Burning Man’s Experimental Dreampolitics

Does the iconic festival suggest a new way forward?

When the era of master narratives recedes and well-trodden Enlightenment principles cease to be relevant, progressives should issue the challenge to come up with an alternative thinking. It is quite a challenge today to bring about new reasoning when the distinguishing feature of our current condition is distrust and skepticism ...
Read More
Burning Man’s Experimental Dreampolitics

Social Organicism in the Service of Power

The sinister side of unity discourse

Socialists, social democrats, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and even liberals like Barack Obama, have been condemned for promoting “class warfare.” However, condemning those who combat oppression and injustice for “dividing society” is to participate in the defense of the social order as it currently exists. Such condemnations of attempts at ...
Read More
Social Organicism in the Service of Power

Are Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Althusser’s ‘Reading Capital’ Still Relevant Today?

Princeton professor Nick Nesbitt argues for the transhistorical importance of both works

The following are excerpts from an interview with Nick Nesbitt conducted by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paolo and from his introduction to the edited volume The Concept in Crisis. Reading Capital Today published by Duke University Press in 2017. Copyright 2017 Duke University Press. Folha de São Paolo: A century and a half after ...
Read More
Are Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Althusser’s ‘Reading Capital’ Still Relevant Today?

The Long Shadow

The legacy of the Moynihan Report and the limits of postwar liberalism

In Rochester NY, where I live, a recent poverty initiative has been proposed to address some of the most deeply entrenched poverty areas of this country. History casts its long shadow over the understanding of poverty evinced by these initiatives. Short on proposals to empower the community, the reading lists ...
Read More
The Long Shadow

Film review: Champ of the Camp

The first ever feature-length documentary filmed in the UAE’s controversial labor camps

Mahmoud Kaabour’s film Champ of the Camp (2014) opens with the song by a South Asian man set against the backdrop of a modernistic building covered in glass windows. The song is called “Long Separation” and the setting is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Such  juxtaposition runs throughout the movie: the poor ...
Read More
Film review: Champ of the Camp

From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond

At first sight, today’s crisis appears to be political. Its most spectacular expression is right here, in the United States: Donald Trump -- his election, his presidency, and the contention surrounding it. But there is no shortage of analogues elsewhere: the UK’s Brexit debacle; the waning legitimacy of the European ...
Read More
Placeholder