The Prison and Theory Working Group (PTWG) was founded in 2014 by a group of scholars and activists committed to prison abolition. Members of PTWG wrote "10 Key Points" collaboratively during in-person and virtual meetings over several months in 2014 and 2015. This collectively authored work is the first document that the group has produced. PTWG continues to work toward prison abolition, holds open events and workshops, and maintains a bibliography of work by currently and formerly incarcerated writers, which can be found at http://ptwg.org/.

This essay argues that the radical subjectivity of nullity defined as the part-of-no-part by Rancière and as universal-singular agency by Žižek, cannot be embodied in a group or a class, but exclusively through autonomous individuality. All group identities are essentially pragmatically-particularist, i.e., constructed through a consensual counterfeiting of public rationality whose purpose is to maintain hierarchical inequality by defining common interest as the pragmatically-interested distribution of ranks and benefits. The core irrationality of this consensual pragmatism is revealed through its constitutional enmity towards the unavoidable contentiousness of rational dialogue and its suppression of the infinity of rational curiosity. The relentlessness of rational inquiry, given that it questions paternal authority in the given context, is a deed of Desire. Yet, as Kafka’s The Castle shows, the widespread acquiescence to consensual hierarchy deploys the perfidious tool of silent ostracism to disable the autonomous individual from publicly implementing his/her inquiring Desire.

In this essay I critically examine David Graeber’s concept of “everyday communism.” Graeber claims that that all societies are ultimately based and founded upon what he calls the “communism of the senses.” This “two-level” version of social reality, as I intend to show in what follows from a Marxian standpoint, should be rejected, as it operates with a descriptive concept of society that posits as the center or “essence” of society its universal and ahistorical “human” base, on top of which hierarchical and economic relations are posited as “superstructures.” Graeber favors a theory that posits an ahistorical base underneath the historical. As a consequence, society disappears underneath an empty and abstract concept of the ethical. This image of society, I will argue with Marx and Engels, overlooks the categorical form of social relations, which cannot be reduced to an empty and abstract concept of sociality as “human” ethical relations. This is especially visible in the case of capitalist socialization.

Respect for victims requires that we have social systems for punishing and condemning (reproving) serious crimes. But, the conditions of social marginalization and political subordination of the communities from which an overwhelming number of prisoners in the United States come place serious barriers in the face of effective reprobation. Mass incarceration makes this problem worse by disrupting and disrespecting entire communities. While humanities education in the prisons is far from a total solution, it is one way to make reprobation meaningful, so long as the prison classroom is a place where the educators’ values are also put at risk.

Through a study of Fanon’s writings on colonial medicine, this paper focuses on the intersection of clinical medicine and mass incarceration. I argue that correctional medicine operates as an extension of colonial medicine via structural white supremacy. To clarify this position, I first draw from the recent literature on mass incarceration to highlight the relationship between carceral punishment in the U.S. and structural white supremacy. In the second section of the paper, I combine my analysis of structural white supremacy and mass incarceration with an analysis of colonial medicine. Here, I focus on Fanon’s writings on medicine and health under conditions of structural oppression to clarify a pattern of violence inflicted upon communities of color and poor communities in the United States, i.e., the communities most affected by mass incarceration.

Bill Martin believes that orthodox Marxism has omitted ethics in capturing social reality. He remedies this deficit by constructing an “Ethical Marxism” that appeals to Derrida’s “materialization” of Kant’s categorical imperative. He adds that the historical and ethical dimensions involved in this effort would each be an “empty formalism” without the other. Thus his ultimate goal is to save us from formalism by joining “vision” to “viability,” transcendence to immanence. But some aspects of Martin’s Ethical Marxism suggest that he may be further from Derrida than he thinks. I will explore this possibility and draw its implications for the viability of Martin’s Ethical Marxism.

In this article I clarify foundational violence by differentiating it from direct, structural, and cultural violence. Unlike direct violence, foundational violence is productive as well as destructive and can occur via practices that conventionally are considered peaceful. Unlike structural violence, it obliterates instead of exploits established social relations. Unlike cultural violence, it does not merely distort reality but annihilates the meanings permeating a pre-existing reality. I illustrate this argument with the erasure of the residency rights of citizens of the former Yugoslavia by the Slovenian state and the erasure of American Indian life worlds by the continental expansion of the United States.

This paper questions the extension of the common notion of violence, i.e., “subjective violence,” involving the intentional use of force to inflict injury or damage, towards social injustice as “systemic violence.” Systemic violence is altogether unlike subjective violence and the work of Slavoj Žižek illustrates that conceptual obfuscation in this regard may lead to an overly broad and facile justification of revolutionary violence as counter-violence to systemic violence, appealing to the ethics of self-defense. I argue that revolutionary violence is only justified to counter subjective violence inflicted or organized by the state. Thus I reject in conclusion Žižek’s further defense of revolutionary violence as retributive and as “shock therapy” necessary to disrupt the old society.

Our paper focuses on the recent incorporation of pop music into torture rituals at Guantánamo. After placing the violent intersection of sound and the sacred in historical perspective, we argue that Guantánamo’s so-called “disco” underscores a significant break with the past: whereas sonic weapons were traditionally called upon to conquer and control, they are now being enlisted in the wasteful pursuit of obliterating the religious devotion of an already captured enemy.

I argue in this paper that Mountaintop Removal (MTR) is part of what I call “ecological violence.” Whereas the common conception of violence perceives it as harm directly inflicted against an individual by a person or group, I seek to illuminate a form of violence that operates in the complex interrelation between people and the environing world they disclose through their practices. Ecological violence, as I understand it, is ecological in that it concerns the practices through which humans understand and uncover beings in their surrounding environments. It is violent in that it is concerned with practices that sever people and other beings from the relations necessary for their authentic being. MTR, I argue, is violent in just this sense. To make sense of the concept of “ecological violence” I draw on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and György Lukács.

In "Finance Capital" (1910), Rudolf Hilferding put forward a theory of capitalist development and imperialism that exerted a powerful influence on Marxist thinking throughout the Twentieth Century. After the First World War, however, Hilferding radically altered that theory. Instead of global capitalist development fueling rivalries among the capitalist states that would likely lead to war, he postulated that mutual economic interests, buttressed by close political and cultural affinities, would be more likely to promote cooperative relations among the western powers which would seek to maintain international peace. Hilferding believed that the “unbridled competition of individual sovereign states” was gradually giving way to a “community of interests.” He suggested that international treaties, the expansion of democracy, and the construction of the League of Nations, would reduce the importance of national sovereignty and would pave the way for peace and socialism. The Second World War and the Cold War seemed to relegate Hilferding’s ideas to the dustbin of history, but the collapse of the communist world and the “triumph of capitalism” have, once again, radically altered the international terrain. This paper argues that important elements of Hilferding’s theory apply to the present capitalist order in which, though imperialism remains alive and well, war among the major powers seems improbable.

The theme is socialist solidarity. Schmitt notes that efforts towards solidarity fail because we do not know how to put our ideals in practice. The example is taken from the early kibbutzim. The founders were clear about their socialist principles but did not know how to put those in practice in such simple situations as the distribution of clothing. Schmitt concludes from that example that efforts to build socialist solidarity are often impeded by our ignorance of concrete techniques and arrangements needed for a solidary socialist society.

How would a liberation theologian respond to Marx’s famous critique that religious belief and, even more specifically, a hope for heaven is “the opium of the people”? I utilize the conceptual resources found within the work of liberation theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez, Enrique Dussel, and Jon Sobrino to argue that a belief in heaven is able to constitute a protest against oppressed persons’ present hell. To strengthen the connection between a believer’s heavenly hope and a commitment to worldly struggle, I examine how the hope must be conceived as the completion and fulfillment of a process of temporal transformation.

This essay explores some well-traveled territory—the area in which eating and suffering come together. I undertake two projects. First, I scrutinize some foods that are often portrayed as unambiguously either good (homegrown organic vegetables) or bad (foie gras), in an effort to complicate the stories we tell about them. What violence has been heretofore invisible in them? What compassion has been occluded? This project informs a second: an answer to the question “how should we eat?” My answer takes up Kelly Oliver’s call for an ethics of “sustaining relationships.” I ground it in an alternative ontology of food, one that views foods not as substances, but as loci of relations.

Contrasting the conflicting positions of Fink and Žižek, this article opens and closes with the question: is feminine jouissance ineffable? It solves the mystery of why Lacan associates the Other jouissance with women and presents an account of phallic and the Other jouissance informed by the work of Breuer and Freud. It argues that the satisfactions of Lacan’s feminine subject bear striking affinity to those of the hysteric, while phallic jouissance affords the same sort of enjoyment as that of Freud’s obsessional neurotic. And, while “real” experiences make one lose one-self and may not be represented by one who was absent, this is not to say that we cannot shed light on characteristically feminine pleasure/pains.

After an extended period in which Marxism received relatively little attention, many of its tenets are now playing a more important role within the left. This essay argues for the relevance today of a number of Marx’s major themes. The Marx I offer here is a conservative Marx. I base this view on his insistence that socialism is needed not to makes us perfect but to save society, in a general sense, from the threats of destruction that it encounters under capitalism. His criticism of utopianism requires that change be anchored in steps humanity has prepared itself to take, rather than in steps that it has no reason to believe will be effective. The importance of class has survived attacks on it as a relic of industrialism and the dominance of the male proletariat. But the working class is more extensive than it ever was. It now encompasses diverse races, genders, and cultures in what can become a front against capitalism. Finally, Marx’s politics posits an inversion of the power relation in capitalist society with capitalism’s subordination of citizens to the state. The global ferment against the failures of capitalism opens new possibilities for the growth of anti-capitalist currents.