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The Name of Algeria: French Philosophy and the Subject of Decolonization

Alberto Toscano February 1, 2018

A hypothetical “Algerian history of French philosophy” elicits a variegated but in many ways opaque picture. Arguably, it is only the generation that came of political age in the late 1950s and early 1960s – the generation of Balibar and Rancière – that, with considerable delay, incorporated the questions raised by the decolonization of France and Algeria into their thinking, but when they did so it was not in terms of the problematic of revolutionary anti-colonial violence, but in terms of the antinomies of citizenship.

“Why We Appear”: The Brief Revival of The Anti-Imperialist Review

Fredrik Petersson February 1, 2018

The LAI’s theoretical organ The Anti-Imperialist Review and its editorial history represent a constituent source of militant reportage on global anti-imperialism between the two World Wars, as well as a rigorous effort to construct a conceptual framework within which the international communist movement could politically analyze how these phenomena were articulated within the broader international relations of force. The dead-ends and contradictory ideological and political shifts that the LAI had to navigate also point to the insurmountable problems of the anti-imperialist practice of Comintern-linked organizations.

Hour of the Furnaces: Imperial Finance and the Colonization of Daily Life

Morgan Adamson February 1, 2018

The state of bankruptcy under imperial rule interrogated by Hora de los hornos allows us to consider what Randy Martin diagnosed as the “financialization of daily life” together with what the Situationists called the “colonization of everyday life” within capitalism, while surpassing each of these theses by insisting that quotidian violence is inseparable from imperialism as a historical and cultural process.

“Negro Workers, Defend the Soviet Union and the Chinese Revolution!” – The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers and the Political Rhetoric of The Negro Worker

Holger Weiss February 1, 2018

The Negro Worker surveyed the geographies of colonialism and imperialism through the labor regimes which marked the uneven development of global capitalism, and in doing so also plotted the different trajectories and strategies of anti-colonial struggles.

Appeal to Negro Seamen and Dockers (1932)

International of Seamen and Harbour Workers February 1, 2018

The International of Seamen and Harbour Workers (ISH) greets you and appeals to you to organize within the ranks of the revolutionary water transport proletariat to fight against the terrible exploitation and robbery imposed upon you by the capitalists, the shipowners, the lighterage companies, as well as their white and black agents – the headmen, the stevedore-bosses, the foremen and managers.

Marx, Du Bois, and the Black Underclass: RAM’s World Black Revolution

Bill V. Mullen February 1, 2018

“World Black Revolution” was a critical exegesis, literally a reimagining, of the primary tenets of Marxist thought dating back to the 1848 publication of the Communist Manifesto. Its authors, members of a small cadre of trained black revolutionaries, sought to demonstrate that every major premise of western Marxist historiography and Communist history had failed to address what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the color line.” Thus, the World Black Revolution, elevated to the level of a strategic concept, aspired to define Black Power as an epochal stage and interpretation of world history, a new hermeneutic for a revised historical totality.

Revolution Decentered: Two Studies on Lenin

Matthieu Renault February 1, 2018

Through the two studies that follow, we will begin to explore Lenin’s itinerary of a decolonization of the revolution, covering the question of national self-determination and struggles for independence prior to 1917 as well as the imperative to decolonize the Russian Empire after 1917, starting with the case of the Muslim colonies of Central Asia.

Why We Appear (1931)

League Against Imperialism February 1, 2018

In the last few years the struggle of the oppressed masses in the colonial and semi-colonial countries has gained enormously in extent and intensity. National oppression in Europe exerted by imperialism through the instrument of the Versailles Treaty is giving rise to acute political problems. The “League Against Imperialism,” which has been in existence for more than four years as the international organisation uniting all anti-imperialist forces, is faced with the need for extending and intensifying its activities to a corresponding degree.

The New Left and the Army: Let’s Bridge the Gap! (1968)

Vietnam GI, The Movement and Derek Seidman February 1, 2018

During the U.S. war on Vietnam, an extraordinary phenomenon arose within the military’s ranks: the widespread production, circulation, and readership of an underground antiwar press for, and often by, rank-and-file GIs.

Forms of Unfree Labor: Primitive Accumulation, History or Prehistory of Capitalism?

Yann Moulier Boutang February 1, 2018

We propose to show two things: on the one hand, it shall be argued that so-called “primitive” accumulation of capital takes place in a continuous, or ongoing manner; on the other hand, in order to accurately identify the contemporary role of forms of unfree labor, it is necessary to take the same approach as found in my previous work on the constitution of historical wage-labor.