• The latest issue of n+1 features an overview of French philosopher Étienne Balibar’s work.
• “The ability to have an abortion is as important for women as the vote.”
• Eileen Jones, who’s in the new issue of Jacobin, on the death of Roger Ebert.
• Writing in the New York Times, of all places, a Harvard historian explains why “the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.”
• Bureaucracy, austerity, and callousness in the modern welfare state.
• Susan Faludi profiles the late radical feminist Shulamith Firestone.
• “Foundations are, virtually by definition, the voice of plutocracy.” Do they have a place in a democracy?
• Owen Jones writes in the Independent, “Thatcherism was a national catastrophe, and we remain trapped by its consequences.”
• Meanwhile, Jason Cowley in the New Statesman on Thatcher and the Left.
• For a sense of the disaster Thatcher wrought, read the Socialist Register‘s analyses of the crushed 1984–85 miners’ strike.
• A classic: Antonio Gramsci’s “Americanism and Fordism“
• Barbara Fields and Ta-Nehisi Coates, in conversation.