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.

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Contributors

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.

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