Viewpoint is proud to co-sponsor the Rome Conference on Communism, taking place in the eternal city from January 18-22, 2017. The conference entails a series of roundtable discussions with major figures in the history, practice, and theory of communism, as well as workshops bringing together younger activists and militants.
Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression reminds us of an earlier generation of radicals who disidentified with liberal capitalist democracy and American exceptionalism to envision an end to imperial domination and economic exploitation. The pamphlet and the multi-racial struggles against legal lynching that inspired it are important tools as we heed renewed calls for black self-determination amidst a global reassertion of fascism and lynch law.
Tags: From the Archives
Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity.
If you had read in early 2016 about a National Policy Institute conference on the theme of “Identity Politics,” you might have assumed it was an innocent gathering of progressives. If you had attended, you would have been in for an unpleasant surprise. The National Policy Institute is an organization of white nationalists, overseen by neo-Nazi media darling Richard Spencer.
It once was common practice for radical journals to solicit feedback from their readers. It anchored theoretical developments and pointed to new areas of inquiry. As Viewpoint expands its work, we hope our readers can help us revive the practice here.
On July 21st, 1960, LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, visited Cuba with a remarkable group of eleven intellectuals and activists, including Robert Williams, Harold Cruse, John Henrik Clarke, and Sarah Wright.
Tags: From the Archives
November 8, 2016 – we may remember this as the day that the liberal elite of the American coasts learned of a world outside its Facebook feed.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is an Aymara activist, sociologist, and oral historian who has worked with indigenous movements in Bolivia over the last four decades. Her work provides a valuable critique of certain forms of indigenous identity politics, and a balance sheet of anticolonial struggles in the country more broadly.
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.
The relationship between Antonio Gramsci and operaismo, if occasionally mentioned, is rarely explicated. And if translations of Tronti’s 1960s writings have appeared in fragments, his prior formation has remained almost entirely obscured. These texts provide the reader with not only some of the ideas percolating in the mind of the young Tronti, but also a window into the prehistory of workerism: the tumultuous debates within the Italian left of the 1950s over the meanings of Marxism.
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