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Anton Jäger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and coauthor of The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession.
Michel Houellebecq’s chronicles of modern discontent have made him one of the most renowned writers of the century as well as a far-right prophet. Yet liberalism’s fiercest critic still hasn’t found his alternative future.
This isn’t capitalism’s first loneliness epidemic. But in the 21st century, relationship simulators like Replika are here with the solution: your very own AI lover.
Neoliberalism is embedded in the European Union’s DNA. But for the continent’s left, there are few good alternatives.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone chronicled the growing loneliness and isolation of wealthy societies. Twenty years later, the problem is far worse than he could have imagined.
The UK’s former prime minister Liz Truss came to power promising to restore growth to the British economy. During her 45 days at the helm, she crashed it. Calamity is pending, and the country’s political elite are out of ideas.
Belgium was a pioneer of industrialization, and class struggle by its workers’ movement created one of Europe’s most impressive welfare states. But with regional divisions now dominating Belgian politics, the country’s long-term survival is deeply uncertain.
If everything is political, then nothing is political.
The “post-politics” era of the 1990s and 2000s is over — people are engaged with politics everywhere you look. But strangely, our ability to do anything about those politics is still missing.
With the rise of industrial capitalism and the workers’ movement it created, we created new words to explain a confounding new world.
Don’t count right-wing populism out. While technocrats have seen their fortunes rise under lockdown, the sense of national decline and disarray that first brought leaders like Donald Trump to power still has a bright future.
Whatever its shortcomings, Thomas Piketty’s latest book, Capital and Ideology, is a serious attempt to map our social world without resorting to easy abstractions.
Liberalism is often presented as a loose set of principles like reason, freedom, and the rule of law. But over almost two centuries, the Economist has provided a window into the dominant strand of liberalism in action — with imperial conquest and undemocratic regimes defended in the name of upholding “free trade.”
Rutger Bregman made a name for himself by dressing down Tucker Carlson and calling out the ultrarich at Davos. But his new book is closer to a hopeful self-help guide than a manifesto for radical political change.
The Bernie movement can win precisely because we’re learning from the mistakes of Corbynism, not to mention our own.
Four years ago, we celebrated Europe’s left-populist push. Now we have to look seriously at how little was accomplished and what might have been lost.
Socialists and populists have found plenty to disagree about over the years, from private property to trust-busting. But their shared commitment to fighting corporate power often brought them together — and it should today, too.
History shows that when working-class strength threatens the status quo, even moderate conservatives won’t balk at making common cause with fascists.
Left populism is the new idiom of radical politics worldwide. It emerged as the answer to the problem of a weak and disorganized working class — but despite its electoral successes, that class remains weak and disorganized.
Critics of populism lament the rise of “emotion-driven” politics. But instead of asking why politics has become so “irrational,” we should ask why people are so angry in the first place.
“Post-work” Marxism aims to liberate us from the coercion of wage labor. But without a program for reorganizing production, it can only return us to the tyranny of the market.