ABSTRACT
Amidst the turbulence of the 1960s, consensus over the American welfare state unraveled. At this time, two groups of former Marxists or soon-to-be former Marxists, mostly of immigrant and working-class backgrounds, launched journals in New York. This unraveling was not entirely unrelated to what was appearing in the press, on television, and, importantly, in journals such as The New York Review of Books, as the unfolding military debacle in southeast Asia became more clear to the public, Gitlin 1993. In addition to critiquing the welfare state through the theory of artificial negativity, as Telos began to cover US politics in the late 1970s, it also offered more targeted criticism of welfare state politics and emerging neoliberal policies. It is easy to argue that part of the motivating force behind the new theorization of the possibility of criticism that the artificial negativity thesis proposed was a re-evaluation of the journals own purpose and existence.
