Because of her political longevity, Grace Lee Boggs leaves as a legacy a corpus of ideas and revolutionary practices linked to the shifting dynamics and cycles that mark the history of capitalism in the United States. She was an example of a life dedicated to the movement, informed by a spirit of solidarity, and attuned to the pressing issues of the period.
The Latin American passive revolutions are sliding dangerously down a slope in which they are losing their hegemonic luster, demonstrating the possible beginning to an extended end of the cycle.
While our emphasis on these international sources of capitalism’s emergence may seem rather obvious to some, it’s striking how few theoretical approaches (Marxist or otherwise) actually provide a substantive historical sociological theorization of “the international.”
As this inquiry demonstrates, campus activism has taken myriad forms – from perennial die-ins and walkouts to a campaign for a Level 1 Trauma Center. Still, what many share is a rejection of the mythos of “Black progress.” What they embrace, in turn, is that the enduring condition of Blacks in the United States is one of struggle, necessitating agitation for the re-imagination of equity in an equally enduring white-supremacist order.
Lineages • Theories • Terrains of Struggle • Sexualities • Populations • Paradigms of Production • Forms of Life
When we consider the question of surplus populations from the point of view of the feminist literature on social reproduction, we see that migrant women do not constitute a surplus population in Europe, but rather a “regular army,” which is totally necessary to capitalist production. While the widespread debate around surplus populations rightly highlights unemployment as a cause of migration, it runs the analytical and political risk of obscuring the fact that most migrant women do not take the jobs of others, and are waged rather than “superfluous” in their countries of arrival since much of the socially reproductive activity in the Global North has become commodified.
In some ways, our renewed focus on social reproduction shares interesting parallels with the “Italian Revolution” of 1968-1980, the most radical upheaval in postwar Western Europe. For while originally firmly anchored to the struggles of the factory proletariat, many movements began to wage a multitude of struggles beyond the point of production, developing class power on what was called the terrain of social reproduction.
In fact, from one point of view, we cannot unravel one female’s narrative from the other’s, cannot decipher one without tripping over the other - Hortense Spillers 1 We had driven straight through from Brisbane to Sydney, a nine-hour drive with your foot flat to the floor. We were on our way to a radical student conference, it was the… Read more →
By the summer of 1968, less than two years after its inception, Oakland, California’s Black Panther Party was running out of space. Signs of the Black Power organization’s rapid growth were especially evident at its Grove Street office, which by this time, was “busting out at the seams,” with “piles of newsletters, leaflets, buttons, [and] flags” overflowing into members’ homes.… Read more →
What could have interested Foucault in the passages from Capital, to the degree that he presents them as sources for a positive study of power, rooted in the development of the economy and its “forces?” We would like to clarify this point by returning to Marx’s text, which Foucault’s suggestion prompts us to read in a manner that might be called “symptomatic,” since it is not at all obvious, at first glance, how one might derive the principles for an analysis of “power” which is at best implicit in Capital, hovering in the background.
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