Section
Capitalism
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Kafala in the Time of the Flood
The opposite of Kafala is being alive.
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Is the World Enough?
Is our relation to the earth mainly a story of scarcity, of insatiable wants curbed by a finite planet?
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Oil and Injury in Los Angeles
The city’s ports may be physically located in the imperial core—inside the barricades of the USA—but their tendrils span the globe.
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The Frankfurt Book Fair and Its Cupboards
“In order to understand the multi-dimensionality of the global book industry, we urgently need to move beyond standard methods alone.”
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Five Books on Labor and Ecology
Our scorching planetary age results from the conjoined forces of colonial extractivism, fossil capitalism, and postcolonial developmentalism.
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5 Books on the Politics of Indonesian Labor
People are familiar with how big the Japanese and South Korean economies are, but Indonesia is a rising power in Asia with a large labor force, and it’s very rarely being talked about.
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“Let Us Gather Together”
Capital violently forces dispossessed people into markets, workplaces, and prisons. But such forced meetings could end capitalism itself.
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Car Creditocracy: An Interview with Julie Livingston & Andrew Ross
“If you are a car owner, you are red meat for whoever wants to prey upon you, whether it is police, auto lenders, or state agencies.”
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“Work More, Consume Less”: How Austerity Coerces
The true purpose of austerity is to permanently and structurally extract resources from the many to the few.
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How to Profit from Climate Change
How did capitalism waste the crucial decades when climate change could have been halted? By fixating on—and downplaying—“risk.”
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Taking Our Time: How Australian Universities Measure Academic Work
“Who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?”
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“Democracy Depends on It”: Carissa Véliz on Privacy and Ending Data Surveillance
“There is nothing shocking or radical about ending an economic practice that has too many negative externalities.”
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America’s “Land Grab” Universities: Robert Lee on Colonial Extraction by “Treaty-Like Agreements”
“It’s not about the land underneath campuses. It’s land at a distance, that can be sold or managed to raise funds for endowments.”
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Marshall Sahlins’s “Original Affluent Society” 50 Years Later
Capitalism seeks wealth to meet desires. But foraging societies follow “the Zen road to affluence”: not by getting more, but wanting less.
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Private Pain, Public Disinvestment: Talking Student Debt with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
“Individual Americans thought they were the only ones who could not afford to send their kids to college.”
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Why Renters Fought NYC’s Push for Ownership
“Doesn’t every New Yorker really want to own a co-op?,” a realtor asked a crowd of tenants in 1972. But this provoked only “a chorus of noes.”
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Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements
“As often the most vulnerable in our cities, immigrants face struggles that reflect the wider landscape of housing precarity.”
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Is “Regulation from Below” Possible?
A powerful grassroots movement campaigned in the ’70s and ’80s for banks to reinvest equitably in red-lined urban communities. It failed—but why?
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Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds
“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”
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How to See Silicon Valley: Talking with Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner
“The ways in which the community itself is breaking down felt like end game capitalism.”
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The Long Road to a New Ideology: Piketty on Trump, Democrats, and Inequality
“We need to have both the reparation and the universal perspective on economic justice.”[none-for-homepage]
