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Marx once declared that philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Demarcation and Demystification examines the ways in which a radical practice of philosophy is possible under the aegis of Marx's 11th thesis, arguing that philosophy's radicality is discovered by understanding that it can only ever interpret the world; that social transformation lies beyond the sphere of its operations. 'Demarcation and Demystification is a major statement on the gulf between what philosophers actually do, and what they think they do.' Matthew R. McLennan, author of Philosophy and Vulnerability
"There was a time when we proclaimed that we were part of a beautiful and fragmented chaos of affinity groups, conflicted organizations, disorganized rebels, all of whom were somehow part of the same social movement that was greater than the sum of its parts. We were more accurately a disorganized mob of enraged plebeians shaking our fists at a disciplined imperial army. Years ago we spoke of social movementism but now it only makes sense to drop the 'social' since this phase of confusion was incapable of understanding the social terrain. Disparate, unfocused, and divided movements lack a unified intentionality; they have proved themselves incapable of pursuing the necessity of communism." T...
Anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries have long turned to dialectical thought as a central weapon in their fight against oppressive structures and conditions. This relationship was never easy, however, as anticolonial thinkers have resisted the historical determinism, teleology, Eurocentrism, and singular emphasis that some Marxisms place on class identity at the expense of race, nation, and popular identity. In recent decades, the conflict between dialectics and postcolonial theory has only deepened. In Decolonizing Dialectics Geo Maher breaks this impasse by bringing the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery. This is a decolonized dialectics premised on constant struggle in which progress must be fought for and where the struggles of the wretched of the earth themselves provide the only guarantee of historical motion.
"A virus is haunting the globe, one of pandemic proportions, whose threat has necessitated unprecedented measures to forestall death and violence worse than the present crisis. But the cruelty, violence, and depredations that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic aren't merely detritus in the wake of its spread; they characterize the necrocapitalism of this conjuncture." - from the Prologue As the pandemic transitioned from science fiction to reality in early 2020, a number of writers and thinkers in the imperialist metropoles declared the impossibility of writing in the face of a future that is foreclosed. And yet, due to the nightmare that capitalism has been since its beginning, numerous...
Methods Devour Themselves is a dialogue between fiction and non-fiction. Inspired by Quentin Meillassoux's Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction that was paired with an Isaac Asimov short story, this book examines the ways in which stories can provoke philosophical interventions and philosophical essays can provoke stories. Alternating between Benjanun Sriduangkaew's fiction and J. Moufawad-Paul's non-fiction, Methods Devour Themselves is an interstitial project that brings fiction and essay into a unique, avant-garde whole.
Wang Fanxi, a leader of the Chinese Trotskyists, wrote this book on Mao more than fifty years ago. He did so while in exile in the then Portuguese colony of Macau, across the water from Hong Kong, where he had been sent in 1949 to represent his comrades in China, soon to disappear for decades into Mao’s jails. The book is an analytical study whose strength lies less in describing Mao’s life than in explaining Maoism and setting out a radical view on it as a political movement and a current of thought within the Marxist tradition to which both Wang and Mao belonged. With its clear and provoking thesis, it has, since its writing, stood the test of time far better than the hundreds of descriptive studies that have in the meantime come and gone.
On January 20th, 2017, during an interview on the streets of Washington D.C., white nationalist Richard Spencer was punched by an anonymous antifascist. The moment was caught on video and quickly went viral, and soon “punching Nazis” was a topic of heated public debate. How might this kind of militant action be conceived of, or justified, philosophically? Can we find a deep commitment to antifascism in the history of philosophy? Through the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, with some reference to Fanon and Sartre, this book identifies the philosophical reasons for the political action being enacted by contemporary antifascists. In addition, using the work of Jacques Rancière, it arg...
"By 2009, every anti-worker ideologue and their devotees had a popularized concept under which to mobilize their arguments about how and why workers should absorb the excesses of those capitalists who wanted to maintain their wealthy lifestyles: austerity. In this sense, the austerity apparatus is simply that which functions to police the everyday operations of crisis capitalism. In another sense this apparatus is the mobilization of operations that are a normative part of capitalism even without a crisis But this is simply due to the fact that economic crises are also part of capitalism's day-to-day functioning: capitalism is crisis, implicitly or explicitly." An excavation of the ideology ...
Since its first publication twenty years ago, Eurocentrism has become a classic of radical thought. Written by one of the world's foremost political economists, this original and provocative essay takes on one of the great "ideological deformations" of our time: Eurocentrism. Rejecting the dominant Eurocentric view of world history, which narrowly and incorrectly posits a progression from the Greek and Roman classical world to Christian feudalism and the European capitalist system, Amin presents a sweeping reinterpretation that emphasizes the crucial historical role played by the Arab Islamic world. Throughout the work, Amin addressesa broad set of concerns, ranging from the ideological nature of scholastic metaphysics to the meanings and shortcomingsof contemporary Islamic fundamentalism. This second edition contains a new introduction and concluding chapter, both of which make the author's arguments even more compelling.