Sylvia Wynter, “In Quest of Matthew Bondsman: Some Cultural Notes on the Jamesian Journey,” in Urgent Tasks, no. 12 (Summer 1981), emphasis in original →.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Pluto Press, 1986), 220.
Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2010), 167. See also, more broadly, 163–70 of Jones’s important study.
Carla Lonzi, “Let’s Spit on Hegel” (1970), trans. Veronica Newman, 2010 →. On Lonzi, see also Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, ed. Franceso Ventrella and Giovanna Zapperi (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Lonzi, “Let’s Spit on Hegel,” 18. See also Janet Sarbanes, “On Difference, Self-Valorization, and the Unexpected Subject,” chap. 5 in Letters on the Autonomy Project (Punctum Books, 2022).
“Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.” It should be noted that Marx’s use of the terms “socialism” and “communism” here differs significantly from later usage. Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, emphasis in original →.
On Marx’s discussion in the 1844 Manuscripts of communism as a mediation to be superseded, see also Chris Arthur, “Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Negativity,” in Radical Philosophy no. 35 (Autumn 1983). On Deleuze, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xii, 33, 62. On Césaire, see Jones (drawing on Hardt), Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy, 168–70.
My phrasing here invokes Howard Caygill’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s immanent dialectical criticism; Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Routledge, 1998), 62–63. For immanent critique from a Frankfurt School perspective, see also Rahel Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Harvard University Press, 2018).
Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” in New Left Review, no. 86 (March–April 2014): 66. See also Fraser’s recent elaboration on this article in Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Capitalism, Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do about It (Verso, 2022).
The diagram was originally devised by Community Economies Collective in 2001 and drawn by Ken Byrne. See J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 70.
The point that so-called primitive accumulation (unsprüngliche Akkumulation) presupposes the development of capitalist productive relations, and thus does not “precede” capitalism, is made by Pepijn Brandon in his lecture “Elements of Original Accumulation: Dispossession, War, and Slavery in the History of Capitalism,” Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, May 23, 2023 →.
An expression used by Jota Mombaça during a gathering in the context of Jeanne van Heeswijk’s exhibition “It’s OK … commoning uncertainties,” Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, July 7, 2023 (quoted from memory).
Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, We Are “Nature” Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (Pluto Press, 2021), 43.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Allen Lane, 2021), 27–77.
Chto Delat, “A Declaration on Knowledge, Politics, and Art” (2008), with comments by Dmitry Vilensky and David Riff (2010), in the newspaper Chto Delat? What Is to Be Done? in Dialogue (reader), 2010, 2 →.
Comment by David Riff in Chto Delat, “A Declaration on Knowledge, Politics, and Art,” 2.
The German phrase “Menschen mit Nazihintergrund” was proposed as an ironic variation on the phrase “mit Migrationshintergrund”; see for instance Michael Rothberg, “‘People with a Nazi Background’: Race, Memory, and Responsibility,” in Los Angeles Review of Books, May 20, 2021 →. The term has been applied to prominent art collector Julia Stoschek.
See →.
Sven Lütticken, “Plan and Council: Genealogies of Calculation, Organization, and Transvaluation,” Grey Room, no. 91 (Spring 2023).
Jazael Olguín Zapata, “Lumbungs of the Worlds: An Ongoing Making,” in documentamtam, no. 4 (May 2022) →.
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2009), 26.
Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019); Getachew characterizes the International Workingmen’s Association as having constituted the first such project (3).
Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives of Postindian Survivance (University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2013), 13.
Clifford, Returns, 37.
See my Objections: Forms of Abstraction, vol. 1 (Sternberg Press, 2022).
Clifford, Returns, 28.
T. J. Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2023), 14.
The second issue of the Chto Delat newspaper was titled “Autonomy Zones” (2003).
Dmitry Vilensky (Chto Delat), “Unlearning in Order to Learn,” in When the Roots Start Moving, First Mouvement: To Navigate Backward / Resonating with Zapatismo, ed. Alessandra Pomarico and Nikolay Oleynikov (Archive Books, 2001), 65.
See interview with Ramor Ryan, “Zapatismo, Solidarity and Self-Governance: A Conversation,” in ROAR, March 23, 2022 →.
On historical debates among anarchists in the wake of the Paris Commune, and on creating federations of cooperatives so as to prevent them from becoming isolated islands, see Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015), 117–42. Léon Lambert argues that the Commune already installed a form of “archipelagic sovereignty” linking up autonomous islands, and potentially stretching beyond Paris to include “rural islands.” See Léopold Lambert, “The Paris Commune and the World: Introduction,” The Funambulist, no. 34 (March–April 2021): 13.
This essay is based on a chapter of my forthcoming book States of Divergence. For various reasons, including feedback on early drafts or for productive comments at conferences and symposia, I would like to thank James Clifford, Stewart Martin, and Stevphen Shukaitis.