Anti-intellectual prejudice has had a large influence on both intellectuals and activists and has settled into a series of common notions that remain operative today. But anti-intellectualism, rather than a nod toward the popular, is a call to order.
There is no doubt therefore that students are not only workers but workers facing a decidedly precarious future. About this only ideologues brook debate these days. And yet this will not quite do. It is better to say that students join hands with workers as proletarians.
In a moment when the right wing is confident and unionization is at an all-time low, it is important to gather forces that can debate and strategize.
The Enlightenment is again the object of debate. We can only rejoice that traditional interpretations have been questioned. Yet it would be regrettable to replace one doxa with another by artificially constructing a homogeneous philosophical tradition and a teleology of philosophical radicalism, linking Spinoza and the French Revolution and, doubtless further, the contemporary radical left.
Coates’s descriptive language and haunting narrative are not mere metaphors. They act as an ontological pivot, mystifing racism even as it is anchored in its physical effects.
“Communism for Kids” was written during the so-called “end of history” — the historical epoch between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Arab Spring. A period of intense fragmentation of the Left, this was when the anti-globalization movement mobilized around the slogan, “another world is possible.”
Haraway’s former (profoundly system-oriented) Marxian technofeminism has given way, then, to something called multispecies feminism characterized by a barely disavowed willingness to see whole cities and cultures wiped from the planet for the sake of a form of thriving among “companion species” involving relatively few of us.
The student movement has taken an action that exceeds its character as a narrow, student effort circumscribed to the academic setting. In order to understand how these thousands of students stopped acting “like students” and began deliberating, acting, and demanding in a clear and self-consciously political field of struggle, it is necessary to look at the history of student struggle in Puerto Rico.
Are the premises of queer theory really antithetical to a historical materialist understanding of the origins of capitalism? Considering Foucault’s something of the patron saint of queer theory, we might perhaps discover the error of the whole formation in the thought of its founder.
Viewpoint Magazine is a proud Co-Sponsor of this year’s Historical Materialism New York Conference on “Resurgent Radicalisms in a Polarizing World.” We hope that the conference can be another platform for urgent discussion and debate posed by social movements and Marxist theory in these turbulent times.
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