In the wake of the Detroit Rebellion, the Inner City Voice newspaper placed a sharp emphasis on defining the strategy and tactics of the ongoing black liberation struggle and how it might prefigure and trigger a second American revolution.
Trans liberation through communism is suggested by the already existing activity of trans women who have fashioned some kind of life for so many of ourselves, even in the face of transmisogyny and exploitation.
What made bop strong is that no matter its pretensions, it was hooked up solidly and directly to the Afro-American blues tradition, and therefore was largely based in the experience and struggle of the black sector of the working class.
The point is to place the human operator back in the frame, to ask after those who tended the machine before it was available as a spectacle, and to listen to how they understood what they were tangled in the midst of.
Harootunian emphasizes the tension between temporalities, where anachronisms can disturb the homogeneous linear time of capitalism and the nation-state, and can orient the trajectory of political modernity in a different direction. These anachronisms constitute possibilities for derailing the train of history in another direction.
I went on migrating from room to room in the house of reproduction. Then finally I found the door that opened into the flower and vegetable garden: I realized the importance of the question of the land. That door was thrown open for me by the new actors I was looking for, the protagonists of indigenous rebellions, those fighting against dams or deforestation, the women of the Global South.
The traditional forces of the extreme center have crumbled, and now there is a renewed resistant subjectivity, which has been barred by ruling forces over the past forty years of neoliberal restructuring – there are subjects who continue to be resolutely against the labor law and its world.
Anti-intellectual prejudice has had a large influence on both intellectuals and activists and has settled into a series of common notions that remain operative today. But anti-intellectualism, rather than a nod toward the popular, is a call to order.
There is no doubt therefore that students are not only workers but workers facing a decidedly precarious future. About this only ideologues brook debate these days. And yet this will not quite do. It is better to say that students join hands with workers as proletarians.
In a moment when the right wing is confident and unionization is at an all-time low, it is important to gather forces that can debate and strategize.
Viewpoint Magazine