Broadcasts

This video introduces the Marxism and Disability series: How the idea came about, what to expect from the series, and how to get involved.

For some of us, the family is a source of love and support. But for many others, the family is a place of private horror, coercion, and personal domination. In capitalist society, the private family carries the impossible demands of interpersonal care and social reproductive labor. Can we imagine a different future?

In Family Abolition, author M.E. O’Brien uncovers the history of struggles to create radical alternatives to the private family. O’Brien traces the changing family politics of racial capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and in the slave plantations and settler frontier of North America, explaining the rise and fall of the housewife-based family form. From early Marxists to Black and queer insurrectionists to today’s mass protest movements, O’Brien finds revolutionaries seeking better ways of loving, caring, and living. Family Abolition takes us through the past and present of family politics into a speculative future of the commune, imagining how care could be organized in a free society.

ME O’Brien is the editor of two magazines, Pinko and Parapraxis, and the co-author of the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. Her new book is Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care.

Dan Berger is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington at Bothell. He is the author most recently of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey.

Jules Gleeson is a writer, historian, and comedian. She is the co-editor of Transgender Marxism and has published essays in outlets including Viewpoint Magazine, Invert Journal, and VICE.

This video is the first session of the six-part History and Class Consciousness Marathon with Mariana Teixeira, Victor Strazzeri, Konstantin Baehrens, and Alexandros Minotakis.

This video is part 1 of the Sean Sayers Lecture Series ‘Marx, Hegel, and Dialectic’, based on revised and extended passages from “The Rational Kernel of Hegel’s Dialectic” International Critical Thought 12 (2). 2022: 327–336.

Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality. An Alternative legacy of Modernity, s considered one of the most important recent contributions to political philosophy. Its main argument is that within traditions of subaltern resistance and insurgency, a different form of universality emerges – radical, agonistic, egalitarian – that represents the alternative ‘subterranean’ current of modernity. This resonates with both contemporary theoretical debates and political exigencies, especially those related to the egalitarian and emancipatory potential of contemporary struggles. In a period when the main thrust of the dominant discourse is to represent ‘liberal democracy’ as the inescapable finality of the entire trajectory of the political philosophy of modernity, Tomba offers in Insurgent Universality a way to both revisit this legacy and also to see the tensions and ruptures running through it. Above all, Tomba insists that the subaltern can both act and think, producing their discourse and theory in the forms of very explicit declarations and enunciations that subsequent historical and theoretical expositions (including many varieties of Marxism) have tended to underestimate. Historical Materialism. Research in Critical Marxist Theory dedicated a significant part of issue 30.4 to symposium on Insurgent Universality, with contributions by Aldo Beretta and Rebecca Fritzl, Vanita Seth, Harry D. Harootunian, Niklas Plaetzer and responses by Massimiliano Tomba, along with an introduction by Panagiotis Sotiris. The issue can be reached here: https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/…

To continue the debate on this important contribution, we have organized this broadcast in which Aldo Beretta, Panagiotis Sotiris and Alberto Toscano will discuss with Massimilano Tomba his book and the ways in which it remains pertinent to contemporary discussions Massimiliano Tomba is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of books and articles on Bruno Bauer, the Left Hegelians, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Benjamin. Among his publications Marx’s Temporalities, Brill, 2013 and Insurgent Universality. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, Oxford University Press, 2019. He is currently working on a new project titled The Work and Politics of Anachrony.

Aldo Beretta is a philosopher and political theorist. He currently is visiting professor at the Alice Salomon University in Berlin and associated fellow at the Center for Social Critique of Humboldt University. Some of his publications include: Democracy and Economy: Traces of an Immanent Crisis (2020), From Marx to Mariátegui: Primitive Accumulation and Agrarian Community (2019), Observations on Habermas’s Critique of Marx (2017), and Capitalism and Reification: An Approach to Theodor W. Adorno (2016). He is currently working on the reception of Marx in contemporary Critical Theory.

Alberto Toscano teaches in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, and is the author of two books coming out this year, Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum and Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. He is also the co-editor of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography, Georges Bataille’s Critical Essays and The Sage Handbook of Marxism. He is an editorial board member of Historical Materialism Research in Critical Marxist Theory.

Panagiotis Sotiris works as a journalist in Athens, Greece and teaches at the Hellenic Open University. His most recent book is A Philosophy for Communism. Rethinking Althusser. He is an editorial board member of Historical Materialism. Research in Critical Marxist Theory.