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Abstract This article is an analysis of the Black liberation struggle in the context of current capitalist crisis. The past forty-plus years since 1968 is the periodization embodied in this framework. The analysis is partially a rumination on the current state of Black America and the Black liberation struggle. Some discussion of an emergent black left and the United States Social Forum as a process for social transformation is considered. It is, as well, a look into Black feminist interventions in the Black freedom struggle. Core here is the feminist demand to center race, class, gender in intersectionality. Finally, some thought is given to the interplay and complexities surrounding class and the Black right in the US with implications for the current period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interview that follows revisits some of the theses developed by Alain Badiou concerning the revolts of the Arab Spring in his 2011 book Le Réveil de l'Histoire in light of subsequent events. The interview touches on a number of themes, including the relation between recent revolts and the on-going global economic crisis, and the way the reconfiguration of global value circuits impacts upon both tactical and strategic questions for rioters in Europe, North America and beyond. It also examines the way an analysis of the class composition of those involved in contemporary mass movements offers keys to understanding their failures and successes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Iraq War was a space in the ongoing geographical extension of global capitalism linked to US foreign policy. Was it simply the decision by a unitary, hegemonic actor in the inter-state system overriding concerns from other states? Was it an imperialist move to secure the ‘global oil spigot'? Alternatively, did the use of military force reflect the interests and emergence of a transnational state apparatus? We argue that the US imperium needs to be conceptualised as a specific form of state, within which and through which fractions of national and transnational capital operate. In so doing, the Iraq War is assessed as a moment in the extension of global capitalism in which the interests of a national fraction of capital within the US state form was dominant, thereby placing processes of class struggle and their relation to wider spaces of imperialism at the centre of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Piketty has offered, and many have desperately snatched at, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of our epoch. Piketty's affinity with John Maynard Keynes and his groundbreaking 1936 landmark is largely unreflexive. But the ties that bind him to Keynes are powerful, and manifest themselves at many levels in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The epistemology, the political stance, the methodological commitments, and the politics resonate in imperfect but remarkable harmony. This is no accident, because the world in which Piketty's book appeared is saturated with the specifically capitalist form of anxiety that Keynes sought to diagnose, and fix, the last time it made the richest economies in the world tremble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that popular revolution was closely tied to the establishment of capitalism. Contrary to the revisionist George V. Taylor's view that the Revolution had nothing to do with the advance of capitalism because financial and productive capital were divided from one another, this article contends that the Revolution played a critical role in tying them together. Prior to the Revolution financiers began to make limited investments in wholesale trade, manufacturing and mining. But during the revolutionary crisis the sans-culottes pushed the Jacobins to create a national money and to curb speculation in order to foster production and exchange and reduce unemployment. With speculative activity blocked by popular resistance and state interference, bankers and other capitalists increasingly turned to productive investments and forged a link between financial and productive capital which proved crucial to further capitalist accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gregory Elliott's Ends in Sight (2008) argues that Marxism is no longer a 'real movement' grounded in the historical tendencies of the present, but has retreated into being a utopian idea. Refusing to embrace anti-Marxism, Elliott controversially argues that such a position is the only realistic one that can be held by the Left in the wake of the defeat of historical socialism. In assessing this claim, this review-essay re-traces Elliott's indebtedness to the work of Perry Anderson, and notes the tension Elliott reproduces from Anderson between resignation to defeat and a realism that would scan for new signs of resistance. Elliott's closing embrace of a full-blown pessimism is criticised as inconsistent with the necessity of some consolatory 'illusions' to any radical political mobilisation. The crucial question that Elliott raises concerns the motivational power of Marxism as a political discourse, particularly once shorn of its grounding in the 'tide of history'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the contradictions found in the book 'Empire,' by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Details of the postmodern style of the book and its conception of history; Discussion on capitalism in the book; Ways in which the thought of the authors can be assimilated.