What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany

An excerpt from Jonathan Bach’s latest book

Introduction The GDR never existed.” Nonsense, of course -- the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany, existed for forty cold war years as the front line of the Soviet Bloc, as West Germany’s socialist double and as a lived reality for sixteen million people. Yet, eighteen years after German unification in 1990, ...
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How Buddhism and Marxism Can End Our Suffering

Interdependence as a Response to Global Crisis

Terry Gibbs, Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist: Buddhism and the Compassionate Society (Plymouth, UK: Zed Books, 2017). Distributed in the United States by the University of Chicago Press. Paper: 19.95.  "I’m not going to argue in this book that we all need to be Buddhist Marxists," writes Terry Gibbs in ...
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How Buddhism and Marxism Can End Our Suffering

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How Hotel Workers Fought For a Union — And Won

Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and The Nation Magazine present 'What does a feminism for the 99% look like? Ask the hotel housekeepers who unionized a Doubletree hotel owned by Harvard. These women fought the first female president of Harvard to gain a union. They asked Sheryl Sandberg to "lean ...
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White Supremacy, Elitism, and the Future of Liberal Education

A response to Tim Lacy’s ‘Great Books Socialism’

In his extended essay, “Great Books Socialism?,” recently published on Public Seminar, Tim Lacy makes a compelling case for adapting the practice -- suggested by Molly Worthen in an Op-ed for the New York Times -- of deploying the great books as ideological tools established by conservative foundations and institutes ...
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White Supremacy, Elitism, and the Future of Liberal Education

Great Books Socialism?

Intellectual Traditions Matter for Movement Building and Identity Formation

Late in 2016, Molly Worthen lauded the great books idea as an antidote to liberalism’s ills in the Age of Trump. In “Can I Go to Great Books Camp?” Worthen notes that studying the history of ideas is always connected to great books. One assumption of Worthen’s, which I endorse, ...
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Great Books Socialism?