Socialism Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Chris Gilbert’s Commune or Nothing! places Venezuela’s communal movement as a key moment of working-class self-emancipation

March 6, 2025 • by Gant Roberson

In the central western region of Venezuela, a vast scenery of fertile land blends with the llanero (herdsman) culture of the people of Simón Planas township. Adults make use of children's bicycles (received as Christmas gifts from the government) to meet the exigencies of day-to-day life, evoking “a forgotten episode ...

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Capitalism

Social Capitalism

Synthesizing Marx, Keynes, and Schumpeter

September 17, 2024 • by Anna Pick and Mark Setterfield

Feathers were ruffled at Davos this year when, during a panel on “How to Trust Economics,” a speaker went rogue, accusing economists of being a “tribal clique” who only quote each other and have “blind faith” in models, however disconnected from real events they may be. The critique came not ...

History

Threshold Dwelling in the Ruins of Llano del Rio

Excavating a socialist colony in the desert

March 19, 2024 • by Joscelyn Jurich

In the desert's shifting realms, mirages dance with possibility and impossibility. Amidst the stark expanse, a threshold-like bardo blurs distinctions between creation and collapse, thriving and weakness....

Threshold Dwelling in the Ruins of Llano del Rio

Politics

Is Ecuador on the Road to Revolution?

Although $36 billion is still missing, socialism is on the rise in Ecuador

March 28, 2023 • by Paloma Velasco

Even right-wing fortresses such as Guayaquil, Ecuador’s economic capital, elected a leftist mayor for the first time in 30 years. ...

Podcast

We’ll Always Need to Work: An Interview with Alex Gourevitch

Unproductive Labor Podcast, Episode 19

January 12, 2023 • by Pete Sinnott and Luke Mergner

What the anti-work and post-work crowd get wrong in their thinking about work and the future....

We’ll Always Need to Work: An Interview with Alex Gourevitch

Education

The Politics of Student Loan Cancellation

The American Left needs to keep pressing for more ambitious solutions to the problem of student debt

September 15, 2022 • by Jackson Todd

Biden’s action on student debt indicates that Americans may be ready to move on from the austerity politics that defined the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump....

The Politics of Student Loan Cancellation

Climate & Ecology

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

The climate crisis has its material foundations in the capitalist system of production; Syracuse University geographer Matthew Huber proposes that tackling the problem requires changing how production is organized

June 7, 2022 • by Vince Carducci

Huber is essentially correct that the climate crisis is for all intents and purposes a class war, that of the transnational national capitalist class against the rest of us...

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

Socialism

The Socialist Revival

Can the Democratic Socialists of America claim to be a vanguard? Not yet

January 26, 2022 • by Max B. Sawicky

Could socialism be in the cards for the United States? Recall Senator John Edwards’s joke from 2008, “Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.” Socialism has become more familiar to Americans, thanks to the politician who has done more than anyone to render obsolete its traditional meaning. That would ...

Interviews

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

June 24, 2020 • by Charlotte Slivka and Ted Hamm

Charlotte Slivka [CS]: Bernie’s Brooklyn is so much more than what the title would suggest. This book shows a deep love for the city and how politics and life are so tightly intertwined in our dense and crazy city. Are you from New York? Ted Hamm [TH]: No, I grew up ...

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

North America

America’s Weimar Moment, Redux

A preface to our symposium on the left

May 28, 2020 • by James Miller

It seems like an eternity. But it was only a few months ago, before the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, that it seemed possible that the Democratic Party might have as its Presidential candidate an avowed socialist – Bernie Sanders. On February 6, 2020, Public Seminar ran a comment entitled “America’s Weimar ...

North America

The Story Behind DSA’s Non-Endorsement of Joe Biden

“Be it therefore resolved, the Democratic Socialists of America will not endorse another Democratic Party presidential candidate should Bernie Sanders not prevail”

May 28, 2020 • by Andrew Sernatinger

I joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the fall of 2017. I’m a millennial, but by then, I’d been an activist for the better part of twenty years. I’d been in the anti-war movement as a high school student after 9/11. I grew up in the suburbs of ...

The Story Behind DSA’s Non-Endorsement of Joe Biden

North America

Why Socialists Should Support the Democratic Ticket in November…

… Even if it is led by Joe Biden

May 28, 2020 • by Max B. Sawicky

Enthused by the wave of support for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, I joined DSA shortly after leaving the federal government the following year. The group seemed well-positioned to take that wave of support and turn it into something enduring. My optimism has been elevated by the emergence of ...