The Brooklyn Rail

The End of Roe

By Rob Hunter

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade should and will prompt no little reflection on the state of many struggles today. How and why did the mainstream abortion advocacy movement become so focused on national-level fundraising and litigation, at the expense of engaging with (let alone learning from or being led by) local activists?

Letter from Paris

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

By Rona Lorimer

The French presidential elections brought what many were dreading, a standoff between what has long been called the “authoritarian liberalism” of Emmanuel Macron and the “avowed fascism” of Marine Le Pen.

War, Nationalism, and the Collective

By Charles Reeve

It can happen that the way things go in this big impossible world can be grasped more easily in miniature: for example, in a little country, a little society where the flaws of capitalism are clearly exposed.

Whither the American Pastoral?

By Joe Lombardo

The preeminent historian of the American environment, Leo Marx, died on March 9, 2022, with sadly little fanfare. Marx was the famed investigator of the American theory of the pastoral whose writings stand among those of other historical theoreticians like Frederick Jackson Turner and Richard Hofstadter.

Futures past

By Ross Wolfe

Just over a century ago, imprisoned amidst inter-imperialist war, the Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg declared that bourgeois society stood at the crossroads of socialism or barbarism. Exhausted by the bloodshed, the working masses of Europe faced this dilemma. Given that socialism did not come to pass, however, it follows that barbarism has reigned ever since.