A Brief History Of How Countries Sleepwalk Into War
John P. Ruehl – Independent Media Institute
07-31-2026 ~ From the Civil War and World War I to the ongoing conflict in Iran, America’s and other nations’ expectations of war have repeatedly been challenged by the realities that emerge once fighting begins.
A nominal ceasefire reached in April 2026 has done little to halt the escalation in the Persian Gulf. After Iran’s “attempted surprise attack” against US forces on July 28, the US retaliated by launching a “heavy wave” of airstrikes on July 30, according to NPR, targeting Iran’s “military command centers and missile facilities,” and intensifying the fighting in the Middle East.
Since the war began in February, Iran has suffered extensive destruction to military and civilian infrastructure, resulting in thousands of casualties. Washington’s Gulf allies and Israel have likewise faced sustained pressure from Iranian attacks. Yet, despite nearly $40 billion in US spending on the war with Iran and damage to American military assets in the region, the conflict has not sparked widespread public debate among its citizens.
Protected by two vast oceans and overwhelming military power, the US has long been able to separate everyday life from the consequences of war and shield policymakers from public scrutiny. The casualties in the current conflict remain relatively low, with the latest Iranian strike bringing the official number of US deaths to 18. Life at home has continued largely uninterrupted, with the US even cohosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup during the conflict.
But the war has already outlasted initial expectations. US President Donald Trump had earlier stated that the Iran war would last four to five weeks, according to Al Jazeera, and the American strikes would lead to the collapse of the Iranian government. The July 26 expansion of Houthi attacks on shipping and infrastructure around the Red Sea has, however, further complicated the war as it is unclear what they aim to achieve.
America’s detachment from the war marks a departure from its early history, when conflicts were felt more directly and romanticized through glory and duty. The Civil War shattered those beliefs by exposing Americans to the realities of industrial warfare, while Europe’s descent into World War I revealed how easily countries could underestimate the costs of conflict while overestimating their ability to adapt to them. Those lessons are worth revisiting as the modern US approach to conflict continues to evolve.
The End of Glorious War
The last time war fundamentally transformed everyday life in the US was arguably during the Civil War. Before that, conflict was still imagined through the lens of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the frontier wars. Armed clashes were subjects of songs, novels, paintings, and patriotic myths, which portrayed them as decisive battles won through heroic charges, often accompanied by the fanfare of flags and drums.
As sectional tensions intensified in the lead-up to the Civil War, many Southern figures confidently insisted the commercial-minded North would never risk a costly conflict. In his infamous “Cotton is King” speech from 1858, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond declared, “No power on earth dares to make war upon” the South’s lucrative cotton economy.
Even if war came, political leaders assured it would be swift and with minimal loss of life. Judge Samuel F. Rice boasted, “we can whip the Yankees with popguns,” while South Carolina Senator James Chesnut Jr. claimed he would “drink all the blood shed” over secession. The first Confederate Secretary of War, Leroy Pope Walker, similarly told a crowd in April 1861, at the start of the war, that any blood spilled as a result of secession “could be wiped up with a handkerchief,” predicting that “before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington,” according to Reason magazine.
Mark Twain would later blame the novels of Sir Walter Scott in particular for fostering romantic notions of chivalry among Southern elites and the idea that war would be noble and victorious.
Northern leaders were generally more restrained but no less susceptible to overconfidence. The New York Tribune stated, “Forward to Richmond!… the place must be held by the National Army!” Historian David B. Blight argues that “Lincoln, under the pressure of public opinion,” pushed General Irvin McDowell to advance before his army was ready in the hope of delivering a knockout blow that would end the rebellion.
The First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 became the defining symbol of the North’s misplaced optimism. Politicians, journalists, and curious civilians—some arriving with picnic baskets—gathered to watch what they believed would be the war’s decisive battle. Instead, they fled alongside retreating Union troops as Confederate forces prevailed, and the illusion of a short war vanished.
What followed was one of the earliest industrial wars in history. Railways moved large armies, factories produced weapons on an unprecedented scale, and entire regional economies were reorganized for the war. Much of the South was devastated as the North countered, while the North also experienced localized destruction. Around 750,000 Americans died in the war, which amounts to roughly half of all US war deaths in the nation’s history. Far from the romantic image of combat imagined in 1861, two-thirds of those who died in the war succumbed to disease.
The war preserved the Union and ended slavery, one of the most consequential achievements in American history, but it bore little resemblance to the swift and bloodless campaign envisioned before it started. Lincoln’s assassination also derailed hopes for a smoother Reconstruction and led to the political and racial divisions continuing for generations. The conflict demonstrated that even conflicts fought for essential causes rarely unfold as predictably as their supporters expect, producing lasting trauma and resentment alongside historic victories. Read more
Framing In News Media; From Pillarization To Polarization
Aalt Smienk – Beeldvorming in Berichtgeving; Joden toen, Moslims nu – Amsterdam, Rozenberg Publishers, 2022
07-27-2026 ~ Framing in news media is probably as old as news media themselves. In social sciences framing is usually used to describe a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies in general organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. Framing plays an important role in interpersonal communication like in social and news media. In short, frames may be seen as mental representations, interpretations and simplifications of the reality.
Since news media, next to different other social media, play an important role in the public debate about current issues, it is worthwhile to pay attention to the way in which minority groups are framed in news media, particularly at moments when there rises an issue or debate on conflicts in society.
An example of framing of Muslims is the presentation in 2008 of the anti-Islam production Fitna by Geert Wilders, chair and only member of the Dutch rightwing party PVV. This Internet film tries by way of selected excerpts from Surahs (chapters) of the Qur’an, and interspersed with media clips and newspaper cuttings showing or describing violent acts by muslims worldwide, to demonstrate that Qur’an followers are motivated to hate all who violate Islamic teachings. Fitna pretends to describe the influence of Islam in The Netherlands in particular. The narrative may be summarized as follows: Islam encourages acts of terrorism, antisemitism, violence against women, and violence against LGBT people. Therefore Islam and Muslims should be excluded from our country.
In his PhD dissertation ‘Framing Differences in the News; Jews then, Muslims now‘ (Beeldvorming in Berichtgeving; Joden toen, Moslims nu) (2022) Smienk investigated by way of content analysis, the framing of Muslims in Dutch newspapers (1990-2013) and compares this with the framing of Jews in Dutch newspapers (1890-1910). The analysis took into account the way in which the media landscape has developed during the last century.
In the past decades, Muslims and Islam have frequently been in the news.
At the end of the 19th century, the position of Dutch Jews, at that time being the largest non-Christian religious minority group, was discussed in Dutch newspapers in a more or less comparable way in which Dutch Muslims were discussed one century later.
The comparison of the news coverage of both groups provided insight into the process of emancipation into Dutch society, then and now. Although we pay in this contribution some attention to framing of Jews then, we focus particularly on the framing of Muslims now.
The content analysis of 52748 articles about Muslims or Islam in different newspapers (NRC, Trouw, De Volkskrant, De Telegraaf and Het Algemeen Dagblad) focussed on a specific part of the framing, namely the reporting on the position of Muslims in Dutch society. Muslims as a social category, although with a totally different background as Jews around 1900, may likewise be considered a religious minority, a group that is ‘knocking on society’s door’.
The analysis, carried out both quantitatively (amount of attention for Muslims, their social position, and related current issues) and qualitatively (different narratives) took as a point of departure the theoretical concepts: assimilation, segregation, integration and dominance as a possible description of the position of Muslims in society. These four concepts were used to construct four ideal-typical frames of reference to analyse how the position in society of the two minorities, Jews (back then) and muslims (presently) is represented in the news.
Previous research findings show that there are various factors and criteria that may influence the process of selection and production of news. Most of these factors, like agenda setting and framing, proved to be relevant to this research. Agenda setting is the process in which media decide what to report. When media not only select what readers should know, but also describe how readers should think about events (the narrative), this process is called framing.
The place of today’s newspapers in the media landscape and their role in society is different from that of the newspapers at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The first part of the 20th century was characterized by the division of Dutch society along political and religious lines, also known as pillarization. The newspapers in this period were often dominated by religious, political and/or social movements, which has been described as a period of political logic: what is news and how the news is presented to the readers is predominantly determined by representatives of the political, societal and religious currents within society. For example a catholic newspaper addressed, through Catholic journalists, Catholic readers; a Socialist newspaper addressed Socialist readers.
From the nineteen seventies onwards newspapers were no longer dominated by religious, political and/or social movements; their historical ideological ties with the various social movements gradually disappeared. The reader was considered more as a citizen who needs to be informed, to be able to act as a responsible citizen. Around 2000, newspapers changed their attitude towards their readers from citizens that need to be informed into consumers who need to be entertained. So media themselves decided more on what readers would like to know and in that respect they were or became more competitive towards each other. The number of readers and ‘having the scoop’ became more important criteria for the selection of news items. The way newspapers selected their news in the first decade of the 20th century is usually called media logic. One could say that news around 1900 was more politicized and around 2000 more entertainment and reader or customer oriented.
Another relevant difference between the current media landscape and that of one century ago is the position of the newspaper within the field of all different news media. Whereas at, the end of the 19the century, newspapers were the most important and fastest way for readers to keep abreast of the news, today newspapers are no longer the only providers of news, and certainly no longer the fastest way to get informed about the outside world. Nowadays radio, tv, and increasingly social media, like X and TikTok, play a prominent role.
The analysis of framing in the news of Jews, around 1900, showed that their images were initially problematic, connected to the ‘Dreyfus affair’, the rise of antisemitism in Western Europe, the prosecution of jews in Eastern Europe, and even polarizing around the late nineteenth century, but became significantly less negative in the beginning of the twentieth century. That could, at least partly, be explained by the fact that Dutch Jews were not the only emancipating group in Dutch society at that time; also women, workers, Catholics and Protestants, Socialists, organized themselves separately from each other in similar ways – the start of pillarization – and with similar goals, striving for a more equal position in Dutch society, and in their struggle they sometimes allied with other groups. In short, the emancipation of Jews in Dutch society did not differ from that of other religious, political and/or social minorities. Therefore it was not considered a social problem, nor was it described or depicted as such in newspapers.
Dutch Muslims’ emancipation efforts on the other hand, were increasingly considered outdated at the end of the 20th century since it this took place in a period in which religion was losing significance in Dutch society and religious parties no longer dominated Dutch governments. The strategy of strengthening one’s own identity by organizing as a movement – accepted and seen as successful in the earlier period of pillarization and pacification – was considered counterproductive and an obstacle to their successful integration into society.
The results of the analysis of framing of Muslims during the period 1990-2013 led to an opposite picture compared to the framing of Jews one century ago. Those results show an increase in the use of word roots ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’ from 2000 onwards. At the same time, the increased use of the four frames of reference mentioned earlier shows that after 2000, news coverage of Muslims focuses more on their position in society. Until the year 2000, this reporting was mainly about integration – Muslims were comparatively described as people trying to find their way in a multicultural society. The Sebrenica disaster was the main international news event in which Muslims were described as victims of a genocide. Read more
Is The US Ready For Radical Change?
07-28-2026 ~ Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today’s United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way.
The US is the richest country in the world, yet an international outlier on many measures. Among industrialized nations, the US spends a lower percentage of its GDP on public social expenditure, has no universal healthcare system, union density is at an all-time low, and the average American’s standard of living is in decline, as “nearly half of US households can’t make ends meet.” Of course, delusional President Donald Trump continues to say that the US is the “hottest country in the world.” Is the US, however, ready for radical change? After all, isn’t there evidence that Americans are losing faith in capitalism and that socialism is gaining ground among voters?
Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou shares provocative thoughts on these issues in an interview with the French-Greek writer and journalist Alexandra Boutri. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today’s United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way and regards the Democratic Party itself as the graveyard of radical change undertakings.
Alexandra Boutri: Recent polls indicate that capitalism is in trouble in the US, as there is a growing loss of faith in the system, apparently even among Republicans, while socialism is gaining mainstream appeal. So, I want to start this interview by inquiring about your own impression regarding political and ideological trends in the United States. Indeed, is the country on the verge of radical change?
C. J. Polychroniou: I am now old enough to take any talk of radical political change with a grain of salt. That being said, there is no doubt that the US version of capitalism has been an utter failure for the majority of Americans. In contrast to European or Asian versions of capitalism, capitalism in the US has always been structured around what we might call the Sopranos version of doing business, which is the Trump administration’s way of actually running the whole country today. But Trump aside, what kind of civilized society denies its citizens access to universal healthcare, tuition-free higher education, guaranteed long-term parental leave, 4-6 weeks of guaranteed paid vacation, and robust unemployment benefits? The US does!
The younger generations in the US seem to have awakened to the realization that the US economic system is brutal and thus detrimental to their well-being, even if they may not have an alternative socioeconomic system in mind that they would like to see instituted. They have indeed taken notice of the fact that the US is the only industrialized nation in the world without a universal healthcare system and that the standard of living has declined to the level of developing countries. Truth be told, even if North America remains the wealthiest on average, the quality of life in many European countries, which are, of course, still fully capitalistic, is superior to the US. There are stronger social safety nets and greater work-life balance in capitalist Europe than there are in the capitalist United States of America.
Which countries are best on women’s well-being? According to the latest Women, Peace and Security Index, European countries occupy all nine of the top positions while the US ranks 31st, below countries like Serbia and Malta. So, we do need to take into account different versions of capitalism. In that context, it is safe to say that many Americans have finally awakened to the realization that the US version of capitalism sucks! Anything more than that, however, is open to speculation. Socialism is gaining ground, but the challenges of building a unified socialist movement on a national scale and having a socialist political party that can contest power at the federal level are enormous in the United States of America.
Alexandra Boutri: Is the rise of socialism in the US the reason why Trump is reviving the boogeyman of communism?
C. J. Polychroniou: Absolutely. However much of a shallow man Trump happens to be, he is nonetheless a mastermind politician who has the pulse of today’s Republican voters. He is the greatest bullshitter of the modern age, but that’s only because of his audience. He knows how to stir fear. He also knows that he can normalize cruelty because his fanatical and racist fanbase simply loves it. Have his policies worsened economic conditions in the country to the point that even some of his own followers are beginning to doubt him? He only has to raise the volume on culture wars and then becomes again, in the eyes of his own supporters, the nation’s savior. Of course, such tactics have an expiration date even for the most popular authoritarian leaders. Look, for example, at what happened to Viktor Orbán in Hungary. After 16 years in power, even his own core supporters grew tired of his cronyism and corruption. I believe we will see something similar happen to Donald Trump and to the Republican Party, perhaps as soon as this coming November, in spite of how deeply the anti-democratic tradition has entrenched itself in all branches of government. In the end, only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.
Alexandra Boutri: Are you also saying that the Democrats have been responsible for Trump’s rise to power?
C J. Polychroniou: Of course, and it was the Democrats, with their ability to destroy trust in government by siding themselves utterly and shamelessly with major corporate and financial interests, that rolled out the red carpet for Trump’s arrival on the nation’s political scene. The country had been moving further and further to the right since the early 1980s. In fact, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates had been declining since the Clinton years. Democrats still talk about Bill Clinton’s achievements, such as turning deficits into surpluses and making the economy more globalized, but his policies ushered in a new era of inequality while he transformed the welfare state by ending social policy. Essentially, the welfare state was dismantled under the Clinton presidency and was largely replaced in turn by volunteerism.
Neoliberalism (embraced by both parties in the US) and cultural relativism (a late obsession of liberals and segments of the left) have been at the core of the political turn to the far right in the US. The main point, though, is that the Democrats failed to advance a meaningful alternative whenever they found themselves in power. The Obama administration also had the chance to make a meaningful impact on the future of the country but opted, instead, to align itself with the status quo on all major issues, both on the domestic and foreign front. The Biden administration did make some progress on economic policy, mainly thanks to pressures from the progressive wing of the party, but failed miserably on foreign policy. As to why Kamala Harris lost to Trump, that’s an issue that will forever be debated.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recent campaign speech in Michigan, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that the Trump administration is “hellbent on tearing down in four years what it took this country 250 years to build.” What did she mean by that, and how likely is it that she will be the Democratic 2028 nominee?
C. J. Polychroniou: Naturally, the country has made progress over the past 250 years. Don’t you think it would have been unnatural if it hadn’t done so? But how do we measure progress? Wars existed in the past, and it appears that war will never end. By the same token, we have taken major steps toward protecting individuals against discrimination on the basis of sex or gender, but economic inequality is greater today than it has ever been in the modern era, while women, people of color, and minorities continue to face economic disadvantages. In any case, it is beyond dispute that Trump is destroying whatever social and economic progress has been made so far. He is a wrecking ball, an unhinged sociopath, but one who is still being treated as America’s savior by something like close to 40% of voters. That’s simply mind-boggling, but it says something noteworthy about the persistence of a particular component of American political culture—one that rests on possessive individualism, anti-intellectualism, and the paranoid style. Richard Hofstadter addressed some of those aspects of American political life long before the rise of Trumpism. But we need to add racism, as it also remains a profound component of American political culture. Read more
How Technology Is Rewriting The Way We Write
Danica Tomber – Photo: LA Progressive
07-23-2026 ~ As keyboards and touchscreens replace pens and pencils, the decline of handwriting raises questions about cognition, culture, and creativity.
When was the last time you wrote something by hand? Was it a stylus signature at a checkout stand, a kitchen calendar reminder, or a note jotted down on a scrap of paper? These days, writing largely lives in the digital realm. Despite its advantages, handwriting has been pushed to the fringes of everyday life.
Historian Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience, explains that handwriting is a vital embodied experience that allows us to make sense of our world. In a Guardian article, Rosen points to calligraphist Bernard Maisner, who “argues that calligraphy, and handwriting more broadly, is ‘not meant to reproduce something over and over again. It’s meant to show the humanity, the responsiveness and variation within.’”
Is the decline of handwriting an inevitable loss or a harmless evolution? To answer this question, we trace the historical significance of handwriting, investigate its cognitive impact, reflect on its cultural meaning, and explore its future relevance.
A Brief History of Handwriting
Unlike speech, which is an innate capability of the human brain, writing is an invention. Just like modern digital tools, such as computers and the internet, writing systems—from logographic to alphabetic—were invented, albeit thousands of years ago. The oldest form of writing known to us is cuneiform, a script developed in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) around 3400 to 3300 BCE, with Egyptian hieroglyphs likely following around 3000 BCE.
Although cuneiform was most commonly imprinted on clay, Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared on a variety of media—carved on stone and written in ink on papyrus. Much later, in medieval Europe, scribes trained on wax tablets before moving on to parchment as they learned textualis, a Gothic writing style.
Throughout history, writing has maintained an aesthetic component. From calligraphy to Spencerian script, penmanship is a form of artistic expression that encourages writers to wield their creativity to capture detail, contrast, curvature, and negative space. In describing Platt Rogers Spencer’s inspiration for Spencerian script, master penman Michael Sull says:
‘You should be able to create visible language on paper that has so much personal expression that whoever reads it could understand how you felt, what you meant. Because everybody is different, it allowed people to write the way they wanted to write.’
Other techniques prioritized function over form. The Palmer Method, first proposed in 1894, facilitated speed, legibility, and ease through fluid arm movements rather than finger movement, making it a helpful method for people with fine motor challenges.
Around the same time as the introduction of the Palmer Method, a new technology was transforming the world, ushering in a significant shift from handwriting to typing. With the typewriter, speed and efficiency were prioritized yet again—this time to meet the demands of industrial growth. But within a century, typewriters were surmounted by word processors and digital computers, solving several issues, including the ability to revise, store, and share written information more easily. In the 21st century, mobile technologies have come to dominate; people now use laptops, tablets, and smartphones to type.
Handwriting and the Brain
On the surface, the written word is valued for its role in sharing and recording information, but it serves a multitude of cognitive functions. In addition to improving fine motor skills, writing by hand stimulates greater comprehension and neural connectivity. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that, compared to typewriting, handwriting showed more “widespread brain connectivity” in areas associated with learning and memory. Speaking about the study, neuroscientist Ramesh Balasubramaniam told Science News, “It shows that there’s more involvement of these brain regions when you’re handwriting, which might give you some specific advantages.” He added that the reasons for these differences in brain activity warrant further research—an opinion echoed in a 2025 commentary on the study.
A greater understanding of these mechanisms will also better inform educational policy. Handwriting’s link to literacy is another reason why researchers recommend that early childhood education programs include handwriting instruction. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology revealed that the development of reading skills is critically dependent on handwriting. “[T]he physical act of forming letters by hand enhances the mental representation of those letters. Writing by hand involves coordinated movements, attention to shape, and sensorimotor feedback—all of which seem to reinforce learning. Typing, by contrast, requires only pressing a key, which may not engage the same cognitive or neural processes,” states a PsyPost article, referring to the findings of the 2025 study. Literacy encompasses a range of skills, from letter formation and spelling to reading and writing. Although handwriting is typically thought of as a single skill, research indicates that it is a combination of two separate but related skills: fluency (how quickly and smoothly someone writes) and legibility (how well it can be deciphered). Read more
Participatory Economics. An Interview With Michael Albert
Michael Albert – Photo: nl.wikipedia.org
Louis Bourgeois ~ In preparing for this interview, I’ve read various descriptions of your economic theory of Participatory Economics. It is a rather complicated theory, and I was hoping you could describe the theory for the average reader.
Michael Albert ~ Economics affects stuff – combining and refining inputs into outputs, distributing them among all members of society, and then consuming them. Economic production, allocation, and consumption affect people via directly changing their fulfillment, consciousness, social relations, etc.
Participatory economics, or parecon for short, treats all actors equitably and meets needs and develops potentials as its guiding theme. It fosters solidarity and diversity via its implications for interests and behaviors. It conveys self-managing decision making power to all in their economic lives. To attain these goals parecon delivers classlessness since you can’t have self-management and solidarity, for example, if you have a class takes the lion’s share of social product and power, violating equity and all the other aims as well.
To accomplish equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management means that parecon must reject current defining economic relations such as having private owners of productive assets, using corporate divisions of labor, remunerating for power, property, or product, having top down decision making, and using markets for allocation, because these institutions by their intrinsic requirements viciously violate the sought aims.
Parecon instead proposes having no ownership of productive assets, workers and consumers self-managing councils, a division of labor that conveys to all workers a fair share of empowering tasks and responsibilities via what parecon calls balanced job complexes, remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and finally, for allocation, participatory planning, which is workers and consumers councils cooperatively negotiating inputs and outputs.
In other words, parecon isn’t a blueprint of all features and even their details, but instead just a minimal list of a few very central features which a new economy must have – albeit with many more detailed variations – and conversely a few that it must reject, if it is to be classless, honor diversity, foster solidarity, and convey self-managing power. Of course we could go into more detail about each broad aim, and about why some institutions must be rejected for violating those aims, and about the institutions claimed able to fulfill those aims, but this has been done in many places already.
You’ve been instrumental in establishing the independent political press in America, having created from the ground up such presses as Z Magazine and South End Press. How has the independent political press changed over the years?
That is a hard question because I don’t think there was ever much of a definition of independent press. In other words back in the mid to late seventies, and even earlier, there were independent presses – meaning not owned by large corporations and thus not directly controlled in their content by those large outfits, and thus independent – of diverse kinds. Some were unapologetic profit seeking entities with very little other than the good will of an owner or two to distinguish them from mainstream outfits. Their independence was a matter of policy and was subject to being eliminated by a single boss – and in most cases that is precisely what eventually happened, to ensure greater profits. There were other independent outfits that were nonprofit, but otherwise not so different in structure and internal dynamics from more typical mainstream media. They were better than the privately owned examples, on average, but also limited, in my view, both as models and editorially. All those involved in such media were affected by their position in a typical corporate hierarchy and the implications of that for their values, thoughts, and behaviors, and particularly their ability to address many class issues, were and remain deadly. Then, back then, there were also far more collective operations, finding ways to avoid internal class hierarchies, and to ward off, as well, sexist and racist structures – thus achieving for their content a far greater level of independence from the pressures of existing institutions – as well as themselves being a model for a better way to do things.
Well the same picture exists now. There are what are called independent media operations that are freer of impositions from existing relations, and others that are less free of those impositions, or even totally subject to them. While instances of all these types might label themselves independent, what follows for me is that we should have something more in mind than liking a few essays online or in print when we label their source organization alternative and point at it as an example of what we seek. To earn that label, a media project should not only have independent and inquiring editorial policies that meet real needs, it should also have internal organization and structure consistent with – rather than constantly impeding and finally obliterating – such values. Indeed, its structure should not only serve its functions, but also be a model that others can emulate. An alternative media institution should be part of the process of planting the seeds of the future in the present, meaning it should reject classist, racist, and sexist structures and opt, instead, whenever it can and to the degree it can, for classless, feminist, and intercommunalist’s policies and structures.
Has Socialism, as the word is commonly understood in the Western world, become more of a reality in the 21st century, or less?
As the word socialism is most widely understood, institutionally it means that the government owns everything and decides everything for workplaces that are very nearly indistinguishable internally from those we now have, plus using central planning or retaining markets for allocation.
The word socialism also, however, has a values meaning – and that is very different. People should have a say over their lives, get a fair share of the social product, enjoy worthy work conditions. The trouble is, the institutional view, if implemented or even just seriously influencing thought and actions, trumps the second values view and even makes the values unattainable. So the first view has to be replaced, meaning, advocates of socialist values need to be in favor of institutions that can actually deliver the values they espouse, rather than institutions that will obliterate those values.
Indeed, I think applying the label socialism to systems that combine public ownership, remuneration for output and power, corporate divisions of labor, top down decision making, and markets or central planning for allocation, is the real error. These systems do get rid of the basis for capitalists to even exist, much less to rule, but, in the capitalist’s place they elevate what I call a coordinator class – the set of employees who do overwhelmingly empowering work, thus lawyers, doctors, engineers, administrators, etc. – into a dominant position above workers who are in turn left with rote, repetitive, obedient labor like before. Instead of calling such systems socialist, therefore, I call them coordinatorists.
So that’s where parecon enters. Parecon’s claim is precisely that it delivers an economy that meets the most advanced and enlightened socialist and anarchist desires for economic life – their values that economics be classless, equitable, diverse, solidaritous, and self-managing, serving people real needs and potentials, and attending to environmental effects and needs as well. Thus, socialists and anarchists could adopt parecon as the economic part of their overall social vision – and perhaps they might even call that overall vision participatory socialism. Read more
Backing For UBI Is Growing. Let’s Push For The Most Progressive Version Of It
Nancy Folbre – Photo: en.wikipedia.org
07-20-2026 ~ Universal basic income is not a panacea, and some versions are libertarian — but a good version is worth fighting for.
The idea of a universal basic income has been around for decades, but it is now growing in popularity as artificial intelligence threatens to make our economic future under neoliberal capitalism even more precarious. Yet, no one would argue that a universal basic income is a panacea to capitalism’s evils.
Moreover, there are different proposals for implementing a universal basic income, as renowned feminist and socialist economist Nancy Folbre — the author of several books including Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First — points out in the interview that follows.
Folbre, who is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, acknowledges that, given the balance of power between capital and labor in today’s world, the obstacles to implementing a fully progressive version of such a plan are enormous. Yet, societies must care for the well-being of citizens if they are to continue sustaining themselves. As Folbre says, a philosophy of every person for themselves philosophy “is a recipe for extinction.”
C.J. Polychroniou: Support for universal basic income (UBI) has grown rapidly over the past several years across Europe as well as in the United States. Of course, the idea of a universal basic income has a long history but has made a major comeback as a response to growing inequalities and concerns about the effects of automation. Still, no country has yet to implement a full UBI system, and there are many variations behind the idea. What are the defining features of UBI, and what would be the core arguments in favor of it?
Nancy Folbre: This concept implies just what it says — universal (everyone would get it) basic (not very much) income, to be provided on a regular basis, like once a month. The strongest ethical argument in its favor is that some basic level of support should be a human right. The strongest pragmatic argument in its favor is that it would buffer the effects of sustained high levels of unemployment that some (including the world’s first trillionaire-for-just-12-days Elon Musk) see as a serious threat from the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI).
What are the potential risks and complications behind implementing a UBI system in contemporary capitalist societies?
UBI and AI have something in common — they both have great potential to make us all better off, but their effects will be largely determined by who designs and controls them.
A UBI could be deployed in ways that reduce poverty, reward unpaid care, and increase the bargaining power of wage earners but it could also be used to co-opt dissent, justify cutbacks in public services, and enhance control over the population.
Historically, employers disliked the very idea of UBI because they thought it would reduce the supply of labor to employment, creating a permanent class of “free-loaders.”
In recent years, however, a number of privately funded small-scale experiments have explored the impact of a short-term “guaranteed income” on the community level, offering a relatively small payment (such as $500-$1,000 a month) for a year or two to a random sample of low-income persons in order to assess their effects. Reductions in employment that took place were small, and benefits to physical and mental health and subjective well-being were significant — especially for children.
However, it’s not clear that CEOs in the tech sector are enthusiastic about these social benefits, since they seem to believe that human workers will soon be redundant, anyway. They keep saying that a publicly funded UBI could compensate for job loss. If AI produces enormous wealth, concentrated among a few firms, some mechanism for redistribution might be necessary to avert political revolt. Hence the “benevolent oligarchy” strategy — give the masses just enough money to keep them alive and in line.
Would UBI necessarily replace all existing welfare programs?
Different answers to this question highlight the issue of design and control. A “progressive” UBI is framed as an add-on, complementing the provision of public services. A “libertarian” UBI is framed as a reallocation, using cash transfers as a replacement for public services.
Libertarian support for something like UBI has a long history. In his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, the conservative economist Milton Friedman advocated for a negative income tax that was the forerunner (in spirit, if not precise design) of some UBI proposals today. He argued that cash assistance should replace much of the existing welfare bureaucracy, including many categorical assistance programs.
This argument lingers on in different forms. In his 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, Andrew Yang outlined a kind of compromise — a detailed UBI proposal that would have reallocated some but not all funds away from other programs. At least his proposal took financing and design seriously, unlike what followed.
Elon Musk — despite his happy talk regarding a future Universal High Income (rather than a merely basic one) — has offered no details whatsoever regarding its design. However, given his actions as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE (which would have been better titled the Department of Government Eradication), it’s pretty clear that he sees cash transfers as something between a sop and a bribe.
The progressive case for a UBI, by contrast, sees UBI as a universal income floor layered on top of existing social programs, rather than replacing all of them. While it would justify elimination of means-tested income transfers, it would not replace social insurance (such as pensions) or public services. Indeed, the most compelling vision of programmatic change to the “welfare state” calls for both UBI and Universal Basic Services (UBS) which would include health care, child care, and elder care.
These versions of UBI typically rely on progressive taxation — imposing higher taxes on those with higher incomes or wealth. Even the very rich would be eligible for a basic income, but it would be more than canceled out by the higher taxes they would be required to pay. This is what makes the net transfer strongly progressive. Read more