Archives: Online Posts
The Price of Freedom
Jordan Daniels reviews Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature.
The UAE’s Subimperialism in Sudan
Husam Mahjoub analyzes the role of counterrevolutionary subimperial agents—in this case, the UAE—and their imperialist enablers in the ongoing conflict in Sudan.
Breaking the Cycle of Violence
In the latest entry in Spectre’s incarcerated writers’ series, Antoine E. Davis reflects on trauma, the desire of revenge, and how to overcome the cycle of violence.
What Are We Waiting For?
This two-part essay draws upon crisis theory and the history of economic crises to reflect on the current turbulence and the next economic crisis. This second part of the essay develops a theoretical framework for socialist resistance and movement coordination for when the next crisis hits.
What Are We Waiting For?
This two-part essay draws upon crisis theory and the history of economic crises to reflect on the current turbulence and the next economic crisis. The first part of the essay begins by drawing on the work of Daniel Bensaïd and Bob Jessop to reconceptualize crises as societal paroxysms—highlighting the role crises play both as disruptions and transformative reconsolidations of the capitalist order. From this starting point, the remainder of Part One explores how we might understand economic crises in the 2020s and the near future.
Mamdani’s Judeo-Bolshevik Threat
Benjamin Balthaser explores the representation of Zohran Mamdani as simultaneously foreign menace and inauthentic outsider, deploying both antisemitism and Islamophobia to prop up a neatly racialized version of politics.
The Anti-Zionist Tradition of the US Jewish Left
Shane Burley’s review of Ben Balthaser’s Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left draws out the conditions of Jewish diasporic radicalism in the US, showing the roots of a now resurgent Jewish anti-Zionism.
Zionism, or Racism with(out) Borders
Rawan Abdelbaki and Rana Sukarieh argue that Zionism is a project of bordering that is both materially embedded in, and helps proliferate, global racial capitalism.
How Settler Colonies Fail
Richard Solomon reviews Lauchlan McNamee’s Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, arguing that it’s analysis of the strategic calculus of settler colonialism gives inadequate weight to the actions of indigenes.
The Enduring Fantasy of “Feeding the World”
Members of the Agroecology Research-Action Collective argue against the productivist logic underlying the “feed-the-world” approaches to feed security.