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.

Three Texts from The Negro Worker on the U.S. South

Three Texts from The Negro Worker on the U.S. South

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The bourbon capitalists of the South have been able to maintain their semi-feudal sway over the millions of brutally oppressed and bitterly exploited Negro and white toilers solely because of their ability to keep these workers unorganised and divided. About this the Southern ruling class has no illusions. It knows that these workers and especially the Negro workers, when organised under the militant leadership of the Communist Party and the revolutionary trade unions can be but a battering ram for the smashing of the entire capitalist system, breeder of all forms of economic, social and political inequalities.

11 Theses on Possible Communism

11 Theses on Possible Communism

Specter // Neoliberalism // Crisis // Proletariat // Class Struggle // Communists // Communism // Forms of Life // Program // Soviet // Future

Movement Pedagogy: Beyond the Class/Identity Impasse

Movement Pedagogy: Beyond the Class/Identity Impasse

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Thinking pedagogically renders a coalition between the universality associated with class struggle, and the positionality that is key to a radical identity politics. Attending to the actual arrangements of voices and minds and bodies in classrooms and movements, what people actually do when they come together to fight and unlearn oppressive relations of production, shows a link where most ideologies on offer today show a gap.

Winter in Catalonia

Winter in Catalonia

The Catalan independence struggle is not the politicization and expression of social problems, but the socialization of political problems. For this to happen, social problems necessarily became subsumed and misrepresented in the independence process, and the cross-class project of Catalan independence was sold as a solution to the problems of the economic crisis and the crisis of representation. 

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State, Party, Transition (1978)

State, Party, Transition (1978)

The problems of Althusser’s text and other recent interventions appear to me to lie elsewhere. What does it mean that “the party must be fundamentally outside the State,” with the clarification that it is “through its activity within the masses”? What does it mean to “tear the party away from the state”? Do we not find here an ideal (and idealist) conception of a party?

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