Nate Holdren

In her earlier work, Marta Russell called readers attention to the economy as a factor producing disablement and argued that we needed to re-embed the market in society, to tame businesses’ need to profit via the social policies of an interventionist state. By the end of her career, however, Russell had gone further, focusing on capitalism itself. Her solution expressed not a Polanyian ideal of a somewhat more egalitarian capitalism, but a Marxist aspiration to a vastly better and more egalitarian society, achievable only by ending capitalism through collective action.

Luke Herrine, Noah Zatz, Veena Dubal, Blake Emerson, Diana Reddy, Nate Holdren, Caroline Grueskin, and Charlotte Garden offer their initial reactions to the Court's decision blocking OSHA's vaccine-or-test mandate.

Klare speaks to the virtues of post- and non-marxist social theory. My impression is that these literatures are long on the kind of disaggregation that the theory of underdetermination permits. Marxist critical theory tends to place more emphasis on aggregating, finding patterns. That kind of thought and past socialists who held to only minimally appear in Klare’s text and do so largely as foils. I would like to suggest that marxist social theory and the identification of patterns that persist over time – such as structural domination – is at least equally valid for left purposes and for understanding the relationship between law and political economy.