However, I wonder about the extent to which my part of the left has calcified and become brittle, recycling old thoughts that we thunk about new situations that rhyme with things we remember, in which we spare ourselves the effort of engagement out of confidence in our past conclusions, but in doing so miss the mark. To help me think through it, I have enlisted four sources: Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists (2018), an intellectual history of neoliberalism, from the first world war to the 1990s; Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica (2024), a history of arguments for free trade “from the left”, from the 1840s to the beginnings of Slobodian’s book; Starhawk’s Webs of power (2002), a moment-in-time, first-person-plural account of the antiglobalization movement between Seattle and 9/11; and finally Florence Reese’s Which side are you on? That’s the base of surplus value: the owner pays the input costs, and the input cost of a worker is what the worker needs to make a living (rent, food, etc), but the that cost is less than the value of what the worker produces.
Published at: 2026-02-11 22:20:50
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