Corey Robin's Blog, page 13

Kafka Comes to CUNY

Three days ago, the New York Post reported that Hunter College was looking to hire a scholar in Palestinian Studies. The job ad read: We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality. It took less than a New York minute for Governor Hochul to order the job listing taken down and for CUNY leaders to comply. According to Hochul’s office, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.” The hateful rhetoric in question? These words and phrases: “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.” If […]

Not your grandparents’ Marxist theory of the state

Most readers and followers of Marx are familiar with two fairly simple and stereotypical versions of his theory of the capitalist state. The first, which can be gleaned from On the Jewish Question and other writings, essentially sees the liberal constitutional state, with a rule of law and various civil liberties, as the perfected form of the capitalist state. The second, which can be gleaned from the Eighteenth Brumaire, sees a populist dictator, like Louis Bonaparte, as a different, more authoritarian version of the capitalist state. But in reading and re-reading Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx, I think we can find, in Marx’s other writings, particularly his articles on 1848, some of which were later collected in The Class Struggles in […]

Marx on Trump’s Abuses of Power

One of the more surprising elements in Bruno Leipold’s book Citizen Marx is just how fierce a critic Marx was of what political scientists call presidential systems. In presidential systems, the executive is invested with power that does not derive from the legislature, as in a parliamentary system. Instead, the executive is invested with power derived from elsewhere, most commonly election by the people themselves. Such systems tend to lionize the executive as a creature above and beyond the normal shabbiness of politics. That kind of elevation of the executive in a presidential system is something that Alexander Hamilton, that old fox, was wise to, and why he advocated so forcefully for it. Marx saw immediately how such a system, […]

Joan Robinson predicted our future

Joan Robinson, one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, never won a Nobel Prize. Here she is, in 1962, writing to Robert Solow, a very good economist in the 20th century, who did win the Nobel Prize: Dear Bob, To me you are a fascinating study—A clever man who cannot see a simple point. Here is Robinson, also writing in 1962, in a prescient piece for the New Left Review on what we now call the care economy and Baumol’s cost disease: The services to meet basic human needs (particularly healthcare and education) do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially, as with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have […]

The Real Plot Against America

There’s a moment in the middle of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America where the family has just learned that the father, Herman, is going to be transferred by his long-time employer, an insurance company, from Newark to somewhere in Kentucky. It’s very clear that the transfer is punitive, punishment for the father having crossed his sister-in-law, who is very connected with the fascist Lindbergh administration. The transfer order also looks a lot like simple ethnic cleansing, except that it’s framed as an “opportunity” that has been opened up by the Department of Interior, along the lines of the Homestead Act, where you get to be a pioneer in empty territory. But it’s all Jews who are being transferred. Though […]

Trump, the ideal delinquent

New York Times: President Trump, furious about delays in delivering two new Air Force One jets, has empowered Elon Musk to explore drastic options to prod Boeing to move faster, including relaxing security clearance standards for some who work on the presidential planes…He is infuriated that he begins his second term flying around in the same aging planes that once transported President George H.W. Bush. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899: The ideal pecuniary man is the ideal delinquent.

The opposition party is neither in opposition nor a party

Forty Twenty [aach, basic error] percent of Americans now say that they think flying is very or somewhat unsafe, up from 12% last year. Google searches for “is it safe to fly” are way up from the norm. And Trump just fired 400 workers at the FAA. If an opposition party can’t put these simple stats together to make a political argument about society, government, and our interdependence, it’s neither in opposition nor a party. Update, 3:30 pm On a related note, The Washington Post just reported this: The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that it is moving to correct the accidental firing of several people working onthe federal government’s response to an outbreak of avian influenza, commonly known […]

The world’s oldest democracy, backstopped by the financial markets

Two legal scholars whose work I admire have a useful analysis in the Times of all the steps courts can take during an escalating constitutional crisis. But the last part of their analysis really shocked me, insofar as it really, truly expresses the bankruptcy of the democratic imagination in this country, even by, maybe particularly by, the leading lights of the most liberal parts of the legal professoriate. Say, the authors ask, the courts have run out of all other options, and the administration is still defiant. What then? Their answer: Here, the resolution of an ultimate confrontation between the branches, which would dominate the news, would also depend on the response of a range of actors in the public […]

Elon Musk, Adam Smith, and the East India Company

Far from being something entirely new or novel, Elon Musk embodies something Adam Smith identified in The Wealth of Nations as one of the most pernicious political forms of the modern age: the East India Company. Most people don’t realize this, but Smith’s text, particularly the fourth book, is a sustained critique of the East India Company, which he identified as a monstrous hybrid of merchant and sovereign, “the worst of all governments for any country whatever.” Smith was most concerned about the role of the East India Company in India, but its reach was global and the repercussions revolutionary. The irony here is considerable. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, the same year as the American Revolution. […]

Trump is your worst HR Officer

This afternoon, a federal judge in DC issued a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s firing thousands of employees at USAID. The judge was appointed by…Trump. I’ve already written about the very real possibility that Trump’s judges may rule against Trump; they did this, after all, repeatedly during his first term. And they’re doing it again, in his second term. But I want to address here a different, more troubling, issue. In their lawsuit against Trump’s gutting of USAID, the unions that brought suit claimed that Trump had exceeded his legal and constitutional authority by firing thousands of employees. “Not a single one of defendants’ actions to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. were taken pursuant to congressional authorization,” the unions claimed. “And pursuant […]