In 1941 in Cindy Walker’s native Texas, the sexual encounter described by her song “Cherokee Maiden” was not only frowned on, it was illegal. Texas had been the first state in the union to pass a law officially barring miscegenation.
The strike allows us to find each other, and to together constitute a new collective subject, bringing our bodies together in a common action and shared territory. Just as women’s labor takes many forms, so does the women’s strike: a work stoppage, a walkout, a march, a picket, a blockade, a shopping boycott, collectively refusing gender roles.
Where elites bumble and jockey, possibilities arise. That is why in the radical uncertainty of our moment, the Left needs to strategize and organize for a revolutionary break. If we’re not prepared with a revolutionary scenario of our own, the struggles of elites may swallow us up.
It is the theme of dissolving margins, and the many ways in which Ferrante grapples with it, that makes the Neapolitan novels a testament to the borderline experience between true and false, as categories of both the personal and the political.
The Women’s March in the United States on January 21 is part of a cycle that demonstrates a new form of feminism: the overlapping movements of women, trans people, and migrants refuse to remain subjected to the empire of new forms of capitalist exploitation.
Leadership can serve as a privileged prism to revisit, in this theoretical homage to the work of Cedric J. Robinson, his own encounter with C.L.R. James’s work.
It remains to be seen what kind of politics can be built on the foundation of the notion of racial capitalism. To determine what organizational and practical activity can be derived from this analysis, we should turn to the comparison we have in front of us: the work of the communists of the early 20th century, who began with the now widely discredited and ridiculed Black Belt thesis.
Only a concrete analysis of our concrete situation can determine what role, if any, the black bloc can play in today’s movements.
This original encounter of linguistic difference, of unintelligibility and non-translatability, seems to have had a lasting impact on the long, slow, violent, and modern histories of human suffering mentioned above. In a sense, poetry and politics after Auschwitz must be barbaric—that is to say, they must be foreign to the hegemonic language and culture that produced the Holocaust.
The kind of feminism we seek is already emerging internationally, in struggles across the globe: from the women’s strike in Poland against the abortion ban to the women’s strikes and marches in Latin America against male violence; from the massive women’s demonstration of the last November in Italy to the protests and the women’s strike in defense of reproductive rights in South Korea and Ireland.
Viewpoint Magazine