Towards a Queer Marxist Future with Holly Lewis

Transcript available here.

We speak with Holly Lewis, assistant professor at Texas State University and author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection published by Zed Books.

The Politics of Everybody examines the production and maintenance of the terms 'man', 'woman', and 'other' within the current political moment; the contradictions of these categories and the prospects of a Marxist approach to praxis for queer bodies. Few thinkers have attempted to reconcile queer and Marxist analysis. Those who have propose the key contested site to be that of desire/sexual expression. This emphasis on desire, Lewis argues, is symptomatic of the neoliberal project and has led to a continued fascination with the politics of identity. By arguing that Marxist analysis is in fact most beneficial to gender politics within the arena of body production, categorization and exclusion Lewis develops a theory of gender and the sexed body that is wedded to the realities of a capitalist political economy.

Boldly calling for a new, materialist queer theory, Lewis defines a politics of liberation that is both intersectional, transnational, and grounded in lived experience.

Raj Patel on The Dinner Table After the Revolution

Full Transcript Available Here.

Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution.

After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of considering one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society.

Our first episode is The Dinner Table After the Revolution featuring Raj Patel, writer, activist, and academic who has authored the books Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food Sytem; The Value of Nothing; and The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things with co-author Jason W. Moore.

“The idea that you have in your mind when you hear “dinner table,” whether it’s around mommy and daddy and two kids or around a small group affair, is itself a product of our times. If one imagines a future after the revolution it’s not just the size of the dinner table or the labor that goes into the food that appears on the dinner table, it’s the whole string of commodities and relationships of power that go into thinking about who’s there, and who’s labor is there, and what nature and capital flows through this dinner table in a way that’s emancipatory where capitalism of course now is not.”

#osri3 #laborwavepodcast #rajpatel #aftertherevolution #historyoftheworldinsevencheapthings

Boots Riley on Power, Art, and the Radical Dr. King

Full Transcript Available Here.

Laborwave Radio presents a reproduction of audio from a live discussion between Boots Riley and Andrea Haverkamp. The event was organized by the Coalition of Graduate Employees (CGE 6069) and King Legacy Advisory Board (KLAB) to honor the legacy of the radical Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and the 20th Anniversary of CGE.

“Even for us as organizers the nature of power under capitalism has been obscured. We’ve been told, for any of you who are old enough to have been around during the anti-Iraq War invasion protests of the early 2000s, people would say ‘if we could just get millions into the streets then we’ll be able to stop this war.’ And we did, we got millions of people into the streets at the same time on the same day all around the world- didn’t stop the war. Because that’s not how power works. Power doesn’t just get shamed into doing the right thing.”

#cge6069 #bootsriley #sorrytobotheryou #wayfairstrike