Revolutionary Union members weren’t going off to do some exciting actions and waiting for the rest of the world to rise up. This is heavy stuff. These young people basically said “I’m going to dedicate my life to making a revolution in the United States.”
The analysis of James’s thought elaborated here is only a preliminary to what we have called a counter-genealogy of race. Tracing this genealogy could assist us in overcoming the aporias that stall contemporary debates around race, and requires suspending any pre-given conception of the concept in order to shed light on the heterogeneous, and sometimes contradictory, historical instances of a counter-concept of race within struggles against racial oppression.
Underlying those points – which we might call tactical points about the usage of cybernetic technologies by revolutionary movements – is another larger, more strategic point: the changes in class composition which have been effected by capital in terms of its restructuring of the global workforce using automata and networks and, in the financial system, networks of automata.
The widening gap between global public opinion and the ineffectuality of the international state system in the face of the ever-worsening conditions of Palestinian lives obliges global solidarity activists to deepen our understanding of the conflict, reconsider the possibilities for its resolution, and reflect on our strategies.
Outbursts of organized racism were thought to be yet another difficult chapter in Germany’s history, but now firmly in the past. Yet the attack in Heidenau was not an anomaly, but the latest in a series of nationalist and racist actions which has been intensifying in recent years.
In one sense the history of the NCM can be summed up as “a moment of sectarianism and dogmatism.” In another sense, however, the NCM was more than the sum total of its sectarian and dogmatic errors. It attempted to keep alive the remnants of the mass movements of the 1960s, it organized workers, built left caucuses in unions, mobilized struggles around fundamental issues of racism, women’s rights, immigrant rights, and built movements in solidarity with liberation struggles around the world.
The European Scenario is typical across much of the world. Europe’s periphery is now playing out a script already performed many times in the post-colony.
The YPO was a Chicago-based group of poor, white, and revolutionary southern transplants, who played a crucial role in founding the original 1969 Rainbow Coalition, a groundbreaking alliance initiated by the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. But on what grounds could the Patriots see themselves as specifically white revolutionary nationalists?
Despite these ostensibly “progressive” victories, the region’s period of left-wing state dominance may have reached its limits, and in some cases, fallen into outright conservatism. Consequently, there’s a need for a re-activiation of political struggle at the grassroots level to overcome the inertia of the political cycle.
While Adorno claimed that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric, hip-hop claims that it is necessary to write poetry after the barbarism of slavery. Its history, and its historical consequences, must be recorded.
Viewpoint Magazine