The Digger

This is part two of the essay, where we get into some nitty-gritty questions, like how to get people to do work that is really distasteful or even dangerous under socialism. Interesting stuff. `````````````````````````` Part Two: Framing Socialism Socialism and Markets At the heart of finding a way to manifest social property is the tension between planning and markets. In this section we insist that that this is not a matter of planning versus markets but of discovering creative institutional mechanisms that structure the proper place of planning and markets. Marx rightly argued that praising the voluntary and efficient nature of markets apart from the underlying social relations in which they’re embedded fetishizes markets. But markets are also fetishized when they are rejected as an absolute and treated as having a life of their own independent of those underlying relations. The place of markets under socialism is a matter of ...

There's very little satirical this week in my favorite living satirist's latest, but much straight talk. I couldn't agree more. If you do also, throw the guy some cash if you can spare any extra. Writing is work too, you know.  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Maybe Donald Trump isn’t as stupid as I thought. I’d hate to have to admit that publicly, but it does kind of seem like he has put one over on the liberal corporate media this time. Scanning the recent Trump-related news, I couldn’t help but notice a significant decline in the number of references to Weimar, Germany, Adolf Hitler, and “ the brink of fascism ” that America has supposedly been teetering on since Hillary Clinton lost the election. I googled around pretty well, I think, but I couldn’t find a single editorial warning that Trump is about to summarily cancel the U.S. Constitution, dissolve Congress, and proclaim himself Führer . Nor did I see any mention of Auschwitz , or any other Nazi stuff … which is weird,...

"Janine Jackson interviewed Jenni Monet about indigenous journalism for the  January 25, 2019, episode  of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Janine Jackson: On January 18, thousands of people took part in the  Indigenous Peoples March  in Washington, DC, with solidarity marches in other places around the US and Canada. A political demonstration, including songs, dancing and prayers as well as speeches, the march sought to call attention to a range of issues affecting Native Americans, from environmental devastation to violence against women to healthcare to voter suppression. For corporate media, though, it somehow all became about the intervention of some Catholic school boys from Kentucky, and the  video  of that, and the  other  video of that. And now media are on to their favorite thing: coverage about the coverage. An opportunity to talk about the lives and rights of perhaps the most marginalized community in the countr...

What follows is the paper I gave this past weekend at the ninth annual meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History in Dallas. I received excellent comments from our chair, Amy Wood, and from several audience members–comments that have made me rethink some of my argument. But I publish here without editing in the hopes that I receive more comments.  "To decipher Donald Trump’s election, several gobsmacked liberal journalists have been reading about Reconstruction. They seem to think the era of Reconstruction, when tangible racial progress was realized only to be wrecked by white revanchists, speaks to the present. MSNBC pundit Chris Hayes has declared that books about Reconstruction are “all of what I’m reading.”  Slate ’s Jamelle Bouie, to make sense of Trump’s racist and nativist appeals, has blogged his way through W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 magnum opus,  Black Reconstruction in America . This is not the first time that  Black Reconstruction  has been...