Issue 11/12 Preview: “Misery Index”
Our next issue will be mailed to subscribers on August 16 and released online on September 2.
Here’s a preview of the table of contents.
What’s not shown below is the art, which is some of the strongest we’ve yet featured. The cover should be a good indication of that. In addition to our designers Remeike Forbes and Erin Schell, Kotryna Zukauskaite, Ben Sanders, and Daniel Haskett all have illustrations in the 100-page double issue.
You have until Monday morning to subscribe, renew lapsed subscriptions, or e-mail us with your updated address to receive the issue straight from the printer.
Editorial
Property and Theft
by Peter Frase
The overthrow of all intellectual property leaves unanswered the question of how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists.
Essays
The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk
by Penny Lewis
In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by the privileged, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers supported the war effort. That memory is wrong.
Outside the New China
The exploitative relationship between city and countryside pervades Chinese life. Nowhere is inequality in access to public goods clearer than in the country’s urban education system.
by Eli Friedman
Beyond Windsor
by Claire Potter
Queer theory fought the marriage equality movement and lost. What comes next will require scholars to come out of their journals and into the streets.
Don’t Mention the War
by Seth Ackerman and Mike Beggs
With a vacuous social vision, economics confronts the “return of the social question” woefully unprepared.
A Marxist in Keynes’ Court
by Timothy Shenk
Maurice Dobb was one of John Maynard Keynes’ favorite students. He was also a committed Marxist and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Degendering Value
by Anne Elizabeth Moore
Gendered conceptions of credit and reward are written into the structures of intellectual property law.
Locked Out
by Sean Andrews
With roots in the laws of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, intellectual property protections go back to the beginnings of capitalism itself.
Edward Snowden and the American Condition
by Chase Madar
Law and lawyers can’t save us from the creeping police state — but politics might.
Books
Reading Materiel
by Scott McLemee
Introducing the Jacobin books section
From Bandung to BRICs
by Rafia Zakaria
Vijay Prashad’s Poorer Nations asks whether the Global South can pose a credible alternative to neoliberal development.
Back to the Fragments
by Nina Power
A socialist-feminist classic appeared just as Thatcherism began pulverizing the Left. Today, should it be read as historical document or a blueprint for action?
She Came to Riot
by Jennifer Pan
The memory of riot grrrl deepens the divide between cultural and material feminism, hobbling critiques of inequality by mistaking self-improvement for revolution.
Culture
The Fantastic Failure of the Lone Ranger
by Eileen Jones
Say what you want about the results, but at least Verbinski tries to bring intelligent, politically savvy revisionist Westerns back into style.
Silent Majority Music
by Gavin Mueller
To put it most unkindly, trap music is adult contemporary for the prosumer age.
Against Tipping
by Ian Svenonius
So long as the karmic tip jar clouds our perceptions, the insane injustice of an underpaid labor force reimbursed through only the guilty feelings of their coworkers will persist.