Capitalism Never Ends?

A discussion responding to the Capitalism Studies Manifesto and Zaretsky's "How Capitalism Will End" -- One of my frustrations as the editor of Public Seminar is knowing that there have been interesting responses to our posts, but people are reluctant to publish them on the site itself. We are trying to ...
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How Capitalism Will End

The need to organize the economic life of humanity better than capitalism does is well established. Capitalism -- by which I mean the buying and selling of labor power -- breeds inequality, as Karl Marx showed and as Thomas Piketty has just re-demonstrated. Capitalism subordinates collective needs, such as our ...
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Thoughts on Thanaticism

What does it take to inaugurate a new historical epoch, then? A name certainly helps. The “Anthropocene” has gained currency recently, and while its denotation of time is ostensibly geologic, there is surely a political edge to claiming we have moved beyond the Holocene. How many more ways can we ...
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Thoughts on Thanaticism

What’s Left?

A response to Jeremy Varon

Jeremy Varon’s interesting and important response raises three questions: 1) What do we mean by a “Left”? 2) How are we to understand the New Left’s break-up and, specifically the relation of the women’s movement to that break-up and 3) How are we to evaluate the Left today? Let me ...

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What’s Left?

Birth of Thanaticism

Even its adherents have no problem calling it capitalism any more. Its critics seem to be reduced to adding modifiers to it: postfordist, neoliberal, or the rather charmingly optimistic ‘late’ capitalism. A bittersweet term, that one, as capitalism seems destined to outlive us all. I awoke from a dream with the ...
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Birth of Thanaticism

The War on Fascism

By my title,“The War on Fascism,” I do not mean the war between the US, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and imperial Japan on the other, the war that took place between 1939 and 1945. Rather I mean an unspoken ...

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The War on Fascism

Technology R’ Us

Sherry Turkle and our relationship to the digital

“Where are the sensitive machines … ?” So goes part of a tweet reproduced on the flyleaf to Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. The lament is not new. Over 30 years ago the designer and design theorist John Chris Jones pointed to the low sensitivity of technical systems to ...

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Technology R’ Us