Imperialism + Internationalism + Migration

On Method

On Method

If we sustain the distinction – as we try to throughout this book – between “politics” (understood as the battle for power) and the experiences in which processes of the production of sociability or values are at stake, we can distinguish then between the political militant (who founds their discourse on a certain set of certainties) and the militant researcher (who organizes their perspective on the basis of critical questions concerning these certainties).

Living in Freedom: Notes on Colectivo Situaciones and MTD Solano's Hypothesis 891

Living in Freedom: Notes on Colectivo Situaciones and MTD Solano’s Hypothesis 891

Today, when the term “militant research” is regularly used in academic articles and texts, it is worth returning to the question of the purpose and practice of research militancy. Ultimately, as Hipotesis 891 highlights, research militancy is not primarily about another way of doing research, or least research that assumes academia as its main site of enunciation. Rather, it is about another way of doing politics, that does not follow a predetermined line or presume to know the answers a priori, but that sees research as part of the political process itself. 

Evolution of the Labor Process and Class Struggles (1978)

Evolution of the Labor Process and Class Struggles (1978)

If we want to understand something, I think there’s nothing to do but go see it oneself and to patiently collect the most direct knowledge possible. Go see the sites of production, speak with workers and businesspeople, engineers, work where possible together with workers, participate directly in production. This patient work of identifying reality as concretely as possible is what I call “making inquiries.”

The Labor Process and the Division of the Working Class (1978)

The Labor Process and the Division of the Working Class (1978)

The development of outside firms permanently employed across the cluster effectively transforms the division of labor in a thoroughgoing manner, more or less insidiously changing the function of workers of the petrochemical enterprise, and in many cases coming to load the position of the working class in this sector with ambiguity – posing a problem (more or less assumed) to industrial and trade union action. 

“Technology Transfer” and Its Contradictions: Some Aspects of Algerian Industrialization (1977)

“Technology Transfer” and Its Contradictions: Some Aspects of Algerian Industrialization (1977)

The concrete functioning of those industries which have been “offshored” or set up by “transferred technology” in Third World countries has hardly been studied in a systematic way, and we only have scattered and disparate data on this subject. It is regarding this concrete process that we would like to make a few remarks. The contradictions at work in the process of industrialization in Algeria are far from having produced all their consequences.

Introduction to Robert Linhart: Concrete Analyses in the Spider's Web of Production

Introduction to Robert Linhart: Concrete Analyses in the Spider’s Web of Production

Consistent with his rejection of a romanticization of the working class, Linhart insists that workers’ knowledge is fragmented and partial, if also profound. The task of the inquiry is, thus, to collect via dialogue and participation, this disjointed state of collective memory and oral testimony in support of a systematic understanding of the whole.

1,500,000 Gas Masks: Appalachia as a Resource Colony in Rod Harless & Dan Cutler's The Hillbillys: A Book for Children

1,500,000 Gas Masks: Appalachia as a Resource Colony in Rod Harless & Dan Cutler’s The Hillbillys: A Book for Children

The Hilllbillys is hardly a children’s book. The illustrations are raw, and it is a bleak story that carries pessimistic despondency rare to see from movement documents in the era. Harless and Cutler offer a deeply frustrated parable of exploitation and environmental destruction in the Appalachian region. 

This Concerns Everyone (1981)

This Concerns Everyone (1981)

In all capitalist countries, organizing work means dividing workers: exploring ever new “labor reserves,” just as one begins production on a new mining deposit, wearing down and laminating its dense cores. The organization of labor never stabilizes, even in periods where technology remains constant. Workers resist a mode of exploitation which seeks, limitlessly, to intensify work and make labor-power more lucrative and capitalism strives to detect and deepen weak points within worker resistance. 

American Imperialism is the Bitter Enemy of the Palestinian People

The Palestinian Left Will Not Be Hijacked – A Critique of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

On one level, the liquidation of revolutionary Palestinian memory and thought can be contested by recounting history through a materialist method. And on a more urgent level, we should ask what insights the Palestinian Left tradition can offer in strategizing for the liberation of Palestine and developing a robust internationalist, anti-imperialist movement in the present moment. 

Below the Barricades: On Infrastructure, Self-Determination, and Defense

Below the Barricades: On Infrastructure, Self-Determination, and Defense

On this basis, one practice of blockading—of geographically isolated assertions of land-based sovereignty by remote nations—connects directly with another, the chokepoint protests of organizers in cities and distribution centers. This conveys the agency of Indigenous land defenders directly to urban locales, and drafts new possibilities for settler and working-class solidarity with anti-colonial struggle—a solidarity that again traverses the infrastructure it would obstruct, in a demonstration appropriate to the scale of global capitalism.