Sublime

Obviously Reich’s influence went way beyond just me. Alongside other authors such as Anthony Giddens[411] and Jeremy Rifkin[412], he was instrumental in crafting the message of a new generation of progressive leaders that the era of the steady, lifelong job was over. In a more global and unstable world, lifelong education was the new key to providi

Assuming Weber’s central insight to have been correct, then in the face of the dramatic transformation in the forms of contemporary capitalism, some new ethos ought to be unfolding right before our eyes.

The political structure that emerged was quite simple. The Republican Party could mobilize massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its material interests on cultural/religious grounds while the Democratic Party could not afford to attend to the material needs (for example for a national health-care system) of its t

A project of unionizing service workers, fast-food workers, domestic workers, agricultural workers, public-sector workers, and more—defending the unions that do exist and organizing the unorganized—that’s a potential game-changer.

The first principle of democratic socialism is that we measure our wealth—both individual and collective—in terms of socially available free time. Our free time depends on social and institutional forms because it does not concern a mere quantity of time. Rather, our quantity of free time is inseparable from the quality of our free time, which requ

These types fall roughly along the lines described by Weber: the rational and expressive dimensions. In the rational dimension, one finds a rational-economic man (Homo economicus) and a rational-ethical man (following in the tradition of a Kantian ethical imperative),7 while in the expressive dimension, one finds an antimodernist, mystical type and

The crisis is this: institutions built on expertise are no longer working.

Under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable.

Before the wage earner could emerge as our society’s paradigmatic subject, a condition historian Michael Denning calls “wagelessness” had to be imposed. “Capitalism,” Denning writes, “begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living.”24 In other words, it begins with manufactured insecurity—insecurity in its new modern ec