The second season of The White Lotus, HBO’s propulsive satire, had sex on the brain more than anything else. But it never lost sight of the razor-sharp class critique that also animated season one.
You wouldn’t know it from the widespread glorification of America’s “founding fathers,” but the years around American independence were shot through with class conflict between elites and working people. And most of the founding fathers were on the wrong side.
Even the best structural reforms will not succeed without aggressive organizing.
Cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th century, separating poor farmers and landless cowboys from vital resources for their struggling cattle herds. So the cowboys formed fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.
While industrial capitalism got rid of the landlord class, capitalism still had economic rent, but instead of being paid to the landlord class, it is now paid to the banks in the form of interest.
Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common feature of collective life. The consequences are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.
When objectivity is impossible, and other media mishugas
A century after violent efforts to suppress resistance to class exploitation, the nation has learned to think about people and the economy with a language that favors the wealthy and elides issues of power.
Dalit activist and writer Gogu Shyamala’s debut collection of short stories, Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But . . . , explores caste, tradition, and exploitation in contemporary India without romanticism.
Soul City was a boondoggle—not a story of lost or forgotten roads tragically not taken.
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