capitalism 
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SOURCE: Jacobin
7/7/2023
Child Labor Was Essential to Early Capitalism—Don't be Shocked it's Coming Back
by Steve Fraser
As employers seek new possibilities to exploit labor, state legislatures are going back to the future with rollbacks of child labor bans.
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SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
5/17/2023
Museum Celebrates Sweet Smell of... Failure
The Museum of Failure is a global traveling exhibition that celebrates the signal marketplace flops of capitalism, from the infamous Edsel and New Coke to the obscure, highlighting the vagaries of consumer taste and historical contingency.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
5/4/2023
Can Capitalism Exist Without Excess?
by Trevor Jackson
The pandemic supply chain disruptions have focused attention on shortages, but the problem of gluts—of food being destroyed when it can't be profitably sold–reflects a deeper problem with global capitalism.
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SOURCE: Harper's
4/15/2023
Beyond Quiet Quitting: The Real Crisis of Work
by Erik Baker
Impressionistic accounts of worker withdrawal and labor militancy both fail to capture a deeper issue: Work is failing to deliver on the promises the state has made as an avenue of meaning and fulfillment.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/12/2023
O'Mara: Politics and Commercial Pressure, not ChatGPT, are the Threats
Historian of technology and Silicon Valley Margaret O'Mara says that the peril of artificial intelligence chatbots and artificial intellience will lie in how it is marketed; the rush to be first to the market creates conditions for sloppy tech and abusive applications.
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SOURCE: Yes!
1/26/2023
Why We Need Pirates
by Paul Buhle, Marcus Rediker and David Lester
Though vilified in popular culture, the history of piracy shows that many crews were egalitarian bands of maritime workers escaping their exploitation at the hands of merchant companies and navies. A new graphic adaptation of a recent history of piracy tells the story.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
1/27/2023
Review: New Book Worships the False Idol of the Responsible Corporation
The idea of corporate social responsibility is an artifact of the domination of society by big business, a domination so powerful as to make alternatives exceedingly difficult to imagine. A new book internalizes that difficulty.
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1/22/2023
As the Progressive Era Ideal of Regulation Vanishes, What Will Stop the March of AI?
by Walter G. Moss
If capital decides that artificial intelligence is sufficiently profitable to put in charge of driving our cars, writing our essays, or even teaching our history classes, what is left to stop it, even if the products are terrible or even dangerous?
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SOURCE: Foreign Policy
1/16/2023
You Can't Understand MLK's Politics Without Understanding His Critique of Capitalism
Adam Tooze discusses King's longstanding efforts to link racial discrimination and economic exploitation, as well as the working-class base of the civil rights movement.
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SOURCE: Vox
12/20/2022
2022's Lesson? Billionaires Bad, Actually
Tech historian Margaret O'Mara says Musk, like other tech moguls, has long been supported by a myth of the individual genius that is only now being overturned by his erratic decisionmaking, boosting of right-wing conspiracy theories, and incredibly thin-skinned reaction to criticism.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
12/16/2022
Dickens Would Have Had Bankman-Fried's Number
The novelist targeted the absurdities and self-congratulation of utilitarian philosophers, the forerunners of the tech industry's "effective altruism," in his 1854 "Hard Times."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
11/22/2022
Is Environmental Damage Really Sabotage by Capital?
by R.H. Lossin
The term "capitalist sabotage" describes intentional destructive activity in service of profit, and is a more accurate label than "accident" or "unintended consquence" for the environmental change that will cause a million unnecessary deaths a year over the coming decades.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
11/10/2022
Lunchtime in Italy: Work, Time and Civil Society
by Jonathan Levy
The Italian lunchtime insists that time be organized around communal rituals and sustenance, not work. Does the utter foreignness of this attitude in America help explain the current national derangement?
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/27/2022
The Robber Barons Had Nothing on Musk
by David Nasaw
Like the Gilded Age robber barons, Elon Musk's self-made mythos hides the government subsidies supporting his businesses. Unlike them, he has the werewhithal to move financial markets to his advantage through Twitter.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
8/3/2022
The Internet is Lousy Because of Capitalism, Not Bad Apple CEOs
by Matthew Crain
"Surveillance advertising was created by marketers, technology start-ups, investors, and politicians, a coalition bound by the desire to commercialize the web as quickly as possible."
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SOURCE: Boston Review
7/20/2022
Can We Have International Cooperation Without Domination?
by Jamie Martin
There is no golden age of international relations free of the coercive power of capital. A different version of internationalism is needed.
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SOURCE: The Nation
6/13/2022
Reviewed: The Bio of Hippie Capitalism Pioneer and Technofuturist Stewart Brand
by Malcolm Harris
From LSD to the computer revolution, Stewart Brand appeared in some way in the biggest cultural trends to emerge from California in the late 20th century. A new authorized biography tells a version of his story, but is it the whole story?
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SOURCE: Boston Review
4/27/2022
Palm Oil is Colonialism's Continuing Nightmare
by Max Haiven
The extraction and trade in palm oil in west Africa has been at the center of two centuries of exploitation and violence, which stands to get worse as the Ukraine war threatens the world supply of competing sunflower oil.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
4/4/2022
Your House Makes More Money than You Do
Rising real estate values are bringing more wealth to Americans than wages and salaries are. This is a big problem for economic equality.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
3/13/2022
How London Became the Oligarchical Cesspool of "Londongrad"
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
From football to real estate to politics, British institutions have been willing to welcome Russian cash for decades without regard for its potential moral taint.