Capitalism Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

To have family is to own something

March 30, 2026 • by Sophie Lewis

“The Left has largely abandoned questions of the family,” charged the queer and trans Marxists K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson in 2015. “Tacitly, at least, leftist organizations today have accepted families as a feature of contemporary capitalist society, which they will do nothing to end.” The authors’ timely ...

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

The Internet

Showering for Salvation

The viral, hours-long “everything shower” promises women purity

March 23, 2026 • by Drew Vogelsang

The influencer Vanessa Faga has amassed 1.6 million followers on TikTok, posting a new self-care routine video each day. Her content ranges from a “productive Monday morning” to a “winter self-care night,” to promote a new set of wellness products. She presents a life of curated optimization, where every moment ...

Politics

Switzerland, January 22

After the thugs

January 22, 2026 • by Adam Tooze

Walking past the pavilion proclaiming “Freedom 250.” The blank metal of the decaled window frames, evokes nothing of the sort. Faded wraps in red, white, and blue remind one of a gambling parlor in some bedraggled third-tier pedestrian mall. Or of the sort of images that enthusiastic men glue to cars and motorbikes. Strip ...

Sex & Gender

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

December 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum

Slavoj Žižek argues that gaming and virtual reality programs figure the computer as “a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner.” This claim follows on the heels of a reference to Jacques Lacan’s diagnosis in an infamous koan about the impossibility of sexual relations. For Lacan, ...

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

Art & Design

Joanna Walsh’s E-Elegy

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters offers a remembrance of posts past

December 10, 2025 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

Here’s a theory: The posts, tags, and profiles that constitute the internet are all works of art, produced by amateur artists. Whether or not these amateurs recognize their work’s “artiness” is irrelevant; participation on the internet requires acts of intentional creation and studied self-representation, with the express purpose of display, ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Art of Change: A Libretto

Opera 0.2: A Prelude

September 18, 2025 • by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Chiara Bottici and Matteo Procuranti

Synopsis: A community decides to pursue its revolutionary dream by adopting the principle of accelerated change, and applies it to every aspect of social life. The result is a utopian (or dystopian) world that may (or may not) turn out to be ours. Event 1. Prologue Flutist in dialogue with video projections ...

Economy

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

August 27, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Donald Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook “for cause,” escalates his long-running battle with America’s central bank. The news has triggered outrage. In the pages of the FT, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, warned: “President Trump seems determined to ...

Literature

The Blue House

An excerpt from The Ocean in the Next Room

May 28, 2025 • by Sarah V. Schweig

I'm still here in the city I entered years ago.I've been in the city all this time.I don't look up and around much anymore.I've been studying philosophy and having a sonand killing time. I follow my son from roomto room in our two-room rental. While he sleeps,I kill a roach ...

Capitalism

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

May 21, 2025 • by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the ...

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Capitalism

We’re Going to Fort Knox to Touch the Real

If somebody really hasn’t already raided the loot, maybe the administration will show us how it’s done

May 20, 2025 • by Justin Joque

The Trump-Musk right repeatedly insists on revealing the true state of the world and of digging this true world out from under the distortions of liberal modernity. From Pizzagate to attacks on DEI, there exists a constant insistence on revealing what is hidden, mediated, and obfuscated. But nowhere is the ...

We’re Going to Fort Knox to Touch the Real

Capitalism

Social Capitalism: An Alternative to Neoliberalism

On the economic consequences of the US neoliberal period

December 18, 2024 • by Mark Setterfield

As defined by Hagen Krämer and coauthors (2023), social capitalism constitutes a "renewed social democracy" designed to achieve growth that is both inclusive (in the sense of being consistent with an equitable wage share of income) and sustainable (in the sense that it does not foster financial imbalances). These constitute narrow definitions of inclusivity and ...