Richard Wolff on the Left’s New Openings in 2026

In the second half of the nineteenth century, as Russia’s feudalism ended and its empire tottered, the great Russian novelist, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, reflected that time’s deepening concerns and anxieties in his 1863 novel, It offered a socialist answer. Forty years later, a crude and rapacious capitalism had rushed in to replace Russian feudalism. The ex-serfs then began to understand that they had not escaped from exploitation as they had hoped and dreamed. Rather they suffered a new form of…