Criticizing philanthropy (or philanthropists) of any kind is tricky. To most people, a negative appraisal sounds off-base and churlish—yet another instance of “No good deed goes unpunished.” Criticizing the immense private foundations that finance and shape the market-model “reform” of …
We are pleased to welcome three new editorial board members to Dissent. Leo Casey is the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute as well as a long-time friend and contributor to the magazine. Sarah Jaffe is an accomplished labor …
Cross-posted from Waging Nonviolence. Although Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern community organizing in the United States, passed away in 1972, he is still invoked by the right as a dangerous harbinger of looming insurrection. And although his landmark …
Is the era of the student athlete over? This week on Belabored, Lee Adler joins us to discuss the groundbreaking NLRB decision that Northwestern University’s football players are employees and thus eligible to form a union. Plus: a growing campaign to opt out of standardized testing, the difference between unemployment and retirement, the struggle against Amazon in Europe, and more.
That publishers routinely fill their mastheads and bylines with a disproportionate number of white men should hardly come as a surprise when even getting a foot in the door of the industry requires a significant amount of capital, both economic and social.
“Over half of big manufacturers say they’re thinking of insourcing jobs from abroad,” crowed President Barack Obama in this year’s State of the Union address. Riding the wave of populist anti-offshoring sentiment that served him so well in the 2012 …
This week on Belabored, we speak to activists with the Retail Action Project and Women Employed about the impact of unfair scheduling on the lives of retail workers. We also discuss the Supreme Court drama over employer-sponsored health insurance and reproductive rights, “the end of jobs,” labor protections for unpaid interns, Wall Street’s attack on Los Angeles, TaskRabbit, and more.
Libertarianism is suddenly in fashion. Denouncing the NSA, Rand Paul draws cheers both from young leftists in Berkeley and young conservatives in D.C.—and narrowly leads in early polls for the 2016 presidential nomination. The Koch brothers—who once bankrolled the Libertarian Party—plan to spend …
This week, Belabored talks to political scientist Adolph Reed about his recent article in Harper’s magazine, examining the broad prospects for today’s left, the need to focus on inequality, why the labor movement matters, and why Democrats relying on big money donors is like keeping a Komodo dragon in your bedroom. Plus: a strike in Vermont, a lawsuit at McDonald’s, a modest proposal for executive salaries, and more.
In January, the well-known pickup artist Roosh V created a sub-forum on his website to discuss the Ukraine conflict, thanks to “heavy interest” in the topic among his fans. What will happen if the “pussy paradise” joins the European Union?
By the time Crimeans went to the polls yesterday, it was clear that their referendum on secession added little more than rhetorical flourish to a military and political fait accompli. With over 95 percent of those polled voting to join …
This week, Belabored examines the history and ongoing impact of the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike with Micah Uetricht, author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity. Plus: uprisings by UPS workers in New York and IBM workers in China; labor abuses by the Pentagon overseas; the White House’s plans to expand overtime pay; and more.
On Thursday, February 27, Dissent and the India-China Institute co-hosted a panel on anti-corruption movements in China and India at the New School in New York. Speaking on the panel were Jiayang Fan (a contributor at the New Yorker), Mehboob …
In a recent review of Louis Althusser’s On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Anne Boyer misrepresents key aspects of his thought. At the center of her argument is the claim that “Althusserianism has been a Marxism for those who prefer their …
This week, Belabored talks to Melissa Gira Grant, whose new book Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work dismantles the myths surrounding sex work and challenges us to think about sex work in the same framework in which we put other kinds of labor. At the heart is the question: should workers have to love their work in order to be able to demand rights and protections on the job?
