A United Front

This essay is the core argument of my first book, "Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis," extracted and crystallized.

A brief history of Black freedom struggles for guaranteed jobs, abolition democracy, and social democracy.

The Assad regime has held authoritative and hegemonic rule over the Syrian people for decades. Through a neopatrimonialist and nepotist government organization, they have adopted the economic system of crony capitalism which has negatively affected the majority of the Syrian population, especially the rural areas. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad’s anti-imperialist image was no longer efficient in concealing his oppressive leadership, ultimately leading to a mass uprising throughout Syrian communities. While leftists have traditionally supported revolutions against oppressive regimes, they have taken up a rather unique approach against the Syrian opposition. Feeding into the ideology of anti-imperialism, they have overlooked the root cause behind Bashar al-Assad’s unpopularity. Nevertheless, after addressing the decade’s worth of oppression under the Assad regime alongside the neoliberal era where liberalization and privatization of the economy were pushed forward at the hands of Bashar, this essay will argue against the three most common arguments made amongst the pro-Assad leftist community. First, it is the belief that Bashar is ‘popular’ amongst those living within Syria, secondly, the Syrian minorities (i.e. Alawites) are ‘supportive’ of the Assad regime and lastly, Bashar was always ‘supportive’ of political reform. Finally, I will discuss the error in the leftist analysis of anti-imperialism and how horizontal organization can be beneficial in the context of Syria. Overall, Western leftists must abandon their support for Assad as it is predicated on orientalist and Eurocentric views and should instead turn to horizontal organizations and grassroot movements within Syria that focus on smaller-scale regions which resist the Syrian regime and shift towards their liberation.

As the latest global crisis of capitalism that started in 2008 remains technically unresolved, the anti-capitalist stance of radical intellectuals – who subscribe to Marxism or are at least influenced by certain forms of Marxism, such as Chomsky (2013); Bello (2013); Zabala (2012); Žižek; (2011); Eagleton (2011); and Sison (2009) – and the alter-capitalist viewpoint of less radical yet equally non-neoliberal academics such as Piketty (2013), Stiglitz (2012), and Chang (2012), gain more credence. This research is primarily aimed at mapping out the contours of anti-/alter-capitalist thought in three contemporary dystopian films, namely “Snowpiercer” (2013), “In Time” (2011), and “Elysium” (2013). Themes of exploitation, social inequality, class struggle, and revolution, will be discussed using the lens of various Marxist or Marxist-leaning theoreticians. In sum, inspired by Eagleton’s apologia (2011), this paper will analyze these films as “spaces of resistance” (Killick, 2013) against neoliberal capitalism, towards imagining a sustainable future where capitalism is either obliterated or at least, “humanized,” thereby proving that “Marx was right.”

Handbook of Protest and Resistance in China

Labor unrest is rising in China. Meanwhile, the nature of work is evolving, too, toward more flexible, contracted employment—and self-employment. The lives of the country's taxi drivers are emblematic of these trends. After enjoying a relatively privileged position at the beginning of the reform era, cabbies are increasingly hired through a tangle of middlemen to whom they must pay high rental fees, while working long hours and competing with illegal " black cabs " and ride hailing phone apps. Nonetheless, drivers strike frequently, utilizing a diverse repertoire of protest tactics and drawing on strong social ties. Based on news stories and interviews conducted across the country, this chapter explores the determinants of cabbie success and failure and the ways in which taxi activism is becoming normalized even as it is extracting concessions from the state. The chapter concludes by drawing parallels with the efforts of workers in other areas of China's changing economy and by considering the possibilities for organizing going forward.

This Essay sketches out the Movement for Black Lives' claims about law, argues that law faculty should be paying close attention to the movement's challenges to core empirical and methodological assumptions in our teaching and scholarship, and offers pedagogical techniques to welcome these challenges into our classrooms. The movement's empirical claim is that law does not function as is often imagined, the imagination of law’s functioning being central to the legitimacy we invest in our system of government. This claim has many dimensions worth exploring, but here I point to two central applications: police killings and the disjuncture between procedural rights and substantive justice. The movement's methodological claim challenges conventional wisdom about how law changes and the role of law in social change. Organizers have refused to work within the traditional confines of legal process or to celebrate law as the end of their struggle. Instead, they have lifted up disruption and contestation as tactics, and relied on law only as a tool for incremental change in a broader campaign for a radical restructuring. In the process, they have shed light on law’s operation, recast law’s morality, and questioned its relationship to haunting social problems. The movement exposes to the mainstream what black communities have argued—and black freedom struggles have organized against—for centuries: Law is not fair, it does not treat people equally, and its violence is lethal and routine. Law is constituted by power and the powerful, and it changes for the benefit of the marginalized only when it is made to. The movement's critiques may make us uncomfortable, and taking them on in the classroom may require risks—but we need to get uncomfortable. For too long, too many of us have looked the other way, even when we know better. It is time to look at the law beyond our conventional ways of seeing. It is time to bring in the people who for too long have been outside the classroom, and yet are so central to law’s operations.

Mobilizations occurring around just transitions and design for transition contain many potential points of overlap. They are presently remarkably disengaged. This article seeks to rectify this situation by offering some preliminary notes on how convergences between these currents might facilitate modes of anti-racist, feminist and ecosocialist revitalize discussions on ecosocialist design futuring that can get us to think beyond degrowth/Left ecomodern binaries and toward a design politics that can support a Green New Deal. We I proceed by firstly mapping the evolution of labor- focused just transition discussions and indicate how feminist, climate justice and decolonial contributions have productively expanded and complicated understandings of the labors of transition. This paperI then goes on to suggest how such currents could productively engage further with the emerging field of design for transition. Design is not to be trusted. However, post-carbon futures are not simply going to emerge through protest and policy shifts alone. Just transitions will have to be imagined and built, fabricated and realized, coded and created. Tand this will involve the channeling of enormous amounts of creative labor and inventive praxis. It will also involve the construction of public spaces and public institutions where new knowledge practices can meet. Bringing rRadical traditions of design, invention and innovation into dialogue with movements pushing for just transitions could make significant contributions to achieving this end.

This is the launch conference of my ERC Advanced Grant project, 'The Ethics of Doubt'. Conference blurb: While the ancient sceptics regarded scepticism about knowledge as a way of life, philosophers from Descartes to the present day have viewed it primarily as an intellectual problem that requires only a theoretical solution. The aim of this conference is to challenge this contention by focussing on the ‘existential’ dimension of doubt – i.e. the way in which sceptical problems affect the whole person. For example, Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, has proposed that doubt and anxiety are intrinsically linked, and, hence, that doubt may not just be an epistemic vice (if it is one), but also a character failing that consists in a refusal to confront (and to try and overcome) certain forms of angst, such as, for instance, a refusal to face up to the radical contingency and fragility of the (human) world and to take refuge in a ‘scapegoating’ scenario, where super-powerful, hidden agents are to blame: Descartes’ Evil Demon, on the one hand, or, say, a ‘Deep State’ controlling our actions, on the other. The conference aims to explore these issues from a number of different philosophical perspectives (both Kierkegaardian and non-Kierkegaardian) and to bring together Kierkegaard scholars and epistemologists, working in both theoretical and applied areas of the subject.

100 Jahre Bibliotheca Hertziana ... Die Geschichte des Instituts 1913-2013