These challenges must be the focus of the labor left’s energies in the months and years to come. It goes without saying that workplace organizing remains a key task. But something fundamental must also change in the labor left’s electoral orientation. At the very least, a much more confrontational approach toward a party that has actively encouraged class dealignment is needed.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/dealignment-democrats-clinton-obama-trump/

There was still patriarchy in Eastern Europe — getting rid of capitalism doesn’t automatically eliminate patriarchy. But they detached patriarchy from its role in upholding wealth inequality, and that blunted it. There were also still inequalities, but these were inequalities of privilege, not wealth. Even at the highest level of Communist society, there were limits on how big your apartment could be. You couldn’t have a mansion. It was very difficult to get a car, and if you did, it was the same car everyone else got. People showed off by bragging about how many books they’d read and what month they got assigned to visit their communal seaside resorts. (July was the most high-status month to go, by the way.)

In order to attract partners and get social esteem, men were not invested in making more money, which wouldn’t work in a socialist society anyway (because there wasn’t anything to buy). In this context, women chose partners based on attraction, mutual compatibility, shared interests, and affection — not on whether the man could pay the rent, which was irrelevant, because you had housing from the state. These states also provided child allowances, childcare, and paid job-protected parental leave. Under socialism, men had to be attentive and good partners in order to attract women.
"After socialism, once wealth became important for attracting women, men found that it was much easier to just get money than to be interesting."

The result, as I documented in my book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, was that men ended up investing in being interesting guys that women wanted to be with. Of course, this improved gender relations!

After socialism, once wealth became important for attracting women, men found that it was much easier to just get money than to be interesting. This shift was obviously bad for women, but it was also bad for men. I’ve talked to men who grew up under socialism who say that after 1989 or ’91, they were never really sure if women were with them because they loved them or because they needed their money. They have an idealized view of relationships before capitalism because if a woman was with you, it was because she genuinely liked you. That made men feel secure.

In a society where everything is about wealth, we need other metrics of achievement — you earn esteem not just because you’re rich or ripped, but because of your accomplishments. These kinds of institutions promote self-esteem and prosocial behavior.

But beyond class struggle and civic organizations, the main thing we need is good jobs. Workplaces can serve the same purpose, but in capitalism they absolutely don’t.

Everybody needs money. But beyond that, everybody wants the same thing: to be appreciated, validated, and recognized for who they are and what they give to the world. That’s why Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life was such a huge bestseller. It was a book talking to young men and telling them, “Here are some ways you can get esteem.” They’re hungry for it.

As socialists, feminists, and humanists, we absolutely must understand this. Our politics must be grounded in it, and we should propose viable alternatives that can make people feel better about themselves.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/manosphere-tate-gender-wealth-inequality/

Una risposta a questa domanda la offre la Knesset in questi giorni, approvando una serie di leggi e leggine che, lette nel loro complesso, spianano la strada all’annessione per via amministrativa del 60 per cento del West Bank, ossia la Cisgiordania.

In sostanza il governo Netanyahu lancia una sorta di offensiva burocratica contro i 200mila palestinesi che vivono nella cosiddetta Area C, per spossessarli delle loro proprietà o costringerli a svenderle. Alle scorribande dei coloni protetti dall’’esercito si affiancherà uno stuolo di impiegati, magistrati e periti, incaricati di chiudere la partita.

Sarà l’atto finale di un espansionismo per così dire “democratico”, a norma di legge. Il quotidiano centrista Yedioth Aronot le illustra in un articolo opportunamente intitolato “Come Israele sta muovendo quietamente verso l’annessione de facto del West Bank”.

Tra gli interventi legislativi previsti, i principali mirano a trasferire alle autorità israeliane catasto, perizie e sovrintendenze archeologiche, attualmente in carico all’Autorità palestinese; a riclassificare aree del West Bank come "terra di stato (israeliano)”, scippandole ai proprietari con il pretesto di vaghezze nel titolo di proprietà in origine giordano; a connettere gli insediamenti dei coloni alla rete nazionale del gas; a ribattezzare il West Bank col nome biblico di “Giudea e Samaria”; a cancellare i limiti che attualmente frenano l’acquisto di proprietà palestinesi da parte di cittadini israeliani.

Gli effetti saranno presto visibili. Diventeranno legali gli avamposti che il movimento dei coloni e l’esercito hanno disseminato strategicamente per spezzare la continuità del territorio palestinese.

Altri insediamenti sorgeranno su terreni palestinesi riclassificati come terreni demaniali. E i 200mila palestinesi che vivono nell’Area C vedranno progressivamente svanire quel minimo di legalità che possono ancora opporre alle invasioni dei coloni.

La pressione perché emigrino crescerà. E le tensioni generate saranno occasione o pretesto per altri interventi militari sul genere di quelli occorsi a Jenin e Tulkarem, cittadine del West Bank (Area A, cioè formalmente sotto il controllo diretto dell’Autorità palestinese) “gazaficate” negli ultimi mesi mediante la distruzione delle reti idriche ed elettriche, oltre che di strade ed interi palazzi. Risultato: l’espulsione di 40mila abitanti.

Continuare la guerra di Gaza, oggi sotto occupazione per il 70 per cento, è l’altro versante della manovra a tenaglia israeliana, aggravata dalle sempre più feroci polemiche interne: martedì 20 maggio quella intorno al leader della sinistra Yair Golan, che non ha esitato di dire che oggi Israele «sta diventando uno Stato paria», che «uccide bambini per hobby».

https://www.editorialedomani.it/politica/mondo/la-manovra-a-tenaglia-di-israele-per-annettersi-la-cisgiordania-re1rh1gy

Challenging that orthodoxy is surely one of the most urgent tasks today on the Left. Toward this end, I have argued that, whatever else it entails, a materialist theory does not require conceiving of agents as being one-dimensional or cold, calculating utility machines. Materialism simply recognizes that the need to secure economic and physical well-being is the central precondition for the pursuit of any other goals. It does not always have to overwhelm other goals, but where they come into conflict, social agents can ignore it only at great cost. Therefore, while particularly committed individuals might choose to accept enormous hardships at the expense of their physical well-being, most people typically will not. They will be more likely to reject choices that call for such sacrifices as the intensity of those sacrifices increases, and they will accommodate themselves to their circumstances’ demands.

materialism not only provides a means for universal resistance to capital but a profoundly democratic approach to that resistance. The foundation for any democratic engagement is to treat other people with respect. And this is impossible if you assume that they suffer from cognitive deficiencies, are easily duped, or are simply the products of their culture. For people who do political organizing, it is absolutely essential to approach the task with the view that they are dealing with a conscious, reflexive constituency to whom they have to make a compelling case to resist their overlords in some particular way. And they have to assume people will accept a political strategy on rational grounds, not just through brainwashing or — as is so common among today’s leftists — shaming and cajoling.

How do we make sense of the fact that workers vote in large numbers for parties wedded to their enemies, like the Republican Party in the United States and conservative parties elsewhere? Two points are important here. First, to say that rational actors pursue their interests is not to say that they are always successful in this endeavor. This is a claim about their motivation, not about their success in pursuit of their interests. I can very well undertake an action because I believe it to be in my interest even as its effect is disappointing or runs counter to what I had intended.

The best description of this state of affairs is not that working-class voters are irrational but simply that they are misinformed. As I have argued, being misled or misinformed can, however, indicate irrationality if actors do not change their actions upon observing their effects. To go back to the example of health care, if it turns out that the course of action prescribed to me by my doctor only makes my condition worse, I would indeed be irrational if I continued to pursue it. We can apply the same standard for workers who vote conservative. Surely, after a few instances of making such a choice, we should expect them to alter their judgment.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/materialism-socialism-democracy-left-wing/

This republican conception sees freedom not as the absence of interference (as liberalism would have it) but as the absence of domination by others: of their arbitrary power over you.

the spine of Leipold’s argument is that Marx and Engels, starting with a purely political democratic republicanism, were persuaded to a communism that was initially anti-political (as were the communisms of the “utopian socialists” later criticized in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere), but then moved to a new form of communism, which placed democratic political revolution first — not as the end point, but as the necessary first step toward communism. And at the same time Marx and Engels grounded this possibility on the struggle for political power of the proletariat as a class.

The conception of the democratic republic as the necessary first step to communism was Marx’s conception: Leipold has, I think, shown this beyond rebuttal. But it is still possible to argue that Marx was wrong on this question. And it is also possible to argue that Marx’s and Engels’s conception of the road to socialism is superseded by twentieth-century developments.

I put on one side the argument for the “coalitions of the oppressed” approach. It has resulted in handing the issue of class to the right wing, producing “Vote Harris: Get Trump” and analogous results across the world, and as a result far worse outcomes for the oppressed than the old conception of prioritizing the working class.

Democratic republicanism is essential to effective economic planning; and because it is essential to effective economic planning, it is also essential to believable socialism.

The second and more immediate is that at a low level, capital rules through the support of the managerialist labor bureaucracy — from its right wing in the “AFL-CIA” to its left wing in the full-timers of the Trotskyist left. We need to overcome this managerialist labor bureaucracy in order to actually challenge capital.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/republicanism-karl-marx-leipold-review/

This is the blind spot running through all of Abundance’s anecdotes: the limits of the private sector. The primary conceit is that in many areas, the private sector is ready to invest—and to invest big—if politicians would only lift public barriers standing in their way. There is little evidence that is true. In reality, corporate executives and managers make investment decisions based on expected profits. Even when zoning restrictions are favorable, developers evaluate a range of investment options before committing to construction. They are looking not only for positive returns but for higher returns than alternative option. The much-touted housing boom in Austin is a case in point: after a few years of above-average building activity led to modest rent reductions, residential developers reduced construction substantially. The burst of construction made only a small dent in the dramatic increase in rents since 2010.

Along with the state-guided enterprises of China, Klein and Thompson’s preferred corporate model is the AT&T of midcentury—a highly innovative enterprise credited with developing technologies like the laser, photovoltaic cell, and transistor. They attribute AT&T’s long-term orientation and accomplishments to its status as a secure, government-protected monopoly. If that AT&T existed today, large shareholders would balk at risky, long-term investment in speculative engineering and scientific projects. Indeed, this is what happened when a durable monopoly of our era tried to replicate the AT&T success. In 2010 Google set up Google X for an elite group of employees to pursue long-term projects, but by 2015 Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat imposed a more short-term, cautious orientation on the venture as part of a broader effort to reduce costs and disburse more cash to shareholders.

The government could do a lot to change corporate behavior—by banning stock buybacks, for example, or requiring firms to give workers and consumers board representation.
________________

The book says nothing about why the New Deal was so successful, nor about the populist politics—including Franklin Roosevelt’s contempt for “economic royalists”—that undergirded it. Most Americans had electrification, but not electric modernization. The private sector failed to deliver electric modernization simply because it wasn’t profitable. FDR refused to accept this status quo and believed that electric modernization was a necessity. He offered a program that was part conservative, part radical: stressing that private ownership should be the norm in electricity, but endorsing much stronger public control over private utilities. Even as he examined the finer points of utility cost accounting, his rhetoric was populist and combative. Soon after taking office, Roosevelt worked with Congress to put the Portland program into practice. In his first 100 days, Congress established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to build and operate dams on the Tennessee River and its tributaries.

Roosevelt and Congress also launched a major rural electrification program. Created in 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) offered low-cost credit to build power lines in the countryside. The carrot of cheap financing was not enough to get private utilities off the sidelines. (This experience should counsel against optimism about tax credits and other enticements to clean energy development today.) Instead, the REA turned to a largely untested institutional form—consumer-owned rural electric cooperatives—to build these lines.
Thanks to federal support, the rates of farm electrification skyrocketed in just two decades, rising from one in ten in 1935 to more than nine in ten in 1955. Rural cooperatives did the bulk of this line extension, but the private sector stepped up once the federal government showed that rural electrification was a profitable undertaking

That public abundance is still possible. Americans got a small taste of real “supply-side” liberalism in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Through this program, EPB of Chattanooga, a municipally owned utility created in the 1930s, obtained a federal grant to build a citywide fiber optic network. The utility used these funds to deliver the nation’s first 1 gigabyte per second broadband service, helping attract tech companies and workers to the newly dubbed “Gig City.” Replicating this success on a national scale and across a range of urgent challenges calls for a serious revival of New Deal politics, not a doubling down on the ethos of neoliberalism—however appealingly rebranded.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-real-path-to-abundance/

Mentre il ministro si concede passerelle e telecamere, la Direzione investigativa antimafia ha però acceso i riflettori. Sono cinque le procure distrettuali già coinvolte – Reggio Calabria, Messina, Catania, Catanzaro e Milano – e tutte si stanno concentrando sulle aree da espropriare e sui subappalti, ambiti storicamente sensibili alle infiltrazioni mafiose.

Un campanello d’allarme squillato forte anche per il caso dell’ex procuratore aggiunto Michele Prestipino, finito sotto procedimento disciplinare perché avrebbe rivelato informazioni riservate a Gianni De Gennaro (presidente di Eurolink, il consorzio incaricato della realizzazione del ponte) e a Francesco Gratteri, responsabile della sicurezza di Webuild. Prestipino, intercettato dalla procura di Caltanissetta, parlava di indagini in corso su imprenditori siciliani. Ora l'inchiesta si sposta a Roma.

Bonelli denuncia come «nei documenti ufficiali degli espropri per il Ponte compaiano nomi legati a Cosa Nostra e alla 'Ndrangheta».

L’elenco è inquietante: i terreni espropriati includerebbero proprietà riconducibili agli eredi di Santo Sfameni, figura storica dei clan del Messinese, già condannato per gravi reati. Tra i fondi agricoli c’è anche un casolare di Villafranca Tirrena, già rifugio di latitanti e teatro di summit mafiosi, tra cui quelli con Angelo Siino – “ministro dei lavori pubblici” di Cosa Nostra – e il boss Michelangelo Alfano. Sul versante calabrese, notizie risalenti all'aprile 2024 hanno evidenziato come terreni nel comune di Limbadi (provincia di Vibo Valentia), appartenenti a Carmina Antonia Mancuso (figlia del boss Ciccio Mancuso) e a Francesco Naso (imprenditore condannato in primo grado per associazione mafiosa nel processo Rinascita Scott e ritenuto vicino al clan Mancuso), siano inclusi nelle procedure di esproprio.

Il Documento di finanza pubblica 2025 certifica lo spostamento di 1,6 miliardi dai Fondi di coesione e sviluppo di Calabria e Sicilia per finanziare il progetto.

https://www.editorialedomani.it/fatti/ponte-stretto-salvini-reggio-calabria-mafia-comitati-sindacati-nq0wpj3u