Issue #50: When Compromises Come Home to Roost

In this issue, Adolph Reed looks at a range of mid-century compromises that reshaped the nature of American politics; Touré Reed addresses the question of racial resentment in contemporary politics; José Arellano shows how the film Ex Machina figures the convergence of neoliberal economics and aesthetics; Pawel Kaczmarksi clarifies the role of Marxist notions of base and superstructure through a critique of Vivek Chibber’s writings; and Stephen Schryer critiques ecocritical readings of Richard Powers’s The Overstory as missing the point of the book’s critique of capital.

Inside the issue

Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair

Adolph Reed, Jr. June 16, 2025

Because even structuralists like Reuther and Charles Killingsworth shared with the Keynesians the viewpoint that interests of capital and labor were harmonizable and that economic problems were therefore fundamentally technical, the deeper political significance of the differences went unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon. The effect was to obscure the systemic roots of economic inequality in American capitalism, in fact eventually to render it invisible as inequality.

Robotic Pollocks in the Age of Amazon: Ex Machina, Actions, and Mechanical Art

José Antonio Arellano June 15, 2025

Ex Machina helps make visible the effects of the technologically enabled economy that led to the historical convergence of theories of art and action that today appear as the stuff of common sense. The problem the movie presents is less about empathy for the other than it is about a society structured by an economy wherein the concept of intention no longer obtains. Ex Machina thus prompts viewers to consider the political significance of creating and interpreting a work of art today.

Marxism and the Good Picture of Intention

Pawel Kaczmarski June 14, 2025

No class analysis, no matter how precise or exhaustive, will provide the answers of the kind Chibber requires, and to invoke causal factors other than class only delays the issue, as no collection of causal accounts will ever account for all of the existing meanings because interpretation cannot be reduced to a causal account and meaning cannot be reduced to a sum of the work’s causes. Insofar as intention is not simply contained in the mind, no account of how it came to be may replace the interpretation of a meaningful totality of which it is part.

Blinded by Righteous Outrage: From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0

Touré F. Reed June 14, 2025

From the 1994 Crime Act through to the re-election of Donald Trump, liberal thought shapers and policymakers have tended to draw upon a moral righteousness that uncouples racial disparities from the material contexts that engender them, thereby obscuring neoliberalism’s inability to deliver for poor and working-class Americans—blacks being overrepresented among them. As the Trump administration aggressively moves to dismantle the gains that African Americans and other non-whites have made since the Civil Rights Movement if not Reconstruction, progressives should take seriously the counterproductive implications of a righteous, groupist social justice discourse that mistakes sermonizing for analysis while treating “races” as epigenetic identities (rather than ascriptive categories) with discrete interests.

The Earth’s Intentions: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and the Limits of Anti-Anthropocentrism

Stephen Schryer June 16, 2025

Critics have celebrated Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory (2018), for the way that it distills key ecocritical ideas that gained traction in the humanities in the 2010s. Echoing New Materialists’ insistence that we set aside subject-centered ontologies that reduce non-humans to an instrumental status, the novel endows trees with agency, even granting them the ability to speak in a language that human beings might learn to understand. This essay pushes back against this desire for deep ecology, arguing that it short-circuits the novel’s critique of global capitalism. Drawing on a Transcendentalist model of language, Powers’s novel imagines trees using natural signs that collapse signs and referents, allowing them to directly change the chemistry of human brains. This fantasy of mind control distracts from the novel’s investment in communicative action, marked by recurring scenes of reading and persuasion.