A Quarterly of Politics and Culture
Belabored Podcast #24: New Insurgencies
This week on Belabored: a message from departing co-host Josh Eidelson and a roundup of labor news from New York to Bangladesh. Then, Sarah Jaffe interviews longtime organizer and union strategist Stephen Lerner about fighting Wall Street, organizing around debt, and the recent fast food strikes.{…}
Incendiary Politics on the Black Sea
Despite Bulgaria’s ascension to the EU in 2007, organized crime has continued unabated and no panacea from Brussels has materialized. The corruption has driven Bulgarians into the streets for the first time since the fall of Communism. {…}
The Mirage of Neo-Communism
It is no longer clear that social democracy possesses a coherent and compelling political identity. But it is clear that social democracy has one important thing going for it: the serious commitment to democracy. {…}
Belabored Podcast #23: A Taste of Victory
This week on #Belabored: Occupy celebrates a birthday, labor rights for domestic workers, workers centers under fire, and deep cuts for food stamps. Then, Sarah Jaffe breaks down the interplay between unions, judges, and politicians in the battles to save New York hospitals from closure. {…}
Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre
Perhaps climate change had once seemed too large-scale, or too abstract, for the minutely human landscape of fiction. But the threat seems to have become too pressing to ignore, and less abstract, thanks to a nonstop succession of mega-storms and record-shattering temperatures. Several new novels make climate change central to their plot and setting, appropriating time-honored narratives to accord with our new knowledge and fears. {…}
Remembering Marshall Berman
Marshall Berman, distinguished professor of political science at CUNY and a longtime editor of Dissent, passed away on September 11. In the coming days, we will be posting tributes here from some of the many friends and admirers he left. {…}
Gloves Off in British Energy Battles
In late October 2012, twenty-one activists calling themselves “No Dash for Gas” scrambled up a power station to hold a sit-in three hundred feet up in the sky. Their actions put them at risk of becoming the first British climate activists to be sent to jail. It also revealed troubling collusion between energy companies and the police. {…}
Belabored Podcast #22: Resolutions
In this week’s Belabored podcast, Josh and Sarah talk about a judge’s ruling against Indiana’s “Right to Work,” a living wage law vetoed in DC, Chicago schools without air conditioning, and steps towards UAW union recognition in the South. Plus a report back on the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles. {…}
Destroying the City to Save It: New York in the Shadow of Le Corbusier
We often consider Le Corbusier’s top-down redevelopment ethos a dead letter from the urban renewal era, a victim of its own mistakes. But neoliberal governance, as in Bloomberg’s New York, has seen the revival of large scale architectural schemes and the return of the all-powerful planner archetype. {…}
From Civilizing Missions to Collateral Damage: Syria and the Rules of War
There is a general reluctance to judge the effects of U.S. war-making by the same humanitarian criteria we apply to our enemies. Reflection on the history of international law, and on an incident from 1920s Syria, might shed light on the deep roots of this intuition that the way we fight can’t be held to the same standards as the way they do. {…}
