Issue

Antonio Berni, Desocupados, 1934

Surplus Alongside Excess: Uno Kōzō, Imperialism, and the Theory of Crisis

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Uno Kōzō’s Theory of Crisis provides us with not only a way to think about Marx’s Capital as a theoretical structure, but also the conditions of possibility for a renewal of politics in the face of our current situation. Paradoxically, the theoretical eternality of the laws and norms constituting capitalist society is precisely what allows us to grasp the historicity and finitude of the capitalist mode of production itself. And while the necessity of crisis does not simply lead to the necessity of collapse of the system, it does allow us to think otherwise about the necessity of capitalism itself.

Now and Coming Time III

The Postcolonial and the Politics of the Outside: Return(s) of the National Question in Marxist Theory

Today, the field of inquiry called “postcolonial studies” appears to be in a crisis of self-legitimation. This crisis concerns not the “success” of postcolonial studies as a disciplinary formation in the production of knowledge, but rather the foundational assumptions and political directions implied by the emergence of this disciplinary formation. 

Statue of José Marti at the National Library in Havana.

Strategies of Imperialism and Opposition in Cuba: Reflections on the Purity of Anti-Imperialism 

While much of the work on imperialism has focused on distinguishing between different types of imperialism over time or between empire and imperialism, putting aside these considerations and focusing on various cases in Cuban history allows us to see certain slippages between the categories of imperialism, empire, and anti-imperialism. This history illustrates the complex workings of imperialism, which exercises direct control over a country’s economic, social and political spheres, but also over its ideologies, laws and domestic struggles, and often in the context of multiple imperialisms.

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Frantz Fanon and the Problems of Independence (1963)

Frantz Fanon and the Problems of Independence (1963)

Much of The Wretched of the Earth, if not all of it, had been thrown onto paper as a rough draft. Certainly, if the author were still alive, the end of the Algerian War, as well as the events that followed the armistice, would have allowed him to correct some of the ideas and complete some of the book’s more affirmative arguments. Unfortunately, Fanon has left us, but the book remains. The respect he is due cannot excuse us from criticizing the theses advanced in his work without asking: if Frantz Fanon were still alive, what would he teach us in light of the Algerian experience?

A Colonial Encounter

From Nuestra América to Abya Yala: Notes on Imperialism and Anti-imperialism in Latin America across Centuries

For the indigenous population of the Americas, 1492 signifies the closure of self-determined history and the beginning of near demographic annihilation. From the vantage point of Spanish and Portuguese rulers, the same moment signals the ascent of far-reaching feudal empires and the concomitant rewards of extraordinary geographic preponderance. 

Call Center

Deportation as Outsourcing in El Salvador’s Call Center Industry

In this cycle of migration, deportation, and outsourcing, then, the enterprise of deportation takes on a more sinister tone, as open coercion is combined with precarious forms of wage labor. It offers a singular example of the cynical and cruel efficiency of global neoliberal capitalism. The rise of the call center industry in countries like Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador signals the reimagining of mass deportation as outsourcing, in which not only are jobs offshored, but so are the workers that fill them, whose years of living and working in the United States have made them uniquely qualified for the work.

Eurocrats

European Union as Class Project and Imperialist Strategy

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European Integration is a process traversed by class antagonisms, and particular class relations of force can explain both its history and its particular institutional configuration. Yet its particular economic, institutional, and monetary architectures represent material obstacles to the actual coordination of the struggles of the subaltern classes all over Europe, struggles that are necessarily uneven because of the different temporalities of social antagonism in different social formations. This what makes a strategy of rupture and exit the necessary condition for social change but also for the possibility of creating new forms of coordination and cooperation between movements.

Mining

The Radical Anti-imperialist Consciousness of Bolivian Tin Miners in the Early 20th-Century

With the ascendance of Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia, the government disinterred “anti-imperialist” sentiments to challenge the overbearing influence of the United States on Bolivian politics. This renewed anti-imperialist discourse draws from layers of localized history accreted during Bolivia’s long status as a peripheral country entangled in the workings of the world system. My intention here is not to focus on the re-emergence of this politics today, but to re-assess the origins and conditions of anti-imperialist consciousness among workers the 20th-century Bolivian Andes.

The Specificity of Imperialism

The Specificity of Imperialism

A strong socialist movement in this country is impossible without a firm and unwavering commitment to overthrowing imperialism in all its forms. To do that, however, we need a clearer idea of exactly what we are up against.