Alberto Toscano, Amanda Armstrong, and Delio Vasquez on periodization and proletarian self-activity in “the new era of uprisings.”
As we know, Marx never wrote a distinct tome on either international trade or on war and geopolitics – a tome that would have problematized the spaceless assumptions of either a stagist conception of world history or a universalizing capitalist world market. And in that sense International Relations – less as a discipline but more as a problematic – remains very pressing and urgent for Marxists to reappropriate.
While a Trump presidency is not impossible, in this topsy-turvy election it has turned out to be foolish to make predictions. It seems fair, however, to ask a question that is being ignored or suppressed: if eight years of Bill Clinton gave us George W. Bush, and eight years of Obama gave us Trump, what would eight years of Hillary Clinton give us?
By reading Althusser’s work the way he read others, we see an image of Althusser not as irredeemably “theoreticist,” but as a theorist entangled with the complex legacy of Marxism: its history, its debates, and analytical and political currency within his own conjuncture.
If CUNY’s movements are to reverse the administration and the NY government’s assault, they will need to force the union to move past the economism of their contract campaign and embrace struggles that speak to the lives of their members, New York, and the wider world.
These two aspects of Ali’s life – the athlete and the militant – cannot be separated: his entire boxing career was fully political, and his greatest matches, against Ernie Terrell and George Foreman, saw him waging the struggle against white supremacy, racism, and collaborationism in the boxing ring itself.
The real problem with Inventing the Future is not the deficiencies in its program – any bugs in the proposals could always be ironed out in the testing stage – but its relation to futurity as such.
The first part of this essay sought to show how the development of the Marxist theory of the state was closely connected to the problems of revolutionary strategy, specifically in terms of the forms of working-class organization appropriate for developed democratic societies.
The debates of the European Left at the twilight of the classical workers’ movement still divide our contemporaries along rigid sectarian lines, resulting in spectacular eruptions of uncomprehending crosstalk.
To make the most of the political opportunities created by the Sanders campaign, radicals need to develop new forms of organization that are appropriate to our historical conjuncture.
Viewpoint Magazine