Fascism in Our Time: A Reply

In the popular imagination, poverty is a site of negation, of invisibility, of absence. In a neoliberal order whose imagination orbits around the concepts of growth, accumulation, and expansion, at all scalar levels from the individual life to the multinational corporation, to lack property is to risk lacking properties, to become opaque and unnarratable, to attract prefixes like un-, dis-, and in-. Since the late 1960s of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s March and the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty, and that era’s brief, if intense, national focus on reducing inequality through access to health care, food, housing, and education, poverty has receded from public view with the ebbing of the midcentury “high tide of American liberalism.”1 During this slow retreat, policymakers have engaged in the construction of a thousand little ladders allegedly leading to opportunity and the middle class: poor people should work for welfare; poor people should marry each other; poor people should take on debt to invest in higher education as a private good; and poor people should subsist on tax credits and, well, faith.2Recent years have seen the emergence of catastrophic events and prospects without precedent that make these incrementalist approaches look increasingly feeble and even absurd. The rise of crises punctual and slow-moving, from climate change (and the Katrina disaster of 2005), to the economic collapse of 2008, to the pandemic of 2020 to the present has triggered extreme politics, from the frank fascism of the Trumpist fringe on the right to a wide range of recognizably socialist policies and leaders on the left. The latter has given rise to new ways of thinking about, envisioning, and addressing poverty, ways that differ in both degree and kind from those associated with postwar liberalism. Most profoundly, one finds an embrace of the notion that poverty is a structurally produced phenomenon, a feature of capitalism rather than a bug, and hence not something to be conceived of through whiggish narratives of expanding pies and rising tides that lift all boats.In the present moment of mounting fears of catastrophe, eroding norms, and an expanding range of political expression, Black radical traditions offer compelling perspectives on latter-day hyperinequality and structural poverty. Not only have Black bodies borne the brunt of capitalist exploitation throughout US history, as chattel and in enslavement’s many afterlives and extensions, but critical theorists of race have explored both the existential conditions of erasure and invisibility that characterize Black being in a white supremacist order, and the conditions of possibility under which that invisibility can gain expressive and inscriptive power.3 The problem of how subaltern subjects might emerge from obscurity and silence and gain the means of expressing themselves in a durable, visible, and public medium is common to battles against both economic inequality and racism, and there is significant overlap between the theoretical traditions that grapple with economic inequality and racism.In this context, it’s not surprising that scholars interested in Black radicalism are returning to the Depression era, a period of crisis, like our own, in which established traditions and institutions eroded, new ones were born, and subjects long excluded from public view clamored for recognition. The great political triumph of the New Deal era—its creation of a modern welfare state rooted in redistributionist benefits like social security—was enabled by a distinctively stereoscopic gaze, one that superimposed the particular faces of “the people” with an aggregating, continental perspective. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1941b: 4–5) second inaugural address famously renders this point of view, performatively witnessing millions of impoverished Americans through seven paratactic clauses beginning with “I see,” a series that culminates with the famous line, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Beginning with a wave of revisionist work in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars such as Maren Stange (1989) and Nicholas Natanson (1992) have analyzed the ideological blind spots and distortions of this technocratic-liberal perspective, which tended overwhelmingly to remember its “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” in ways that upheld whiteness and patriarchy as its defaults (Roosevelt 1941a: 628). This mode of critique correctly notes that the presence of avatars like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) and John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad, who still circulate in our image repertoire as emblems of the Depression in popular culture, helped to efface awareness of even more “forgotten” people. Foremost among these were African Americans who were marginalized symbolically within the trove of “official images” commissioned by the federal government to document poverty and who suffered more materially by their exclusion from a wide range of New Deal relief, often to accommodate southern segregationists within the Democrats’ coalition.The complement to this ideology critique of the dominant New Deal optic has been a bottom-up search for more expansive and inclusive populisms in the period’s culture. Here, the most significant efforts have worked in a neo-Gramscian mode, recovering marginalized artifacts and social groups and exploring neglected institutions, like the Communist Party–USA and the labor movement. Emphasizing these counterhegemonic efforts illuminates the way the largely unrealized hopes for a postwar “Century of the Common Man” haunts the normative “American Century” ethos of the Cold War and persists as a source of resistant values. Michael Denning’s (1996) work is the most prominent and wide-ranging such effort, reimagining the Depression era as the crucible for the formation of a “cultural front” that, under the sign of the multiethnic and polyglot Congress of Industrial Organizations, knitted together disparate social groups in a process he calls the “laboring of American culture.”At present, especially from the standpoint of Black radical modes of thought, what seems most distinctive about the Depression era is neither its confident technocracy nor its deep and wide coalition-building under the sign of a revitalized labor movement. Rather, with today’s erosion of political norms, increased conspicuousness of white supremacist ideology and organizations, and dominance of capital over labor through the production of precarity in all its forms, we hear echoes of our own moment in Depression-era crises that displaced individuals from secure economic and social locations and, on a more structural level, undermined established institutions that governed social, political, and economic life. If the Depression era, in its official New Deal discourse, sought to re-member the “forgotten man,” it also generated the stranger and more obscure figure of the “bottom dogs” who populated a vital subgenre of the novel. These hustlers and grifters resist inclusion in laborist coalitions and normative constructions of “the people” but speak compellingly of precarious conditions in an outsider’s voice. This topological emphasis on the underbelly or remainder of mainstream, whitened constructions of “the people” finds its echo in recent mappings of an “undercommons” (Harney and Moten 2013) that subtends corporate institutions today and provides a model for a radical reorganization of those institutions and the lives they are supposed to support.Two recent works exemplify this revisionist attempt to read the Depression era through the perspective of its bottom-most spaces and subjects, the Black majority that lives, in Charles Mingus’s (1991) memorable phrase, beneath the underdog and finds, like Mingus did, alternative, infectious rhythms there that foster the creation of new collectivities and new modes of subjectivity. Nathaniel Mills’s Ragged Revolutionaries explores the role of what Karl Marx called the Lumpenproletariat in Depression-era African American writing. These Lumpen figures are defined by their exteriority to industrial production and thus represent a starting point that differs markedly from Denning’s influential laborist approach. James Edward Ford III’s Thinking Through Crisis works, in general, at a higher level of abstraction, using Depression-era Black thinkers to consider how times of crisis might lead to wholesale changes in political order and emergences of new, radically democratic collectivities. Like the best radical writing and thinking, these books seek to remove—root and branch—entrenched limits in our political imagination and to seed in their place new desires, new practices, and new modes of affiliation. Both assert the historical experience of Black people as a center of gravity for the construction of a more just, equitable order.Nathaniel Mills’s Ragged Revolutionaries engages in a sustained exploration of the Marxist genealogy of the lumpenproletariat, those subjects who exist outside of a given class structure, often in marginal spaces, subjects who have bedeviled Marxist theory since Marx and Friedrich Engels’s scattered ruminations on such figures in the mid-nineteenth century. Mills observes that Marx and Engels see the lumpen through a moralizing lens, emphasizing their exclusion as a lifestyle, if you will, rather than a structural effect, and they mobilize this figure in a dialectic in which the primary role of the lumpen is to sharpen the contours of the authentic proletariat as the source of revolutionary agency (21–25). As Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, Marx’s terminological promiscuity as he approaches these shadowy figures and the dubious locales they occupy is symptomatic. These “lazzaroni,” “maquereaus,” “ragpickers,” and so on constitute not so much a heterogeneous group or series of related groups as an unnamable and illimitable jumble of entities that fail to cohere internally or adhere to anyone or anything else (Stallybrass 1990: 71–73).Mills’s project intervenes at just the point, aiming to render the lumpen condition as a cultural and political site of agency and expressivity. This positivity emerges in two major ways. First, Mills observes that the very exclusion of the lumpen from the sphere of labor, in the traditional sense, imbues them with counterhegemonic potential. Often excluded from or marginalized within labor unions, educational institutions, professions, and social affinity groups that feed the economy and the social dominant, Black subjects have been, of necessity, overrepresented in the obscure and marginal space of the lumpenproletariat. Mills observes the appeal of lumpen figures in the 1930s work of African American writers like Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Ralph Ellison. In a strikingly original move, Mills finds in this archive an anticipation of the 1960s and 1970s embrace of the lumpenproletariat as a site of agency in the work of Black Panther Party activists like Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. In both moments one finds a celebration of the revolutionary potential in subjects who exist outside of the “administered life” that pertains in the Fordist organization of labor and leisure (Marcuse 1964: 66–67). Mills argues that lumpen figures and spaces allow us to imagine a “severing of human fulfillment from the injunction to work” and thus make the more labor-centric approaches to the era’s politics seem much more circumscribed and prone to cooptation (32).Second, Mills counters the passivity often attributed to lumpen figures in Marxist theory and in the interwar “bottom dogs” genre through an ingenious reading of the etymology of Lumpenproletariat. Lumpen means “rags” or “tatters” in German, and Mills emphasizes the way this figure condenses, as in Charles Baudelaire’s famous poem on the “ragpicker” (1857), the themes of social marginality, intoxication, and poetic expression, a thematic cluster bound by the fact that discarded rags were the main raw material for paper production until the mid-nineteenth century.4 Thus the “ragged revolutionaries” of Mills’s title represent a profound reversal of expectations. Whereas Michel Foucault (1977: 83) famously imagines bodies as subjects of power/knowledge rendered as “the inscribed surface of events . . . totally imprinted by history,” Mills links these “ragged revolutionaries” to paper and thus to the modes of self-fashioning in which these subjects write, so to speak, in society’s margins.The implications of these twinned arguments about the lumpen draw into sharp focus in the best-known text Mills engages, Wright’s Native Son (1940). That novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, has been read most often as a waste product of American racism and capitalism: most famously, James Baldwin (1985: 33) argued that Bigger’s “doom is written on his forehead” by the inscrutable inscriptive power of whiteness, which leaves him locked in abjection. Mills reads Bigger’s role very differently, convincingly pointing to Wright’s emphasis on the way Bigger’s very exteriority to institutions—the church, school, industrial labor, and even his own family—grants him a kind of second sight that fosters the expression of desires and self-images that exceed the imagination of the “welfare capitalism” represented in the novel by the Dalton family and even the sophisticated anti-racist communism of Boris Max. Bigger’s salient feature, for Mills, is not the stigma with which white supremacy has wounded him but his desire to express publicly the inner core of his experience that he “must’ve felt awful hard . . . to murder” (Wright 2005: 429). Nor is this quest a purely individual one: in contrast with the existentialism Wright and other Black writers explored in the postwar era, in Native Son, Bigger’s expression unfolds within and is plausibly linked to what Mills calls a “counterpublic” construction project that, however abortive, is being undertaken by Jan Erlone, Max, and Thomas in the latter pages of the novel to enhance the Party’s grasp of how race and class intersect (84).Mills develops the theme of the lumpen as resistant and expressive residue, from the standpoint of both the centrist and established Left institutions, in a chapter on lesser-known Depression-era work by Ellison and Walker. He first examines Ellison’s creation of what Mills calls “lumpen-folk” characters in Tillman and Tackhead and Slick, two longer fictional pieces from the period that Ellison never published (97). Mills argues that “lumpen-folk” characters are condensations of, on one hand, the “antecapitalist” values that displaced peasants carry with them to industrial spaces and, on the other, the “lumpen” tendency to elude categorization and assimilation to social norms (108). The theme of doubly marginalized subjects recurs in the final chapter, on Walker’s unpublished novel Goose Island and her radical poetry from the Depression era. In a way, the freshest set of arguments in the book springs from Mills’s sensitive readings of Walker’s engagement with women sex workers in her poetry. Mills emphasizes the way the prostitute, who is radically objectified by Marx as the ur-figure for capitalist exploitation, is rendered much more fully in Walker’s work. Without losing sight of the crushing economic forces that weigh on women doing sex work, Walker emphasizes their exteriority from patriarchal norms and nuclear families as a means of finding new freedoms and pleasures while hustling at the margins.A limitation of Mills’s approach is the intensity of its focus on subjectivities and types rather than broader movements and social formations. Moreover, the lumpenproletariat as a type is, by definition, a kind of antitype, resistant to inclusion into larger social structures or political frontiers. This seeming limitation might be considered a strength, however, insofar as the location of this type outside of production—and outside of the broader Fordist penumbra of socially sanctioned institutions of recreation and leisure, like families, churches, clubs, and so on—means that a focus on the lumpen leads to a focus on alternative formations, or alternative modes of forming collectives altogether. Just how these outsider or bottom-dwelling subjects might cohere into a collective with agency is precisely the subject of James Edward Ford III’s book. Thinking Through Crisis starts from the assumption of “black radicalism’s exorbitance to conventional intellectual boundaries” in order to fashion a “theory of crisis” rooted in the close study of less-familiar texts by very familiar Black writers from the 1930s (1). Through a wide range of texts, from Wright’s 1930s short fiction to Ida B. Wells’s autobiography to Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) to Langston Hughes’s poetry to, above all, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), Ford elaborates a theory of Black agency springing from the economic and social crises of the Depression era.Exorbitance is a felicitous term for Ford’s approach. The term derives from the Latin orbita or “wheel-track,” and Ford’s text departs from historically given grooves in its choice of primary texts, its theoretical emphasis on nonprogressive historiography, and, especially, its rhetorical method. This latter exorbitance is quite conscious and deliberate in the text, as Ford calls what would normally be chapters “notebooks,” thereby emphasizing the contingency and unfinished quality of both the argument and the historical reality it indexes. These notebooks have a fugal structure, with motifs that fade out from one place and recur in another in ways that are frustrating and rewarding by turns, such that the contours of some of the text’s central concepts, such as the “dark proletariat,” the role of “divine violence,” and the role of the “ecstatic” in the formation of collectivities, only become clear gradually, though their recurrence from different angles in the work of different thinkers. Form and theme are densely interwoven throughout, as the “performative” mode of “unwriting” that Ford practices is mirrored in the style of the Depression-era work he engages (28).In many ways, the argument grows out of Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic “critique of violence,” which posits opposing ways of linking violence with political order, the “mythic” and the Ford emphasizes the way “mythic” violence with such that the subject is bound to the by that can never be like that are in the of can only the of in the most and ways, so Ford’s work explores what calls “divine violence,” a of the political, and social of this “divine is neither the individual nor an that is of as an of Rather, it is a mode of that, though in US history, not its political imagination in or way and to become and a new critical Ford this the “dark The contours of this sharpen only for the term the text as something of an collective of and that counters perspectives that and a of the political as through readings of the primary texts the Black proletariat into view, not by debt or a but as the site of in practices that Ford for with the of people from in search of in Du Bois’s of the or with Hughes’s celebration of the that practices of and that and radical this proletariat its as a site of life” in sense, or as a in the of Du Bois’s in rhetorical above make the book resistant to the risk of a text that is anything but the first two chapters consider some of that Black subjects to the and modes of that to them in The first Wright’s of the state of by the of in the of the disaster through that seek to Black Wright’s however and new freedoms within the of the political The second examines Wells’s reading her against as an attempt to imagine a new mode of political being that outside of and a mode of that is a that is written out, for The final two chapters with the formation and of collectivities. The chapter Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain to the role of in the of the radical to the of The chapter reads the poetry of as a of mounting a critique of the higher education and and a celebration of the that collectivities in Black these and chapters the an of the emergence of the Black proletariat as a in Du Bois’s Black Here, Ford notes that Du Bois’s not as a or marginal in of but as the a new center of gravity of a In a Ford examines Du Bois’s reading of John not as a to the of in today’s an to but as a Black In the to us as a of and that a national in the of white a in the of the to the more of the Ford us to Du Bois’s of emphasizing as a to the and of that is, in a collective on the of the to themselves in the process of an not this argument and, well, even in this it their and thematic Ford and Mills an for through the of the Depression era’s crises for in our own they there is and in of both about the cultural of the era and, a more our public desire to to by and all this for the the and the of the beneath and outside figures that Mills and Ford to a mode of construction that from the recent In this way, their of the Depression era of the of and recent work on the a text that Ford engages at the of his book. and Moten their in a for this just about social life. for are the to politics outside attempt to of and its state and . . . represent be (Harney and Moten would like to and for their on an of this

In this review, we read the interdisciplinary traffic across critical human geography and feminist science and technology studies (FSTS) in light of the insights and destabilizing aporias—in other words, irresolvable contradictions or logical disjunctions—emerging from Black radical and feminist study. We highlight three thematic areas that have received sustained attention and debate and that resonate across the three fields: objectivity and subjectivity, agency, and life and its excesses. Inspired by the methodological provocations of Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and the political demands of multiple intellectual currents within Black studies, we venture a modest upending of the form of the review itself. Rather than seek to delineate and codify contributions to a scholarly debate, we point to troubled assumptions and potential openings for those working at the intersection of critical human geography, FSTS, and Black studies.

Alberto Toscano is one of the leading analysts of the contemporary surge of far-Right authoritarianisms, and the author of the book Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. In this interview, he discusses the limits of historical analogy, the relationship between capital and far-Right governments, and the cultural politics of the MAGA movement, among other things. This article appears as part of SPE’s special theme “Critical Engagements with Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism.”

Reviewed by: Heidegger und das Ostasiatische Denken ed. by Alfred Denker etal. Steven Burik Heidegger und das Ostasiatische Denken. (Heidegger and East Asian thought). Edited by Alfred Denker, Shunsuke Kadowaki, Ryôsuke Ôhashi, Georg Stenger, Holger Zaborowski. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 7. Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013. Pp. 475. €48, isbn 978-3-495-45707-8. The Heidegger Jahrbuch series professes that it “delivers ground-breaking contributions to discussion with Heidegger’s thought, makes new sources accessible and [End Page 341] accompanies the actual research in a critical way.”1 Each new volume in the series focuses on a specific theme, and consists of a documentation part that seeks to give readers access to a variety of new and previously published material on that theme, and an interpretation part where a number of scholars engage critically with the theme. As such, the Jahrbuch has previously focused on Heidegger’s relation to other thinkers (Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Husserl), and two of its volumes have dealt with the thorny topic of ‘Heidegger and National Socialism.’ Now, the seventh volume of the Heidegger Jahrbuch has set itself the goal of exploring the theme ‘Heidegger and East Asian Thought.’ Heidegger und das Ostasiatische Denken, edited by Alfred Denker, Shunsuke Kadowaki, Ryōsuke Ōhashi, Georg Stenger, and Holger Zaborowski, starts off with an introduction by Ryōsuke Ōhashi, who takes his cue from the ‘and’ in the title of the book. He proposes to see this ‘and’ in three different ways: first as the ‘between’ of the conversation between Heidegger and East Asian thought, second as the synthesizing force of globalization where the ‘and’ would signal a narrowing or even an end to the distance between different ways of thought, and lastly as the ‘and’ of the problematic of language and translation. Ōhashi suggests that we can find these three topics back in the contributions of the various authors. Next is the Documentation section, containing letters that Heidegger’s East Asian students and colleagues directed to him, letters that Heidegger sent to his East Asian students and colleagues, and various other writings including a transcript of a colloquium Heidegger held with a Japanese colleague (Shinichi Hisamatsu) on art, and Tomio Tezuka’s two writings concerning his dialogue with Heidegger, which at least partly occasioned the publication of “A Dialogue on Language” in On the Way to Language. In this part the current volume repeats a lot of the material already available to readers of German through Hartmut Buchner’s 1989 book, Japan und Heidegger.2 Four sections with articles follow. The first section is on Heidegger and East Asian thought, the second on Heidegger and Japanese philosophy in modernity, the third on current Heidegger scholarship “from an East Asian perspective,” and the last a documenting of the Heidegger reception in Japan and Korea. A number of the articles have previously appeared in other languages, and as such this is a good way to introduce German speakers to scholarship around the world. Individually the contributions of the various scholars are generally of high quality throughout, but overall the book leaves some things to be wished for. The section themes are confusing. If section 2 is about Heidegger and Japan, then one would not expect articles on Heidegger and Japan in section 1 or 3, but there are such. If section 3 is about scholarship from East Asia, why are there only Japanese contributors to this section? We touch here on the major weakness of this volume: it is largely focused on Japan; Heidegger’s critical engagement with China is very much subordinated to Japan. The volume presents fourteen Japanese scholars, six Western, one Chinese, and one Korean. Thus, the theme ‘Heidegger and East Asia’ seems largely truncated to ‘Heidegger and Japan.’ But even then, one has to wonder about the fit into the [End Page 342] theme ‘Heidegger and East Asia’ of articles (by Tetsuya Sakakibara, Shunsuke Kadowaki, and Takashi Nakahara) that have nothing to do with East Asia except for the fact that they were written by Japanese scholars. This only shows that there are Japanese (and other East Asian) scholars who study Heidegger, but not much more. Do these contributions in fact show an...

This paper conceptualises power as a radical open-ended dialectic of political and anti-political moments. Drawing on anarchist, intersectional feminist, Black radical, critical, and Christian personalist theory, I explore an anarchist dialectics that accounts for both the dichotomy and the mutually constitutive relationship between politics and anti-politics, sustaining creative tensions between the two. Based on this framework, I argue that tensions between different traditions, groups and tactics in grassroots movements are rooted in differences of power. These tensions can only be reconciled through reciprocal collaboration between groups and people across differences of power. I explore coalitions and diversity of tactics as ways of organising that can reconcile and radically transform power relations.

This study focuses on boxing champion Muhammad Ali’s resistance to patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity in American warfare. The narrative textual analysis is designed around Ali’s final three championship-boxing bouts before he was stripped of his heavyweight championship title because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. The author constructed a narrative that found that Ali’s performance during this specific period was an extension of the black radical tradition. As a prizefighting champion and a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, the gender performance of black radical masculinities is distinguished in Ali. The results from the bouts were organized with biographical quotes and facts during the period and connected with black radical theory and the trajectory of black masculinities. Amid the three bouts and resistance that led to his eventual exile from boxing, Ali’s black masculinity is reconfigured through an analysis of multiple themes, such as voice, skill, anger, faith, style, and corporeality.

This paper is a review of Matt Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, emphasizing its value for teaching, its contribution to building a broader climate movement, and questions about class and about the treatment of environmental movements. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

Matt Huber offers a powerful materialist class-based account of the notion of the interplay of nature and human life as the struggle of “proletarian ecology.” This formulation has led me to think about D.W. Winnicott’s idea of infant development and “environmental provision” in class-based terms. Winnicott’s ideas of environmental provision seem well suited to Huber’s work on environmental policy and governance. Issues of environmental provision for caretakers and children are increasingly eclipsed in a public policy sphere dominated by the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) as birthrates for high-income women and families continue to fall and birthrates for the poorest women are almost double those of their higher income counterparts. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

Matt Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet has been fiercely debated in terms of its implications for the US climate movement, but it also offers important implications for how we think about the politics of social reproduction beyond US borders. This review draws out theoretical implications from Huber’s work that are especially relevant for understanding social movements, social reproduction, and the state in this ecological moment. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

Although I am highly critical of Matthew Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, I share with him a conviction of the centrality of class in any analysis of climate change. I engage with the argument that Matthew Huber develops under two headings: first, his conceptualization of class, working-class interests, and working-class politics, and second, what the analytic of socioecological reproduction could contribute to thinking on class and climate crisis. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War .’”

This essay considers the import and originality of Matt Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. It identifies class critique and skillful application of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) concept to contemporary environmental movements as the book’s most substantive contributions, culminating in a reflective reassertion of Marxian modernism with regard to capitalist-induced climate change. It also finds lacunae in Huber’s underdeveloped theory of the state as it pertains to energy transition and in his connection (or lack thereof) between specific policy demands and working-class agency. These issues pose questions for further debate and elaboration, yet fail to overshadow the book’s generative class analysis and promising strategic proposals, which deserve widespread discussion on the activist Left. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

In this paper, author Matthew Huber responds to all contributions on the SPE Special Theme about his book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022). This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

In recent years, a schism has emerged within ecosocialist thought on the best way to challenge capitalist responses to the ecological crisis, with modernists on one side and degrowthers on the other. This piece calls for ecosocialists to work past this schism by focusing on common ground and embracing a pluralist Left, wherein both modernist and degrowth currents work collaboratively to gain power by making it clear how confronting capitalism and pursuing ecological sustainability can make our lives better. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

The first issue of IJURR was published more than 30 years ago, in 1977. It opened with a brief editorial statement in which the journal’s founders defined their project. IJURR would be interdisciplinary. It would be open to diverse theoretical approaches and methodologies, whilst seeking to understand urban and regional development in terms of the ‘fundamental economic, social and political processes which operate at local, national and international levels’. Such an understanding should inform ‘social action’ and not be confined to intellectual debate. The tone for the new journal was set by the inaugural issue, which opened with four articles (by Ray Pahl, Jean Lojkine, Enzo Mingione and Richard Child Hill) on ‘urbanism and the state’. Other contributors to the first volume of IJURR included Manuel Castells, Edmond Preteceille, Chris Pickvance, Patrick Dunleavy, Doreen Massey, Martin Ravallion, Roger Friedland, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Alford, Josef Gugler and William Flanagan. Pahl, Mingione, Preteceille, Pickvance, Piven and Castells were all founding members of IJURR’s editorial board, together with Michael Harloe (the editor) and S.M. Miller. The founders of and initial contributors to IJURR comprised a remarkable generation of scholars concerned with the development of a radical or critical approach to urban and regional issues that would be relevant to political and social change. Indeed, IJURR included a section on ‘Praxis’. In the first issue, this section comprised articles on social or popular movements in the USA, Mexico and Spain, and on the civil war in Beirut. The impetus behind IJURR came mostly from sociologists, and there was a considerable overlap between IJURR and Research Committee 21 of the International Sociological Association, but IJURR also drew on the efforts of political scientists, planners and geographers. Change was central to IJURR’s identity. Drawing on egalitarian conceptions of social justice, IJURR’s founders sought to show that cities and regions could change in a variety of directions. Marxist theory was especially appealing to scholars who combined activist and scholarly missions, although Marxist theory certainly did not go unchallenged (not least by Ray Pahl and Patrick Dunleavy) and was never a precondition for publication. The scholarly practice of the journal was unambiguously embedded in an overall surge of radical and even revolutionary politics across the world. The 1970s were the morning after the 1960s explosion of critical theory and revolutionary practice. Student rebellion and scholarly debate fed and radicalized each other. IJURR was both a product of and protagonist in this important shift, and was seen by its editors, authors, reviewers and readers as such.

This article offers a theoretically informed case study of the George Floyd Uprising that emerged in May 2020. In addition to analyzing details of the uprising, it illustrates the ways in which particular uprisings can register at the level of the universal. I make this point through a critical engagement with theories of universality offered by Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Todd McGowan, whose work helps us to theorize universality in its concrete and singular manifestation. Along the way, I show how adjacent work in the Black radical tradition, social movement studies, and the critical social sciences at large can also enter a constructive dialogue with these approaches to universality. Using theory and data, the case study illustrates how this insurgent act embodied the striving towards universal human dignity and liberation. It is long overdue for the humanistic social sciences to revisit and reengage the concept of universality. By doing so, we may generate better social theory, and better understand major movements for social change in the twenty-first century.