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Everyone a Legislator

What is the principal legacy today of Gramsci’s writing on politics? Often taken to be a theory of the party as a ‘modern prince’ derived from Machiavelli, can this still be so in an epoch when political parties are everywhere in decline? Michael Denning argues that what now matters in Gramsci’s work is his theory of organizing as a premonitory form of democratic legislation.

Impeachment as a Social Form

How to account for the recurrent forms of populism, from Bonaparte to Trump? Components of a theory in Marx’s account of variant ‘lesser’ modes of exploitation—rent, tax, interest­—and their necessary forms of appearance.

Design and Discontent

Michael Denning on Nikil Saval, Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace. Transitions from counting-house to typing-pool to playpen, as capital’s designers sought to contain the discontents of labour.

Wageless Life

Origins of the figures of unemployment and the informal sector, and their inadequacy to contemporary forms of wagelessness. Michael Denning draws lessons from Marx, Fanon and the streets of Ahmedabad.