Current events
Insider Intellectual History
Historians have recently revived the sociology of knowledge as a method of analyzing the transatlantic projects of “insider intellectuals” in the middle of the 20th century.
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An Empty Gesture of Resistance
An op-ed published in The New York Times by an anonymous official in the Trump Administration makes the extraordinary claim that a resistance group has formed inside the White House. Its author dons the mantle of resistance and draws moral legitimacy from it. Heroic gestures, such as written protests or public demonstrations, seek to change the public narrative somehow. They convey risk, self-sacrifice, and integrity. Gestures of resistance are speech Read More
Assembling a New Left
What social forces exist under neoliberal capitalism that might form the basis for a new left? How should that new left organize itself politically – as a socialist party, one big union, a spontaneous assembly, or all of the above? See my essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Assembly (2017), the most general appraisal yet of post-2008 radical left politics in the Read More
Reclaiming Antifascism
Antifascism needs restoration. Layers of additional meanings and intentions have accumulated since its inception in the 1920s and ’30s, obscuring its original character. The first layer formed already during World War II, when the phrase “premature antifascists” entered the American lexicon as a label for those on the left who had actively opposed fascist regimes in Europe well before the United States entered the war against the Nazis. Among other Read More
Going Underground
Lately, the idea of resistance has a renewed urgency and appeal. But we won’t be able to fight a fresh wave of authoritarianism without appreciating the symbols that animated the antifascist imagination of the past – in particular, the underground. That symbol has very deep roots in European and US culture, but over the course of the 20th century it was transformed from a threatening zone of subversion into a Read More
The Partisan’s Lament
From eastern Ukraine to an Oregon wildlife refuge, right-wing militias have lately expropriated the memory of antifascist resistance and partisan struggle. But we would do well to remember the progressive and emancipatory potential of that history. Below I’ve translated a famous song of the French Resistance, “La Complainte du partisan” (1943). Here’s a beautiful version by the Russian-born French singer Anna Marly, who composed the song’s original music in 1943 (the lyrics date Read More
A Poem for Dark Times
We surely live in dark times. This afternoon I remembered a poem that Bertolt Brecht wrote in the late 1930s. It was called “An die Nachgeborenen,” and it aimed not to console, but to provoke. Below is my loose translation from the German. (Here’s a recording of Brecht reading the original.) To Future Generations – I –Really, I live in dark times!Innocent words are foolish. An unfurrowed browIndicates apathy. He who Read More