Revolutionary Theory

November 17, 2024

Class Warfare, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and the Revolutionary Alternative

In a “dog-eat-dog world” the existence of nonprofit companies has restored some folks’ hopes in humanity. People working in the nonprofit world are viewed in a somewhat saintly light. Rather than working for an oil company or trading stocks, nonprofit organizations in theory exist to help people without the motivating factor of profit. This provides masses of caring people with an avenue for supposedly supporting their neighbors: You’re feeling empathetic or ashamed? Donate now!

October 27, 2023

by Puntorojo Editorial Collective

Why We Need Theory

Israel’s assault on Palestinians right now is the most extreme offensive Israel has launched in decades. Hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets around the world to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza. The widespread demonstrations across the Middle East have threatened instability and have played a role in Biden calling on Israel to slowdown the genocide.

August 1, 2023

by Tina Trutanich

The Revolutionary Power of Love

Because desire is a social construct, love desired is a collective action toward our liberation. We desire life-giving and honest love. We desire liberation. Karl Marx once stated that our consciousness comes through experience as social beings. Capitalism is not only a political and economic system as most people understand it, but also permeates and colonizes our daily lives as a social structure. As such, we strive to build community, and mostly in the form of “family”. As M.E. O’Brien states in Family Abolition Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, “oftentimes we feel as though we have found it.” Under capitalism, though, we are prevented from constructing the family we need.

May 31, 2023

by Zack Frailey Escobar

(Mal)entender la derrota: una respuesta a Jacobin sobre el proceso constitucional chileno

Tras años de intensas protestas y revueltas conocidas como el “estallido social”, los chilenos votaron a favor de escribir una nueva Constitución en octubre de 2020 por un margen del 78% frente al 22%. La “Convención Constitucional” elegida como resultado de este referéndum estaba dominada por representantes de la izquierda. Parecía inevitable que la reaccionaria constitución impuesta por el ex-dictador Augusto Pinochet iba a ser sustituida por una de las constituciones más progresistas del mundo, que garantiza diversos derechos sociales

May 29, 2023

by Zack Frailey Escobar

(Mis)Understanding Defeat: a reply to Jacobin on the Chilean constitutional process

After years of intense protests and upheavals known as the estallido social (social outburst), Chileans voted to draft a new constitution in October of 2020 by a margin of 78 percent to 22 percent. The Constitutional Convention elected as a result of this referendum was dominated by left wing representatives. It seemed inevitable that the reactionary constitution imposed by former dictator Augusto Pinochet would be replaced by one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, which guaranteed a variety of social rights and recognized indigenous autonomy. Instead, the final draft was dramatically voted down in a second referendum in September of 2022. Now, a new body has been elected to replace the failed Constitutional Convention, this time dominated by the far-right Republican Party. It is essential for the global left to learn from this catastrophic turn of events, but a recent article by comrade Marcelo Casals in Jacobin and Jacobin America Latina draws some mistaken conclusions.

May 8, 2023

by Justin Akers Chacón

The American Way of Fascism

We are living through a period of reemergence, rise, and surge of far right and fascist forces internationally. This includes reconstructed fascist political parties and movements from the past, alongside novel and neo-fascist formations taking shape inside capitalist states and electoral systems in the present.
The miasma of fascist regeneration emanates from within the cascading crises of the capitalist system, increasing in both depth and frequency over the last two decades. This crises include recurring episodes of recession and stagnation; imperialist and inter-imperial conflict and war; distress, weakening, and collapse of traditional bourgeois political parties; and the rising frequency and intensity of class struggle, authoritarianism, culminating in both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements.

November 14, 2022

by Atlee McFellin

The Quantum Mechanics of Imminent Revolution

This article concludes a three-part series meant to explore a more sensuous, suffering, and passionate materialism rooted in quantum mechanics. The three articles are a continuation of a longer series that has attempted to articulate a revolutionary communist politics, one that learns from the failures of the German left against the Nazis, while paying particular attention to the voices of Marxists who were also Jewish and experienced the rise and rule of fascism first-hand. All this is meant to provide strategic direction in hopes of defeating a possible quasi constitutional fascist coup around the November 2024 elections, then on to our own path towards revolution thereafter.

September 21, 2022

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Marx Against Moloch

The fact that the real nature of capital has been completely and utterly mystified is evidenced by the currency of the phrase “human capital.” In the same way that legal titles to income or land become “capital” in the imagination of the landlord or the financial speculator, the liberal press and intellectual class imagine that the development of individual human beings can be classified as such, so that we are perpetually encouraged to see ourselves as little entrepreneurs investing in ourselves as we pay exorbitant costs for a university education and take out loans which only enrich the bankers. Today, however, this logic is being taken to a new extreme. A piece in the New Yorker about a delightful bit of innovation in financial technologies provides a glimpse into the idyllic future capitalism has in store for us: Soon, you will be able to sell yourself!

September 11, 2022

by Bill V. Mullen

What Should Revolutionaries Say About Constitutions?

The recent defeat of a proposed new state constitution by voters in Chile was a setback for Left forces. The Constitution, which would have enshrined new rights for Chile’s multiple indigenous populations, guaranteed national health care, granted rights to the environment, and affirmed gender and sexual self-identification; was the product of Chile’s left-center government which won state elections last year.

August 5, 2022

by Atlee McFellin

Toward a Sensuous, Suffering, and Passionate Materialism

In his 2022 book, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, theoretical physicist and mathematician Leonard Mlodinow argued that “emotion shapes virtually every thought we have.” Antonio Damasio’s neuroscience research, first published in his 1994 book Descartes’ Error and in many books thereafter, has shown that the distinction between feelings and emotions is, fundamentally speaking, not scientifically accurate.

What’s more, turning to Columbia University historian William V. Harris in his 2001 book, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, perpetuating the idea that reason had to control feelings and emotions “was for the most part in the interest of all who benefited from the smooth functioning of the state or the family.” To put it another way, the necessity of supposedly masculine “reason” to control the chaos of “emotion” has been used to justify hetero-patriarchy, class oppression, white supremacy, and colonization for thousands of years.