theory

Cindy Milstein

(Note: This essay is reprinted from the July–August 2008 issue of Left Turn magazine, which features a special section on the elections; it was written before Obama secured the nomination.)

“The world as it is, is not the world as it has to be.”¹ Long our basic aspiration, this ideal now springs from a U.S. presidential contender. And yet the gap between the change that Barack Obama promises and the transformation that we know is crucial may offer a space of possibility. For even as liberals are utilizing “hope” to captivate millions this election, embodied in Obama’s “New Politics,”² I would maintain that those of us who seek a nonhierarchical world are still the real carriers of utopia. Nevertheless, this election supplies us the opening to reject statism in a way that’s sensitive to the historical moment and prefigurative of a directly democratic society—but only if we mind the gap.

by Silvia Federici

[Precarious work is a central concept in movement discussions of the capitalist reorganization of work and class relations in today’s global economy. Silvia Federici analyzes the potential and limits of this concept as an analytic and organizational tool. She claims reproductive labor is a hidden continent of work and struggle the movement must recognize in its political work, if it is to address the key questions we face in organizing for an alternative to capitalist society. How do we struggle over reproductive labor without destroying ourselves, and our communities? How do we create a self-reproducing movement? How do we overcome the sexual, racial, and generational hierarchies built upon the wage?

Angela Davis at U of Ps Women’s Week – 2/15/08 the 21st Century

by Bronwyn Lepore

Angela Davis, of the beautiful gap-toothed smile and uncompromising spirit – and she smiles often, in the face of (or in solidarity with) the struggles she speaks to, and readily – shakes her shaggy fro as she warms to the audience of students, academics and activists tightly packed into College Hall for her Women’s Week keynote address on “Social Change in the 21st Century.” Despite the crowd – even after moving the talk to a larger venue to accommodate demand, many had to wait patiently outside the hall for a promised short after chat – she manages to create a sense of warmth and familiarity, as if we were all crowded into someone’s living room and she’d just popped in for a brief, but intense, chat. “Who’s here?” she asked. Recognizing the privileged status of many in the predominately Penn associated crowd, Davis challenged the audience to put such formally acquired knowledge to good use, as she herself has done, “so that it might make a difference, not for ourselves, but for others,” and to recognize and respect the intellect of those less privileged outside the academy who typically form the core of grassroots movements.