In These Times is entering our 50th year. It comes during a political moment with many parallels to the mid-1970s, the time of our founding. That era’s overarching economic and political malaise created an opening for the beginning of the neoliberal era, an era that now feels distended and tired, ready to collapse under its own weight.
To butcher a quote from the late Fredric Jameson, we can see both the end of the world and the end of the neoliberal order not on a distant horizon, but in our immediate future — and the end of the world is much more tangible.
This magazine was conceived to be more than an independent source for progressive journalism — though, in this issue, you will find examples of our broad coverage of work and workers, like “Capitalism Without Humans” by Sarah Jaffe and “The American Workers Who Went on Strike for Gaza” by Sarah Lazare, as well as a deep investigation of the roots of the anti-LGBTQ policies growing in school districts across Pennsylvania and the rest of the country. In These Times has in its DNA not only a long tradition of proud, muckraking journalism, but of the role of that journalism in a democratic socialist movement that can contend for real political power.
Today, democratic socialists sit in the halls of Congress and have taken the mayor’s office in Seattle and New York City. As a wildly authoritarian, revanchist right-wing government controls the levers of power in Washington, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people take action in the streets to challenge that power.
The labor movement is on a knife’s edge, having neither succumbed to its worst impulses nor become the engine for working-class power that many of us have dreamed. The media landscape has fractured into a hallucinatory vision of a dystopian future. Possibility and danger exist intertwined.
In moments like this, as history happens all around us, political movements from across the spectrum are contesting for power in unpredictable ways. Yet the words of our founder, James Weinstein, continue to ring true: “No political movement can be healthy unless it has its own press to inform it, educate it and orient it.”
As we build toward our 50th anniversary this coming November, we invite you to join us. Not just as a subscriber, a reader and a supporter, but as a collaborator. In the coming months, we will be announcing events and plans to help guide this magazine into the future, and we need your help.
In These Times intends to outlive the neoliberal era. If we work together, we can, in our own small way, help to create and imagine what the next 50 years will look like — not only for this magazine, but for a political movement that intends to change the world. And because it can be done, it must be done.
Alex Han is Executive Director of In These Times. He has organized with unions, in the community, and in progressive politics for two decades. In addition to serving as Midwest Political Director for Bernie 2020, he’s worked to amplify the power of community and labor organizations at Bargaining for the Common Good, served as a Vice President of SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana for over a decade, and helped to found United Working Families, an independent political organization in Illinois that has elected dozens of working-class leaders to city, state and federal office. Most recently he was executive editor of Convergence Magazine.
