left populism

Maybe we try to become skeptical of the idea that the least powerful people are the most responsible for our problems. Maybe we punch up instead of punching the neighbor.

The New Deal was not a peaceful coalition between capital and labor. It was not a workshop in D.C. It was not the product of industry leaders and policymakers sitting together to figure out how to share prosperity. The New Deal was a settlement that came together after decades of industrial violence. That is violence imposed on capital by organized... See more

The common thread between Graeber and Bregman is a refusal to accept that the current organisation of work and economic life is natural, inevitable, or optimal. Both argued that we could build something better and that the primary obstacle was not technological or economic but imaginative and political. We’ve been told so many times that there is... See more

That said, what ‘liberalism’ often now refers to at the level of vibes , is a kind of surface-level niceness that most readily takes root in sub-sections of wealthier socio-economic classes.

“The original and only defensible meaning of liberalism [is that] every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of his or her life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult.”

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, published in 1944, explains why the capacity to “socially embed” new market forces determines national strength. By “embeddedness,” Polanyi meant that markets have historically been subordinate to social and political institutions, rather than governing them. The nineteenthcentury idea of what he called a... See more