Review of Peter Frase’s Four Futures: Life After Capitalism

Peter Frase spoke about his new work, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, to a packed Potter’s House bookstore on October 25. The event was co-sponsored by Metro-DC DSA and the Jacobin reading group. Frase gave a brief overview of his project, putting forth this argument: If there is full automation, then There are two axes […]

Exploitations, Primary and Secondary, in the Capitalist Mode of Production

What follows is a rough draft of an essay that will appear in the Labor Day issue of the Washington Socialist.  Labor day should invite conversation on the state of labors movement and market; my aim today is to focus on what Marx called “exploitation upon expropriation” from the latter. Criticism of Uber and the […]

Radiohead and Rupture: A Moon Shaped Pool, and A Doom Shaped (Labor) Pool

The last time Radiohead released a record it was February 2011 and the Wisconsin protests were taking form, the Arab spring was blossoming, and the undercurrents of the Spanish Indignados movement were flowing. Occupy was soon to follow. In that 2011’s King of Limbs used manic beat programming and digital effects to concoct feelings of […]

A Week of New Duos: Reviews: Iyer & Smith, Iggy Pop & Homme, Batman & Superman

Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith’s “A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke” is stunning. Seemingly a duet between Smith’s ethereal trumpet and Iyer’s probing piano, Nasreen Mohamedi’s drawings and poetry as inspiration makes for a trio. A trio vastly different from the Iyer trio. Though Iyer commands a pulse here, the music lacks Iyer’s characteristic […]

Neoliberalism was the Grounding for the Sacrifice of Flint to Capital, yet Obama Thinks Neoliberalism will Save Flint

The poverty of thought in American policy making bears some similarity to the meager budgets of public water utilities. With the sacrifice zone of Flint present in the public consciousness, where cuts to indispensable public services were the cost of corporate tax cuts, the Obama administration is positioning private capital as the solution to the […]

The Apple/FBI Standoff Reveals the Contradictions in the Role of the State

It is fairly clear that Apple’s position on encryption in their standoff with the FBI is rooted in the expectation that consumers will respond favorably to a “defense” of their privacy. Less clear is what imagery the State hopes to project of itself. Rather than fulfilling its role as the protector of capital and its […]

Is Bernie Sanders a Single-Issue Candidate? Populism, Hillary Clinton, and the Balance of Class Forces

Hillary Clinton’s newest line of attack on Bernie Sanders exposes a flaw of populist politics, the ability to characterize a platform of simplistic Manichean problem and solution sets as reducible to a singular problem and solution, that is, to frame the campaign as being single issue. In an important sense this is an unfair characterization […]

The Bernie Sanders Mandate on the Eve of the Iowa Caucus

Tomorrow night, the Sanders “can you spare three dollars for a ‘political revolution’?” machine faces off against the Clinton “I’ll take you to dinner and give you a signed copy of my book” machine. Over the past six months I’ve critiqued both Clinton and Sanders, but the majority of my criticism has been directed at […]

Bernie Needs to Talk Austerity, and Podemos Can Show Him How

Bernie Sanders’ editorial in today’s New York Times is fairly representative of liberals’ general remarks on the Fed raising the federal funds rate. It notes the dangers of it causing a recession by making investment more expensive, and this just for the benefit of combating nearly non-existent inflation. Missing from his editorial and pieces like […]

Learning from Argentina and Venezuela: The Bane of the Handpicked Successor

The viability of the “handpicked” successor is being strenuously tested in the left-leaning governments that composed the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America. Two weeks ago Christina Fernandez de Kirchner’s chosen successor, Scilio, was defeated by the ring-wing Macri for the presidency, though Christina should herself be considered the chosen successor of her late husband, Nestor […]