstruction of the state after the neoliberal period of the 1990s. It is a ...

...

Read More
Going Backward in Argentina

Neoliberal B Team Win Canadian Election

Assessing the conservative defeat

The decisive defeat of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was the big news of the 2015 Canadian election. Harper resigned as party leader, and the dirty laundry of his heavily controlled campaign is now being aired publicly. The Harper reelection campaign drew deeply on racist and Islamaphobic politics, attacking ...

Read More
Neoliberal B Team Win Canadian Election

On the Other Side of the Berlin Wall

East Germany and the fall

It was a colleague, Jonathan Bach, who discovered that Trebor Scholz and I, both currently associate professors at the New School, happened to be serving in the German military 25 years ago -- but on opposite sides of the wall! As such, he brought us together for the ...

Read More
Placeholder

Russia’s Game in Syria

Security, geopolitics, and a balance of powers

On Wednesday September 30, the Russian Federation started a bombing campaign in Syria with one objective in mind: the stabilization of the country and the survival of Assad’s regime. This action is very relevant for many reasons, but among them is the fact that it is historical. This presents Russia’s ...

Read More
Russia’s Game in Syria