The Phillips curve holds that low unemployment drives inflation, meaning that controlling prices requires putting workers out of work. Its continuing influence shows how power over the money supply shapes class power.
Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers
In 1939, the 25-cent paperback made America a nation of readers, delivering thrillers, classics and Pulitzer-winning books. So why did the Big Five publishers just kill the mass market paperback?
Robert Kramer Is the New Left’s Great, Forgotten Filmmaker
Robert Kramer’s films captured the New Left from the inside, from its promising beginning through its painful unraveling. He faded from view mostly because his work was so hard to see. In our new age of political volatility, he deserves a revival.
AutoZone Workers Won a Union. Then the Company Fired Them.
In September, workers in White Plains, New York, won the first union at any of AutoZone’s nearly seven thousand US stores, despite an aggressive anti-union campaign. The next day, the company fired a lead organizer. Then another.
How Much Liberty Should We Limit?
At its best, the Left has championed the cause of freedom against both political and economic tyranny. Does the spread of scourges like social media addiction and sports betting justify more restrictions on individual liberty than we’ve typically accepted?
Is Trump Crashing the Dollar Empire?
Economist Mona Ali on how the United States wields the world’s most powerful currency to shore up empire and its own ruling class — and how Trump’s careless moves might blow it all up.
The real choice is not between globalization and deglobalization, free trade and tariff walls, but between empowering capital and empowering workers.
La France Insoumise Won’t Cede God to the Far Right
Religious identity has become an unusually prominent battleground in next year’s French election. During the pope’s visit to the country last week, left-wing France Insoumise resisted ultraconservative attempts to monopolize Catholic identity.
The Strange Resurrection of Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry’s 1985 cowboy epic is finding a new generation of readers online. Its revival raises an awkward question for publishing: What happened to the big, bloody, male-coded literary novel and to the men who used to read and write them?
The Gospel According to J. D. Vance
J. D. Vance’s spiritual memoir is short on the spiritual and long on hypocrisy, oscillating between complaints about “the elites” and half-baked policy ideas that show little engagement with the Catholic social teaching he professes to admire.
The War in Ukraine Is Spiraling Out of Control
After years of warnings that the war in Ukraine could spiral into a full-on Russia-Europe conflagration, the conflict has reached a point where this is a real possibliity. It’s a prospect that threatens not just European lives but the entire globe.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire became a campus sensation because it offered a master theory for globalization at a moment when old Marxist categories seemed exhausted. But the capitalist internationalism they saw as permanent has now crashed and burned.
Greek Life Endures by Offering a Simulacrum of Solidarity
While unions, churches, and leagues are losing members, fraternities and sororities are drowning in new recruits. Their staying power comes from bundling belonging with elite advantage.
Germany’s Far Right Is Attacking Bauhaus Again
It’s been 100 years since the opening of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau, but the Alternative für Deutschland wants to cut funding from centenary events. The winner of recent state elections, the far-right party labels Bauhaus un-German.
Shawn Fain’s Slate Has Swept the UAW Elections
The message from United Auto Workers members in their recent internal elections, in which President Shawn Fain and his slate are poised to win big, is clear, argues former Fain Chief of Staff Chris Brooks: they want their union to keep fighting.
Anwar Shaikh’s Analysis of Capitalism Is Vital for the Left
In studying with Anwar Shaikh, economist Howard Botwinick learned that Karl Marx’s account of capitalist competition is far richer than his critics assumed. That insight, Botwinick argues in an interview, offers the working class a road map to victory.