Essays

What does the Supreme Court’s five to four ruling in the case of Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, Et. Al.[1]mean for the future of organized labor in the United States? As the four dissenters stressed, the court’s majority overruled a precedent that had held for more than four…

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers ignited something.  People protested. Cities burned. Though seemingly sympathetic to the cause, many feared the conflagrations in the streets.  “Above everything else, I am a mother,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms remarked at a press conference she called after hearing “rumors about violent protests…

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to the state as “the executive committee of the ruling class.” Reflecting the collective capitalist interest in maintaining its accumulation process, capable of forging compromises among competing sectors of its own and other classes, this committee was also meant to enforce legal norms, contracts, and other rules…

In the 45 years since Roe, much has been written about the morality of abortion, and much has been written about the soundness of the legal reasoning in Roe. The aim here is not to join directly either of those arguments. We will leave aside, for example, the invocation of the “penumbra” and matters regarding…

In the last few years the balance of power in the world has changed dramatically. Xi Jin Ping has declared that this is the era of China which, he said, “will take global centre stage by 2050”.  Who can dispute that China’s star is rising, while the West is in decline? It is not only that…

How can an identity strategy – that seeks to reduce oppression by prioritizing freedom over privilege – better unify the state power winning politics of the Bernie Sanders’-aligned forces, social movements, and the independent left? Exploring what might be gained and given up by the left, when Sanders’ anti-oligarch focused approach is engaged by this,…

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was experienced as closing an historic period, that of revolutions inspired by the communist utopia, and marking the entry into the era of ‘natural capitalism’ and of the ‘self-regulating market.’ Naturalization of the current mode of production and exploitation and of the exchange system is the direct…

But, if one has dreamed an empire, the empire of man, and if one dares to reflect at what a snail’s pace men are advancing toward the realization of this dream, it is quite possible” that the “activities of man pale to insignificance.” –Henry Miller Lemmings race ahead, focused on following the one in front…

In a book tellingly entitled Without Offending Humans. A Critique of Animal Rights,[1]philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay thus summarizes her disdain for an argument aimed at extending equal moral and legal protection to other than human beings: What seems most serious is a [passage] that condemns article 3 of the Nuremberg code. Ethico-political insensitivity and a…

In the mid-1960s, as the Cold War seemed frozen into place after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the stalemate that defused the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the spirit of a “New Left” began to emerge in the West. Although encouraged by events in the Third World, its common denominator…