A very useful crisis
This is the text of a talk I gave at New York City DSA’s night school, Socialists of NYC series, May 14, 2024 As the 1960s were turning into the 1970s, New York City was coming off a long economic boom. Sure, we’d lost 151,000 manufacturing jobs between 1950 and the 1969 peak, but that was almost exactly offset by a gain in finance, and overall employment in the city was up 391,000. There were signs of budgetary trouble starting in the mid-1960s, but those issues were patched over with a combination… Read More
The private equity racket
This is the edited version of a talk I gave at New York City political education event on private equity, December 2, 2023. My fellow panelists were Kim Phillips-Fein and Holden Taylor. Video is here. You’ve always got to start somewhere, so I think I’ll start as the 19th century was turning into the 20th. As the scale and technical complexity of production increased, the previously existing world of businesses that were run either as sole proprietorships or small partnerships were inadequate to the task. They gave way to what would become… Read More
Neoliberalism right and left
This is the text of a talk I gave at New York City DSA’s Night School, June 27, 2023. This was the concluding session of a series, Socialism in America, organized by the chapter’s Political Education Committee, of which I’m a member. Also speaking: Raina Lipsitz and Jamie Peck. The graphics were shown as slides during the talk. Neoliberalism is a funny word. True, it’s often used as an epithet by people who don’t really know what it means, which makes it easy for proponents to deny the label. It’s curious how often… Read More
McCarthyism: a primer
Here is the lightly edited text of a talk I gave to New York City DSA’s Night School, May 9, 2023. I restored a few passages I cut for length and added a few minor bits. There’s a video version of the full event here, which also includes Chip Gibbons’s presentation on J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. I’m not much to look at but Chip is well worth hearing. For a note on sources, see the bottom of the page. The graphics were shown as slides during the presentation by way… Read More
Scattered speculations on the US ruling class
This is the text of a talk I gave at a virtual conference sponsored by the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice at the University of Wisconsin, February 13, 2023. The other panelists were Ho-fung Hung and Göran Therborn. It draws heavily on my Jacobin article on the ruling class and Harper’s magazine article on the WASPs but updates them to the lamentable present. In preparing these remarks, that old Gayatri Spivak title came to mind, “Scattered speculations on the question of value.” I don’t mean to cite any more of that article, something I haven’t… Read More
Reflections on the current disorder
[This is the edited text of a talk I gave via Zoom, like everything else these days, sponsored by the North Brooklyn chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. It reprises and updates several things I’ve written recently, but it’s hard to be original these days. Video will be posted, but who wants to look at me? The Q&A was quite good though.] Before I get into the body of my talk, I want to celebrate our electoral victories and say how proud I am to be a member of DSA. If… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 