New Future

Don’t mourn the professional-managerial class — organize it.

Like its 20th-century predecessors, today’s far right longs for the purported glories of the ancient world, all while fetishizing modern technology.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died last month, attempted to forge an alliance between neo-fascists, apologists for French colonialism, and neglected working-class communities. Today this coalition threatens the foundations of the Fifth Republic.

By examining the dirty history of America’s electrification, Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power shows how organizers can build support for public power and public utilities during hostile times.

In 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the prime minister of newly independent Congo. His close ally Andrée Blouin describes how Belgium and the US conspired to oust Lumumba and impose Mobutu’s kleptocratic dictatorship on the Congolese people.

In a staggering display of cruelty, South African police laid siege to an illegal gold mine near Johannesburg, leaving at least 78 workers dead by mid-January. Informal miners are the shadow of an exploitative mining industry — one inextricable from apartheid.

This week, as Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was attempting to further gut the US government, his rocket company SpaceX was cementing a NASA contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency.

Love Hurts is the Valentine’s Day–themed action movie you never asked for.

Born to Rule makes it clear that wealth and inheritance, not merit, are still the way to get ahead in Britain. Its case for a meritocratic elite, however, misses the point: Britain’s problems run much deeper than talent misallocation among its upper classes.

Immanuel Wallerstein was convinced that the capitalist system would end within the next few decades and would either be replaced by a more regressive world-system or a more democratic and egalitarian one. In his view, the odds were 50-50 each way.

In his attempts to reshape the federal workforce, Donald Trump is drawing on the American tradition of treating workers’ employment as completely subject to their bosses’ whims.

In his latest book, Peter Beinart calls on American Jews to see the horrors of Gaza and abandon blind Zionism in favor of a justice-driven Jewish identity. Blending biblical critique with political observations, it rethinks the meaning of Jewishness today.

In Colombia, coastal erosion caused by a combination of climate change and environmentally destructive industrial agriculture is displacing the country’s poorest citizens. But the scale of the disaster means that it has no easy solutions.

From the smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution to the neural nets of today, technology has always been a double-edged sword that carries the promise of liberation for workers. But cashing in on that promise requires control over how technology is deployed.