(A version of this article was originally published in Jacobin in 2020.) In August of 2020, as uprisings continued to sweep the United States in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Virginia state Senator Louise Lucas found herself charged with a felony, in connection with damage to a Confederate monument in the [ ]
Near the end of Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois reflects on the role of mob violence in the counter-revolution of the 1860s and 1870s, which overturned Radical Reconstruction in the south. Of the Regulators, Ku Klux Klan, and other extra-legal forms of white terror, he remarks that 'the kind of thing that men are afraid [ ]
Max Elbaum is a friend and sometime political mentor. He's also the author of Revolution in the Air, the definitive history of the 'New Communist Movement' within the New Left, a tendency that has been broadly influential on my politics as well. So I always pay close attention to his comments on left strategy. In [ ]
Brad DeLong: In the email inbox: In Agatha Christie's autobiography, she mentioned how she never thought she would ever be wealthy enough to own a car - nor so poor that she wouldn't have servants... Malcolm Harris: Servant labor is so cheap even kids can afford it now. https://t.co/Fs0eNRKlaW Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) May 1, [ ]
I swore I wasn't going to do this, but here I go joining in with the endless commentaries on Bernie Sanders, who has at long last announced his candidacy for a Presidential election almost two years away. To get one thing out of the way: I support Bernie Sanders. I will vote for him in [ ]
It is with great sadness that I've learned that one of my major intellectual influences, the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright, is in his last days. But as he bravely narrates his last weeks, I can at least offer my own appreciation of his intellect while he is still with us. Those who recall the [ ]
I was pleasantly surprised with the response to my last post (thanks Red Wedge and Commune and the Art and Labor podcast). But there was one specific misinterpretation that I want to try to clarify. It arises specifically among the 'normie' socialists I was targeting in my previous intervention, and it pertains to just what [ ]
'our power isn t in being less different or strange...it s in making strange things seem possible'. The above statement, though today often attributed to antifa mascot Gritty, was actually made by Kate Griffiths of the Red Bloom Communist Collective. It reiterates themes discussed in a wonderful interview they did with Red Wedge magazine, entitled 'Normie Socialism [ ]
Some recent discussion on Twitter has me thinking again about one of my longstanding projects, and something I want to do at book length soon: the contradictions of building social democracy. My basic outlook, as described in the linked essay, is that the socialist project must be conceived in terms of 'building the crisis', or [ ]
What follows resembles remarks I made at an event marking an art exhibition at the Verso Books, to which Kathy Newman kindly invited me. The event took place on the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the critical moments in the last great financial crisis. The artwork I mention is described [ ]