Matt Vidal

Aviva Chomsky

Neil Larsen

Ramaa Vasudevan

Alex Gourevitch

Abbie Rhodes

Prospects for left renewal dominate this issue of Catalyst. Around the world, progressive forces continue to rebuild after decades retreat. In the process, fundamental questions of strategy are reemerging — from organized labor to electoral strategy to the function of culture and ideology in solidifying capitalist domination.

This issue asks not only how we might achieve power, but what we should prioritize once we have it. We question both the theory and viability of fashionable post-work utopias, give political context to the leftist victory in Colombia’s recent election, which broke with decades of right-wing rule, and analyze how socialists should think about public debt. We also turn a critical eye on C. L. R. James’s cricket memoir Beyond a Boundary and debunk the new discourse on “decoloniality,” the latest incarnation of postcolonial studies.

Vol.6, No.2

Catalyst

This book reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These "labor republicans" derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating back to the classical republics. In this tradition, to be free is to be independent of anyone else's will - to be dependent is to be a slave. Borrowing these ideas, labor republicans argued that wage laborers were unfree because of their abject dependence on their employers. Workers in a cooperative, on the other hand, were considered free because they equally and collectively controlled their work. Although these labor republicans are relatively unknown, this book details their unique, contemporary, and valuable perspective on both American history and the organization of the economy.

Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century

From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth

Alex Gourevitch

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