It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a gulf between intellectuals and activists; between theorists of revolution and its practitioners. Writers who for years have been publishing essays that sound like position papers for vast social movements that do not in fact exist seem seized with confusion or worse, dismissive contempt, now that real ones are every- where emerging.
Articles
Articles and publications
The Politics of Magic
Review of Magic in the Ancient World,
by Fritz Graf (Harvard University Press, 1998)
THE REBIRTH OF ANARCHISM IN NORTH AMERICA, 1957-2007
Abstract: Anarchism has undergone a broad renewal in the US and Canada in recent decades, flowering most spectacularly in the alter-globalization movement in the years after the protests against the WTO ministerial in Seattle in November 1999. At the time, the movement seemed to outsiders to have spring out of nowhere.
The Sadness of Post-workerism, or “Art & Immaterial Labour” Conference, a sort of review
On the 19th of January, several of the heavyweights of Italian post-Workerist theory — Toni Negri, Bifo Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Judith Revel — appeared at the Tate Modern to talk about art. This is a review.
The Shock of Victory
The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.
This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly vic- torious of late.
The sword the sponge and the paradox of performativity
This is an essay about what it means that humans live in history, in a situa- tion where the future cannot be known and the past cannot be changed and, therefore, where the unpredictable is constantly turning into the irreversible.
The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it
Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.
The Twilight of Vanguardism
Revolutionary thinkers have been saying that the age of vanguardism is over for most of a century now. Outside of a handful of tiny sectarian groups, it’s almost impossible to find a radical intellectuals seriously believe that their role should be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction.
THE VERY IDEA OF CONSUMPTION: desire, phantasms, and the aesthetics of destruction in Western society
One of the nice things—if sometimes also one of the more irritating things—about anthro- pology is that it is uniquely well positioned to puncture theoretical assumptions. What I would like to do in this essay is to investigate one such assumption, or rather, set of assump- tions: ones which have, in a way, become some of the philosophical underpinnings of our cur- rent civilization.
There Never Was a West Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between
From the collection "Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire" by AK Press
Theres no need for all this economic sadomasochism
The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins. It turns out that Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who originally framed the argument that too high a “debt-to- GDP ratio” will always, necessarily, lead to economic contraction – and who had aggressively promoted it during Rogoff’s tenure as chief economist for the IMF –, had based their entire argu- ment on a spreadshe