The following texts were written between 1973 and the present. Some of them, beginning in the late 1980s, were published in US journals such as Against the Current, New Politics, Critique, Collective Action Notes and Race Traitor; some have appeared translations. Others are appearing in the Marx / Third Millennium series of Queequeg Publications.
The majority, however, were consigned by circumstance to what Marx called "the gnawing critique of the mice." As such, they circulated only in xerox format to very limited circles of readers. I am posting them today, not because they necessarily possess any overarching coherence or because the evolution of one individual is of any particular importance. Rather, since different readers over the years have found different texts to be useful, I am using the new possibilities opened by the web to make them more generally available than they have been in my file cabinets.
Buried under almost a century of ideology, the “Russian question”, the historical meaning of the defeat of the Russian revolution, is the question that will not go away.
Once again, capital requires, in order to survive as capital, a vast devalorization of all existing values, however great the destruction of human beings and means of production which that entails.
Whatever else may happen from now on, a new historical period has opened up, and the decades in which the grinding post-1970’s crisis were borne in silence, or sporadic uprisings were defeated in isolation, are over.
Since July of 2011, the mainstream media have been increasingly talking about a “double dip” “recession” in the U.S. But we can safely assert that for most working people, the “recession” has never ended, and is about to get worse.
The following theses were circulated within the Insurgent Notes collective for discussion. They expand on the programmatic points sketched in brief a year ago.