This reflection considers my dawning realization that Zapatista insurgency reflects not only opposition to racist devaluation of the cultures of indigenous peoplesbut more fundamentally a struggle to overcome spiritual deracination. I contest two basic assumptions of much contemporary social theory: that race and deracination are entirely socio-cultural phenomena and that the central role played by dialogical accord in Zapatista communities can be understood without a spiritual conception of human existence. I propose that only a spiritual understanding of these three pivotal issues—race, deracination, and dialogue (or accord)—aptly captures the core intuitions that inform Zapatista insurgency.

Both feminists and Marxists have realized that it is necessary to avoid reductionism and recognize the intersections between gender, race, and class. But we donot have a methodology sufficient to develop this idea. I argue that Bertell Ollman’s book Dance of the Dialectic provides a way to think about intersectionality usingMarx’s methodology of abstraction and his theory of internal relations. As a relational abstraction, gender is intersectional. We may legitimately focus on it, as longas we treat it dialectically. We can recognize that it is not homogeneous but stands in relations of identity and/or contradiction with other social relations.

The concept of living labor in Marx’s Grundrisse represents the key notion that conceptually ties his early theory of alienation with the drafts of Capital of the 1860s. Through a critique of the formalism that opened space for Marx’s economic writings, I explore living labor, not only as alienated within the capital–laborrelation, but as an absolute, metahistorical exteriority. Furthermore, the interpretive writings of Enrique Dussel on the Grundrisse are contrasted with the reading ofMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri to show how living labor can be understood as ethical excess within the framework of biopolitical production.

This paper seeks to examine the images and discourses that have allowed for the declaration of the state of exception and the use of sovereign power. Examining the Abu Ghraib prison photographs as iconic emblems of the civilizational discourses that allow for exercises of sovereign power, I argue that these photographs articulate a dual interpellation of the Islamic Other as the terrorist/uncivilized Other and the viewer as a normative, national subject. I identify this moment as a perverted conversion in which the Islamic Other is hailed as one who necessitates an imperial crusade yet whose uncivilized state undermines the efficacy of that crusade.

This lecture offers a reading of the work of the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, particularly focusing on his writings on the question of space. It suggests that this is a simultaneously political and philosophical project and that it needs to be understood as such. Accordingly we need to examine and work with both terms in Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space — thinking about the Marxist analysis of production and the question of space which goes beyond the resourcesMarxism can offer. The paper concludes by offering some reflections on Lefebvre scholarship through the relation of space and history.

Through a structural analysis of the concept of labor in the Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, and in response to critics of Marx such as Hannah Arendt and Alfred Schmidt, the author argues that freedom in Marx is not simply freedom from labor or free time. In accordance with the essence of the human being as a working organism, the goal of the socialist revolution is also free labor. Finally, the transformation of the human being brought about by the development of laboras poesis in turn entails the transformation of labor necessarily performed because of human dependence on nature.

This essay forms the introduction for Hocquenghem’s L’après-mai des faunes. Published in January 1974, the essay reflects critically on the legacy of the events of May, 1968, and the abandonment of so-called revolutionary thought soon after. Hocquenghem calls on the left no longer to form itself simply in reaction to the bourgeois class and its values, but to find ways for turning (away) through “volutions” of action from the apathy of leftism as he has found it. Critiquing the air of crisis meant to stop thinking as such, Hocquenghem “Volutions” reads as current today as when it was written.

The sudden growth and glorification of the penal state in the United States after the mid-1970s (and in Western Europe two decades later) is not a response to the evolution of crime, but a reaction to—and a diversion from—the social insecurity produced by the fragmentation of wage labor and the destabilization of ethnoracial hierarchies following the discarding of the Fordist-Keynesian compact. It partakes of a new government of poverty wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare,” which ensnares the precarious fractions of the postindustrial proletariat in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them towards deregulated employment or to contain them in their dispossessed neighborhoods and in the booming prisons that have become their satellites. This policy of penalization of urban marginality guided by moral behaviorism partakes of a broader reengineering and remasculinizing of the state that has rendered obsolete the traditional scholarly and policy division between welfare and crime. It must be grasped, not under the narrow rubric of repression, but under the generative category of production, as it has spawned new state agencies, social types, knowledges and experts. It makes the study of incarceration an essential chapter in the sociology of the state and social stratification in the era of triumphant neoliberalism.

This article reviews the importance of the French philosopher Guy Hocquenghem. An early theorist of radical homosexuality, Hocquenghem was prescient about the rightward pull on many in the ‘68 generation in France, including those who would go on to media fame in France for liberal critiques of their earlier political incarnations. Hocquenghem would die too soon in 1988, but not before leaving an influential corpus for those thinking non-heterosexist forms of desire and political communities.

This paper contends that philosophers should consult the work of intellectual historians, who write on the history of the social formation of philosophy in the U.S., in order to understand our past role in American society and our intellectual niche in the academy. By understanding the history of our field as a social and cultural phenomenon, and not as a set of ideas that transcend their human contexts, we will be in a better position to set a future course for our discipline.

The following interview was conducted on July 13, 2009 at the JFK Institute for Graduate Studies, Freie Universität in Berlin, shortly after a conference, entitled “Class in Crisis: Das Prekariat zwischen Krise und Bewegung,” at which Harvey delivered a keynote address. The conference, organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, engaged the political, socio-economic, and conceptual dimensions of the so-called precariat class. The precariat (das Prekariat or la précarité) is typically defined by short-term employment, persistent marginalization, and social insecurity—something of a fragmented urban underclass whose precariousness is increasingly evident in traditionally middle-class economic life. While the concept of the precariat has yet to take root in English-language social theory, the work of Loïc Wacquant (who also delivered a keynote at the Berlin conference), for example, has been popularizing it.

By looking at the manner in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu have sought to understand the political nature of their work and explained their interventions in political affairs, this article defines the action they saw as possible and necessary for intellectuals. As it can only involve others, this action can take the form of dialogue and explanation or of a collective intellectual. In the texts where they reflect on their political involvement outside of parties and government, both authors assert the impossibility to evade politics. By comparing their positions, we begin to develop a critical phenomenology.

For about the last ten years, a steadily growing stream of publications is feeding a fascinating international debate on the development of an Eco-Marxism. In this paper, the attempts to “ecologize” Marxism are critically discussed, starting with John Bellamy Foster’s path-breaking reconstruction of Marx’s conceptof “metabolic rift” and the Marxian analysis of the privatization of the commons. Although Marx’s understanding of the limits of nature is only partial, authors such as Paul Burkett have convincingly shown a reconstructed Eco-Marxism follows the fundamental tenets of ecological economics. This approach can also fruitfully inform the development of an ecosocialist political project.