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It’s hard to imagine what the 1960s would have been like if TV viewers, flooded with nightly news reports of atrocities, emergencies, and horrors, had simultaneously been getting their entertainment jollies out of fantasy versions of the same atrocities, emergencies, and horrors. But that’s more or…

Today’s TV landscape is also eerily devoid of anything resembling optimism. This is a telling and significant omission, since feel-good programming used to be the medium’s sometimes namby-pamby, sometimes energetic stock in trade. If our reigning doomsday genres qualify as escapist at all, it’s a v…

[...] It doesn’t even matter much if a lavishly produced, terrifically well-acted hunk of dungeons-and-dragons neo-shlock like Game of Thrones doesn’t appear to be rife with unfathomable subtext to a non-buff’s eye, because HBO was put on this earth to prove Pavlov was right. The projection of my…

Capitalism has to transform plenitude into scarcity, because it cannot endure its own abundance. Again and again, as Marx and Engels say in the Manifesto, under capitalism "there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production"…

[...] In today's neoliberal, globalized network society, "the monopoly of capital" has indeed become "a fetter upon the mode of production." We can see this in all sorts of ways. So-called austerity programs transfer ever more wealth to the already rich, at the price of undermining living standards…