The Promise and Logic of Federations, and The Problem of Their Stability
Historians are right to describe the 19th century as the age of nationalism. While many also depict the 20th as the triumph of the nation-state, with more justice it could be called the century of its failure, despite the vast proliferation of the form. If collapsing empires brought us the first World ...
Xu Youyu Takes Stock Of The Chinese Cultural Revolution
In “The Cultural Revolution, Fifty Years Later,” recently published in Foreign Affairs, Professor Xu Youyu, the University in Exile Scholar at The New School, rightly notes that many intellectuals and officials who lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution are quietly taking stock of the lessons and legacies of that ...
Eleven Theses on American Democracy
Orlando, the City Beautiful
In May 1981, a sinkhole opened up in Winter Park, Florida, the tiny suburb just north of downtown Orlando. Over the course of that day the ground gave way, swallowing five Porsches from a repair shop, a small home, and the deep end of an Olympic-size swimming pool.
The event brought ...
Climate Policies After Paris
Toward the end of 2015, leaders from around the world convened in Paris for the latest round of international climate talks. This marks the 21st annual Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. More than 40,000 people from over 150 countries attended the conference, representing ...
Condemned to Die: Thoughts on Queerness Post-Orlando
Comments on Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future
This video was shown at 'The G20 of Philosophy and Economics' in Amsterdam on April1, 2016. The event coincided with the publication of the Dutch translation of Paul Mason's recent book 'Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future' and the opening session was a discussion on it. After Mason's presentation, there ...
Paris Spring? Social Media And The Spread Of European Solidarity Protests
June marks the fifth month of Nuit Debout (Standing Night) a movement that sprung from earlier protests by young people against the French government’s labor law reform. On March 31, 2016, an informal group of a dozen citizens from Fakir, a left-wing activist magazine, used the #mars40 Twitter hashtag to ...
The Left, the 2016 Election and the Cunning of History
Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president has fallen short, edged out by Hillary Clinton’s formidable organization and her deep ties to the Party’s establishment. The Sanders campaign offered a genuine alternative, funded by record-breaking amounts of small donations from ordinary people, promising to implement an agenda ...
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 ...
A Coup in Brazil, Despite Legal Formalities
The latest political events in Brazil have caused perplexity around the globe. The country once deemed to be not only an emerging global power, but also a positive example of democracy and stability in a region with a long history of political turmoil and authoritarianism, has ...