Alec Israeli is an assistant editor at Jacobin.
Slavery in America, Brazil, and Cuba relied on capitalist markets, which supplied credit and demand for slave-made goods. The Reckoning, Robin Blackburn’s monumental history, offers a dizzying account of the politics behind this system’s rise and fall.
Neoliberalism’s rise engendered a pessimism about historical progress. Geoff Eley’s History Made Conscious shows how cultural history flourished in this era of diminished class politics, while nonetheless continuing to pose valuable questions to the Left.
Philosopher Henry David Thoreau has developed a reputation as an advocate for self-help in the form of withdrawal from work. But in his writing, he advanced a thoroughgoing critique of work under capitalism and defended the emancipatory potential of labor.