Since Occupy, many have puzzled over the tendency of social movements, regardless of their original grievances, to revolve around an antagonism with cops and cages. In charting how a range of ruling class strategies – from urban redevelopment and the disciplining of migrant labor, to imperialist counter-insurgency – pivot on policing, this book helps explain why.
My wagers are these: that the riot can now be thought as a fundamental form of class struggle rather than an impolitical spasm; that we can recognize in this the ascending significance of surplus populations within the dialectical production of capital’s antagonists; and that the riot can be in turn seen as a sundial indicating where we are within the history of capitalist accumulation.
Bernie Sanders’s run for President is over, but his campaign has left behind a coherent social democratic current in American politics. How did this current cohere, where is it heading, and what does this mean for radical politics today?
Alberto Toscano, Amanda Armstrong, and Delio Vasquez on periodization and proletarian self-activity in “the new era of uprisings.”
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?
Just as Marx’s Capital can be read in different ways and its theories brought to bear on different things, so too does Althusser’s Reading Capital offer various lessons.
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.
Viewpoint Magazine