What is significant is not what ends and consecrates, but what initiates, announces and prefigures.
Achille Mbembe
What time are we living in? How can we describe our time? For critical thinking, something decisive is at stake in this question of names, the names of the epoch. The map of names orients strategies, points out the movements of the adversary, reveals possible resistances.
What are we facing today? If we don’t know its name, how can we fight it?
If Trump’s electoral success is due in part to the far right’s ability to create a lifeworld shaped around his persona, the left must pursue a countervailing project. Its aim should be to transform the world people organically experience through mediating institutions: at work, at school, in their neighbourhoods. They should be contesting reality on this basic level.
The leftist critique of social democracy – leaving aside the historical complexity of the ideology and movement, social democracy was and remains essentially the view “that originally advocated a peaceful evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes” (Britannica) – may be summarised in the idea that only a radical transformation can bring capitalist social relations to an end. Whether in its Bolshevik or anarchist guise, “revolution” is opposed to what is disparagingly referred as “reformism”.
The critique is complex, citing citing historical example – the effort to reform capitalism, pushing it towards some form of socialism, has universally failed – and theoretical elaboration. And yet, the “revolution”/”reformism” opposition has perhaps never been so unclear, if it ever was. The historical socialist revolutions have, it can be argued, also universally failed and many of the state-government “reforms” of the last century and a half – pushed and forced by mass working class movements, women’s movements, anti-colonial liberation movements, civil rights movements, that altered capitalist social relations, to some extent “socialising” them – have been “revolutionary”.
Where we fall in this debate has less to do with clearly identifying who is in the right – social life over time permits no such omniscience -, but with endeavouring to understand what can and should be done in the here and now, with a universal justice as the horizon of our political imaginary and practice, which for the anarchist necessarily involves creating “institutions” which permit the greatest degree of freedom and equality possible.
With this cautionary note, we share a finely argued essay on the politics of Donald Trump’s government.
For constitutional lawyers, Trump’s return to power has been a vertiginous experience. The systematic violation of legal process and longstanding constitutional norms has proceeded faster than one can keep up with, resulting in over a hundred lawsuits and counting. Trump has issued a flood of executive orders that explicitly violate congressional law as well as the written text of the Constitution, on everything from the denial of birthright citizenship, to crackdowns on efforts at racial, gender and sexual orientation-based inclusion, to the destruction of legislatively authorized government agencies. At the same time, Elon Musk has boasted that he is pursuing a ‘corporate takeover’ of the federal government, aiming – through mass firing, the selling off of government assets (including ‘443 federal properties’, potentially along with countless works of public art) and the dismantling of vital services – to privatize ‘anything that can reasonably be privatized’: all in violation of congressional and constitutional prohibitions on private citizens, unconfirmed by the Senate, carrying out the work of senior government officials.
Giotto di Bondone, detail from Predella of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata
Heidegger’s abrupt statement in the 1976 “Spiegel” interview: “Only a God can save us” has always been perplexing. To understand it, we must first put it into context. Heidegger had just spoken of the planetary domination of technology, which nothing seems able to govern. Philosophy and other spiritual powers – poetry, religion, the arts, politics – have lost their ability to shake up or guide the lives of Western peoples. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they “cannot produce any immediate change in the present state of the world” and the inevitable consequence that “only a God can save us”.
The fact that this is not a millennial prophecy is confirmed immediately afterwards by the clarification that we must prepare ourselves not only “for the appearance of a God”, but also and rather “for the absence of a God in his decline, for the fact that we fall before the absent God”.
It goes without saying that Heidegger’s diagnosis has lost none of its timeliness; if anything, it is even more irrefutable and true. Humanity has renounced the decisive status of spiritual problems and created a special sphere in which to enclose them: culture. Art, poetry, philosophy and other spiritual forces, when they are not simply extinguished and exhausted, are confined to museums and cultural institutions of all kinds, where they survive as more or less interesting amusements and distractions from the tedium of existence (and often no less tedious).
So how are we to understand the philosopher’s bitter diagnosis? In what sense “only a god can save us”? For nearly two centuries – since Hegel and Nietzsche announced its death – the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom we can give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of divine names (“divine names are missing”, lamented Hölderlin). Beyond the names, the essential remains: the divine. As long as we are capable of perceiving a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a blade of grass as divine, we can do without a nameable God. The divine is enough for us; the adjective is more important than the noun. Not “a God”, but “only the divine can save us”.
We are all in hell, but some seem to think that there is nothing to do here but to study and describe in detail the demons, their horrible appearance, their ferocious behaviour, their infamous machinations. Perhaps they delude themselves into believing that in this way they can escape from hell, and do not realise that what occupies them completely is nothing but the worst of the punishments that the demons have devised to torment them. Like the peasant in the Kafkaesque parable, they do nothing but count the fleas on the guardian’s lapel. It must be said that those in hell who spend their time describing the angels of paradise are not right either; this too is a punishment, apparently less cruel, but no less odious than the other.
True politics lies between these two punishments. It begins, first of all, by knowing where we are and that it is not given to us to escape so easily from the infernal machinery that surrounds us. Of demons and angels we know what there is to know, but we also know that it was with a deluded imagination of paradise that hell was built, and that to every consolidation of the walls of Eden there corresponds a deepening of the abyss of Gehenna. Of good we know little, and it is not a subject we can delve into; of evil we only know that it was we ourselves who built the infernal machinery with which we torment ourselves. Perhaps a science of good and evil has never existed, and in any case, here and now it is of no interest to us. True knowledge is not a science; it is, rather, a way out. And it is possible that today it coincides with a tenacious, lucid and agile resistance on the spot.
Some thoughts, written down at intervals, about oppression, revolution, and imagination.
Slavery
My country came together in one revolution and was nearly broken by another.
The first revolution was a protest against galling, stupid, but relatively mild social and economic exploitation. It was almost uniquely successful.
Many of those who made the first revolution practiced the most extreme form of economic exploitation and social oppression: they were slaveowners.
The second American revolution, the Civil War, was an attempt to preserve slavery. It was partially successful. The institution was abolished, but the mind of the master and the mind of the slave still think a good many of the thoughts of America.
“Is Gender Necessary?” first appeared in Aurora, that splendid first anthology of science fiction written by women, edited by Susan Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre. It was later included in The Language of the Night. Even then I was getting uncomfortable with some of the statements I made in it, and the discomfort soon became plain disagreement. But those were just the bits that people kept quoting with cries of joy.
It doesn’t seem right or wise to revise an old text severely, as if trying to obliterate it, hiding the evidence that one had to go there to get here. It is rather in the feminist mode to let one’s changes of mind, and the processes of change, stand as evidence—and perhaps to remind people that minds that don’t change are like clams that don’t open. So I here reprint the original essay entire, with a running commentary in bracketed italics. I request and entreat anyone who wishes to quote from this piece henceforth to use or at least include these reconsiderations. And I do very much hope that I don’t have to print re-reconsiderations in 1997, since I’m a bit tired of chastising myself.
Si el feminismo deja de incomodar, no sirve absolutamente para nada. Por eso es que yo reivindico mucho ese feminismo intuitivo, que es un feminismo que quizás no se llama a sí mismo como feminismo, o sí, pero que básicamente es un feminismo de la desobediencia, popular y masivo. El feminismo deja de incomodar cuando se vuelve no solamente una moda, sino una especie de patrimonio elegante de pequeñas élites, sea de partidos políticos, de instituciones o de ONG.
We share the words of María Galinda, from a 2023 interview with Edgar Ariel, for No Country Magazine.
When María Galindo (La Paz, Bolivia, 1964) entered the courtroom dressed entirely in red and black, accused of destruction or deterioration of state property and national wealth, she did so with a necklace of broken dolls. The crime: a street intervention signed by Mujeres Creando. The graffiti denounced read: “Feminicide is a crime of the patriarchal State.”
Interview with Argentine philosopher Veronica Gago
Philosopher, feminist activist and member of the Ni Una Menos collective. “How has neo-liberalism managed to make the logic of sacrifice part of the common language?” she asks in this interview, in which she reflects on the reasons for the programmatic antifeminism of the far right and the masculinisation of institutional politics.
“The government is creating a state anti-feminism that aims to combat the feminist movement both in public squares and in public policies and feminist institutions.” This characterisation comes from Veronica Gago, philosopher, political scientist and feminist activist. “Feminisms today condense the social figure of the scapegoat: it’s not just a question of a cultural war, it’s also a question of the political radicalism of feminism and the social transformations it promises”, says the researcher.
In this interview, conducted for the podcast Los monstruos andan sueltos[1], Veronica Gago analyses the scope of what she defines as “patriarchal restoration” and refers to the process of the masculinisation of politics: “Allied political components continue to blame the rise of the far right on feminisms.”
We publish below a text from the Temps critiques collective, the English translation of which was generally shared with us.The essay is available in the original French, as well as Spanish and English, on the collective’s website.
The essay endeavours to interpret the nature of contemporary capital, beyond the labour theory of value, and its tangled and essential relation with state power.
State and Capital: The Current Lay of the Land
Recent discussions and articles on capital or capitalism, and they are few in number,[1] have surprisingly little to say about the state or, for that matter, power in general and the control it affords. The emphasis tends rather to be on profit, a catch-all term that leaves us none the wiser from a microeconomic standpoint. (Why would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos be so intent on making even more profit?) Nor does it provide any convincing macroeconomic basis for calculating a general rate and its supposed variations (e.g., the improbable tendency of the rate of profit to fall predicted by Marx almost two centuries ago). The state, we are told, has been so seriously undercut by what is now commonly referred to as neoliberalism that the bare-bones attributes of sovereignty are just about all that’s left. Such assertions, however, owe less to actual observation than to a mindset verging on caricature; those who make them sharply contrast today’s states with those of bygone times, and ultimately with an earlier phase of capitalism portrayed in equally caricatured and ill-defined terms. When you listen to much of the French left, for example, you could easily get the impression that the 1944 program of the National Resistance Council practically took France beyond capitalism to a sort of “socialism with a human face.”
Ursula Le Guin’s works typically recount the story of a voyage. Whether or not this voyage traverses vast distances of space, it is always an epic journey of the spirit. It is a kind of vision quest in which we who allow ourselves to be taken along confront the strange, the alien, the other, only to return with a deeper understanding of ourselves. We gain a better sense of who we are, but as is perhaps more crucial, we gain insight into where we are. In the end, the voyage is a journey home.
Government by executive order: A lesson in contemporary authoritarianism
If Trump’s electoral success is due in part to the far right’s ability to create a lifeworld shaped around his persona, the left must pursue a countervailing project. Its aim should be to transform the world people organically experience through mediating institutions: at work, at school, in their neighbourhoods. They should be contesting reality on this basic level.
The leftist critique of social democracy – leaving aside the historical complexity of the ideology and movement, social democracy was and remains essentially the view “that originally advocated a peaceful evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes” (Britannica) – may be summarised in the idea that only a radical transformation can bring capitalist social relations to an end. Whether in its Bolshevik or anarchist guise, “revolution” is opposed to what is disparagingly referred as “reformism”.
The critique is complex, citing citing historical example – the effort to reform capitalism, pushing it towards some form of socialism, has universally failed – and theoretical elaboration. And yet, the “revolution”/”reformism” opposition has perhaps never been so unclear, if it ever was. The historical socialist revolutions have, it can be argued, also universally failed and many of the state-government “reforms” of the last century and a half – pushed and forced by mass working class movements, women’s movements, anti-colonial liberation movements, civil rights movements, that altered capitalist social relations, to some extent “socialising” them – have been “revolutionary”.
Where we fall in this debate has less to do with clearly identifying who is in the right – social life over time permits no such omniscience -, but with endeavouring to understand what can and should be done in the here and now, with a universal justice as the horizon of our political imaginary and practice, which for the anarchist necessarily involves creating “institutions” which permit the greatest degree of freedom and equality possible.
With this cautionary note, we share a finely argued essay on the politics of Donald Trump’s government.
Constitutional Collapse
Aziz Rana (Sidecar – New Left Review, 21/03/2025)
For constitutional lawyers, Trump’s return to power has been a vertiginous experience. The systematic violation of legal process and longstanding constitutional norms has proceeded faster than one can keep up with, resulting in over a hundred lawsuits and counting. Trump has issued a flood of executive orders that explicitly violate congressional law as well as the written text of the Constitution, on everything from the denial of birthright citizenship, to crackdowns on efforts at racial, gender and sexual orientation-based inclusion, to the destruction of legislatively authorized government agencies. At the same time, Elon Musk has boasted that he is pursuing a ‘corporate takeover’ of the federal government, aiming – through mass firing, the selling off of government assets (including ‘443 federal properties’, potentially along with countless works of public art) and the dismantling of vital services – to privatize ‘anything that can reasonably be privatized’: all in violation of congressional and constitutional prohibitions on private citizens, unconfirmed by the Senate, carrying out the work of senior government officials.
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