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

Christine’s Story: Poverty and Paperwork

"I was the youngest of nineteen children, born in a cramped city apartment, with the assistance of an undocumented midwife.” So said Christine, the sixty-year-old woman I met five years ago in my capacity as a social worker. Though Christine is a citizen who has lived in the United States ...
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Rebooting RoboCop

Comparing 2014 with 1987

As someone who grew up with Paul Verhoeven's original 1987 RoboCop, I can't help but feel the dystopic and critical social commentary of the movie was lost in its reboot. What was once a critical and distopic film exploring the dangers of unchecked corporate power has become a soft endorsement ...

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Rebooting <em>RoboCop</em>

The Politics of Public Debt

Neoliberalism, capitalist development, and the restructuring of the state

This is the text of the Heuss Lecture (with audio of the Q & A below), delivered as part of the General Seminar series in the Wolff Conference Room of The New School for Social Research at 6 E. 16th. St. in New York on December 11, 2013. 

From the ...

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The Politics of Public Debt

Top 10 List of Best American Historical Writing

Recently the net has seen various ten best lists of works in American history. I’d like to propose one of my own, but first I want to explain my rationale. American historical writing was transformed in the 1960s by two things: the realization that slavery and racism were the foundations ...

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Against Social Determinism

Getting anything done generally requires the collaboration of people who do different kinds of work, and whose various kinds of work has shaped various kinds of thinking. It calls for some kind of translation or code switching. It can be hard enough getting people who do different kinds of intellectual ...
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