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'Informer': TV Review

Tim Goodman The Hollywood Reporter
A taut, twisty new series from Amazon and the BBC touches on race, class, immigration and terrorism.

Dialectics of Christmas

Fred Halliday Verso
A vintage holiday treat from the UK's Black Dwarf, Christmas 1969*, where the author analyzes the dialectic of Christmas in which the desire for happiness is marshaled into a tool of subjection (and alcoholic oblivion).

tv

'Claws' Has the Best Politics on Television

Brenden Gallagher Complex
Representation alone isn’t enough to make a show political. You have to do something with it. Claws finds a way to tie its characters to a broader political narrative in almost every episode.

tv

Anthony Bourdain Was the Best White Man

Malika Rao New York Magazine
Bourdain engaged without fetishizing, touristed with ease, in the way of a person who’s been toggling between identities so long, the act of meeting a stranger from a strange land is the only familiar feeling.

books

Race and the Logic of Capital

Alan Wald Solidarity
Shortly before his death, James Baldwin wrote that in the U.S., “White is a metaphor for power,” an observation that is deep background for much of the discussion in the masterly book under review, where race and class are intertwined, yet surface differences are used to split the labor force and maintain capital’s hegemony. The book can usefully inform debate on race and class and aid in reconstructing a revolutionary project in the context of Trumpworld.

Two Billion Dollars in Stolen Wages Were Recovered for Workers in 2015 and 2016—and That’s Just a Drop in the Bucket

Celine McNicholas, Zane Mokhiber, and Adam Chaikof Economic Policy Institute
Given that wage theft disproportionately affects workers from low-income households—who are already struggling to make ends meet—the loss of wages can be devastating. And these recovery numbers likely dramatically underrepresent the pervasiveness of wage theft—it has been estimated that low-wage workers lose more than $50 billion annually to wage theft.

We Didn’t Start the Fire

Meagan Day Jacobin
Class conflict isn’t something we choose to engage in. It’s just how capitalism works.
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