George Ciccariello-Maher

Constituent Moments, Constitutional Processes Social Movements and the New Latin American Left

The “good-left-versus-bad-left” framework disseminated by Jorge Castañeda, among others, obscures the underlying similarities that cut across all leftist regimes in Latin America while drastically oversimplifying the relationship between the so-called bad left and its “good” counterpart. A shift of focus from heads of state to social movements reveals both that the question of social movements and the state transcends such binaries and that it is precisely within the “bad left” that we find some important lessons for the future. El marco de “buena izquierda versus mala izquierda” diseminado por Jorge Castañeda, entre otros, opaca las similitudes básicas que cortan a través de todos los regímenes izquierdistas en América Latina, y a la vez simplifica de manera extrema la relación entre la llamada mala izquierda y su contraparte buena. Un cambio de enfoque de los mandatarios a los movimientos sociales revela tanto que la cuestión de movimientos sociales y el Estado trascienden tales binarias, como que es precisamente dentro de la “mala izquierda” que encontramos importantes lecciones para el futuro.

The Bolivarian Process in Venezuela: A Left Forum

The ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has reignited debate in Latin America and internationally on the questions of socialism and revolution. This forum brings together six leading intellectuals from different revolutionary traditions and introduces their reflections on class-struggle, the state, imperialism, counter-power, revolutionary parties, community and communes, workplaces, economy, politics, society, culture, race, gender, and the hopes, contradictions, and prospects of ‘twenty-first-century socialism’ in contemporary Venezuela.

A Critique of Du Boisian Reason: Kanye West and the Fruitfulness of Double-Consciousness

This article seeks to disentangle a number of outstanding controversies regarding the radical potential of W.E.B. Du Boiss seminal notion of double-consciousness. The author concludes that the early Du Bois—of the 1897 “Strivings”—idealistically conflates double-consciousness with the racist veil, thereby erroneously negating the materiality of the latter. This error persists only briefly, and Du Boiss transformation is already palpable by the 1903 publication of Souls, especially “On the Coming of John.” Against those who would dismiss the relevance of double-consciousness, the author demonstrates that the continued relevance of double-consciousness is simultaneously the liberation of the concept from its idealistic and middle-class content through the recognition of the veil in all its materiality. Finally, the author assesses the recent work of rap artist Kanye West, whose political progression parallels that of Du Bois before him, arguing that this progression is intimately linked to the radical potential inherent in double-consciousness.

Dispossession without Labour: Bridging Abolition and Decolonisation

Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks makes two decisive interventions. First, it shifts our lens from the capital relation to the colonial relation, disarticulating the process of primitive accumulation to emphasise its component parts: dispossession and proletarianisation. To do so is to both liberate the concept from its European origins by centring those contexts in which dispossession is not followed by proletarianisation, and to pose the political unity of different forms of dispossession: of land (as in settler-colonialism) as well as labour (as in chattel slavery). Second, Coulthard draws convincingly upon Frantz Fanon, whose work is essential for grasping both colonialism and white supremacy, but crucially their complex interrelation.

“The Most Damage I Can Do”: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism

The following essays were initially written for a roundtable in celebration of Joel’s work that was convened at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in 2012.We set out to speak about the wide range of commitments and concerns that shaped Joel’s career as an activist-teacher-scholar: anarchism, the abolition of whiteness, the virtues of fanaticism, the dangers of corporate capitalism, and the necessity and joys of grass-roots action. Joel set so many forces in motion that what we hoped to accomplish by our engagement was not merely to look back in remembrance but to keep moving forward. Yet very few, if any, of us feel equal to the example that Joel set. From the beginning of his academic career at the University of Minnesota in 1991, Joel integrated political activism with intellectual inquiry. This is not to say that he bent ideas to serve political ends but that he posed questions to the history of political thought that would bring insights to his politics. Early on, that politics was anarchism and his political theory interlocutor was Hannah Arendt. A seminar that he took with me inspired him to a critical engagement with Arendt’s “council democracies” and the revolutionary committees of the Spanish anarchists. It first took shape as a seminar paper but Joel lost no time in asking me what it would take to develop it for publication. He was characteristically New Political Science, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 2, 238–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.894702