Marshall Berman, 1940-2013

Black, Brown, and Invisible

Just as mass incarceration uses the gloss of rehabilitation to hide the realities of social control, military intervention has appropriated the language of humanitarianism to disguise imperialist motives.

Different War, Same Columnist

Friedman fires more volleys of cliche into the densely packed prejudices of his readers.

An Exchange on Libya

A letter from Gilbert Achcar on Greg Shupak’s recent Libya piece.

Don’t Mention the War

With a vacuous social vision, economics confronts the “return of the social question” woefully unprepared.

Reading Material

Introducing the Jacobin books section.

Art Class

In his new book, Ben Davis’s arguments too often take the form of smug, self-righteous dismissals that convey only disapproval.

The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk

In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by the privileged, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers supported the war effort. That memory is wrong.

Libya and Its Contexts

The Libyan campaign not only caused extensive death and human rights violations, but it may usher in decades of more war.

This Labor Day, Thank a Teacher

Teacher unions offer our best shot at revitalizing the labor movement.

Vonnegut and Labor

Can literature be a force in the fight for economic justice?

Property and Theft

The overthrow of all intellectual property leaves unanswered the question of how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists.

Outside the New China

The exploitative relationship between city and countryside pervades Chinese life. Nowhere is inequality in access to public goods clearer than in the country’s urban education system.

Beyond Windsor

Queer theory fought the marriage equality movement and lost. What comes next will require scholars to come out of their journals and into the streets.

She Came to Riot

The memory of riot grrrl deepens the divide between cultural and material feminism, hobbling critiques of inequality by mistaking self-improvement for revolution.

Silent Majority Music

To put it most unkindly, trap music is adult contemporary for the prosumer age.

Against Tipping

So long as the karmic tip jar clouds our perceptions, the insane injustice of an underpaid labor force reimbursed through only the guilty feelings of their coworkers will persist.

Degendering Value

Gendered conceptions of credit and reward are written into the structures of intellectual property law.

Locked Out

With roots in the laws of seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, intellectual property protections go back to the beginnings of capitalism itself.

The Fantastic Failure of The Lone Ranger

At least Verbinski tries to bring intelligent, politically-savvy revisionist westerns back into style.