Wendy Brown explains that she regards neoliberalism as a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm. […]

It’s become common to complain that social media have created “bubbles” and aided political polarization. It has also become common to object that the Internet has fallen short of serving as a public sphere, largely because of the ways commercial interests have shaped it. In this context, various technologies—from apps and online petitions to organizational […]

Since the latest UN climate report, some friends and acquaintances have been saying (repeating, actually) that https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fjodi.dean3%2Fposts%2F10156553770399277&width=500“>only a revolution can save us. This strikes me a not just wrongheaded, but dangerously so.   By “revolution,” these people generally mean something like seizing direct collective control of the means of production—of necessity on a global scale. […]

One of the most important insights generated by post-Marxist thought is that “class,” as the name of a structural position/condition within capitalist relations of production, is that which cannot function as a social identity. It emerges there only in displaced form of various proxies. Unfortunately, various critiques of liberalism, the nation-state, procedural democracy, and the like […]

In a recent blog post about what he calls “aspirational fascism,” William Connolly writes: …a focus on guardrails alone reproduces the conditions that created the crisis in the first place. It under plays how radical actions within universities, corporations, localities, and the state challenged ordinary party politics as it extended the pluralization of civic culture. […]

For all the sharp criticism self-described leftists and radicals aim at liberals and liberalism, virtually every successful social movement in the US has been liberal at its core. Even when movement leaders, such as MLK, Jr., were opposed to liberal ideas, they succeeded largely by relying on those ideas. King may have been a socialist, […]

As predicted, the “content” of the Nunes memo is a ruse. The press and people who read are obsessing over it, while Trump and his minions have already declared that it demonstrates a witch hunt. It is made for waving around at cameras, not for hermeneutics. Democrats desperately trying to figure out how to rebut […]

Why do smart people insist on manufacturing demonstrably false straw-man versions of Russiagate? Take this nugget: “The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump.” That’s just wrong. If […]