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.
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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.
The Enlightenment is again the object of debate. We can only rejoice that traditional interpretations have been questioned. Yet it would be regrettable to replace one doxa with another by artificially constructing a homogeneous philosophical tradition and a teleology of philosophical radicalism, linking Spinoza and the French Revolution and, doubtless further, the contemporary radical left.
Coates’s descriptive language and haunting narrative are not mere metaphors. They act as an ontological pivot, mystifing racism even as it is anchored in its physical effects.
“Communism for Kids” was written during the so-called “end of history” — the historical epoch between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Arab Spring. A period of intense fragmentation of the Left, this was when the anti-globalization movement mobilized around the slogan, “another world is possible.”
Haraway’s former (profoundly system-oriented) Marxian technofeminism has given way, then, to something called multispecies feminism characterized by a barely disavowed willingness to see whole cities and cultures wiped from the planet for the sake of a form of thriving among “companion species” involving relatively few of us.
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