Browsing by Subject "Marxism"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    A desire called America: biopolitics and utopian forms of Life in American literature
    (2012-12) Haines, Christian P.
    "A Desire Called America: Biopolitics and Utopian Forms of Life in American Literature" analyzes two periods of American literature - the American Renaissance and American literature following the 1960s - in terms of how specific literary texts return to and revise the founding of the U.S. as a political experiment. Historically speaking, these two periods stand at opposite ends of the arc of U.S. global hegemony: the American Renaissance as the U.S. rises to the status of global hegemon, and American literature after the 1960s in the midst of that hegemony's unraveling. I argue that the precarious position of the U.S. in these two periods enables American literature to reactivate the utopian promise of the American Revolution. The texts I analyze treat the revolution as an archive of futures past, that is, they imagine futures that might have taken place but never did because of the betrayal of the revolutionary experiment. Put differently, my dissertation focuses on the tensions and contradictions between the U.S. - understood as a geographical and political entity - and America - understood as a utopian political desire. I show that one of the most important ways in which the reactivation of utopian political potential occurs is through figurations of the human body.
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    Finitude after after finitude
    (2014-06) Frank, Jay Alexander
    This work represents my efforts to rethink the relationship between philosophical materialism and contemporary rhetorical studies along the lines of Quentin Meillassoux's speculative materialism. Cast as an allegory to Michael Calvin McGee's essay "A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric," the first portion of this work examines the historical evolution of theories of materialist rhetoric as a response to an antecedent turn towards hermeneutics in rhetorical criticism. I claim that, although they represent complex institutional responses to the "hermeneutic" tradition in rhetoric, what have been called "materialist" theories of rhetoric do not fundamentally escape that tradition, and therefore have little to do with materialism. In part two, I examine Slavoj Zizek's speech at Zucotti Park on October 9, 2011. In doing so I uncover some analytical difficulties the "human microphone" poses for both "hermeneutic" and "materialist" rhetoric, and offer alternative connections to philosophy as new ways for rhetoricians to discuss proletarian organization.
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    Hobo orator union: the free speech fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909-1916.
    (2009-07) May, Matthew S.
    From 1909 to 1916 thousands of hobos joined the Industrial Workers of the World and participated in major fights for free speech in several dozen cities in the American west. During this period, the union organized over two dozen confrontations with municipal authorities to challenge repressive speaking laws which they considered to be de facto injunctions against public organizing. The myriad tactics involved in the free speech fights transformed over time to meet the new challenges presented by various forces of repression; but the fights were always anchored in the practice of violating repressive ordinances by speaking on a soapbox. Many of the participants were arrested and barricaded in the bastilles of the American west. Some were beaten, publicly humiliated, killed, or eventually deported. This dissertation explores how the performance of soapbox oratory composed waged and unwaged workers as a class. The study is organized chronologically by date according to the major free speech fights in Spokane, Fresno, San Diego, and Everett. I argue that the hobo orators of the free speech fights demonstrate the significance of the oratorical as a revolutionary practice of class composition. In this regard, the dissertation seeks to reveal lessons about the possibilities of revolutionary unionism today.
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    Neoliberalism’s Last Days: Amazon and the Rise of America’s New Working Classes
    (2022-09) Cox, Spencer
    This dissertation asks the questions: What is neoliberalism? How is it ending? And, from the perspective of political strategy, what can be done to make what emerges next more just? Drawing on long-wave Marxist theory, I argue neoliberalism is first and foremost a popular political bloc led by the financial and entrepreneurial wings of the bourgeoisie in alignment with broader ‘middle-layers’ in the US class structure. Rather than viewing neoliberalism as a process driven solely by the economic logic of the pursuit of surplus profits, I argue that creative destruction is a political process, with an ascendant neoliberal political bloc emerging in response to the profitability crisis in the 1960s. The neoliberal bloc sought to restore the rate of profit and US global economic hegemony, and to do so, aggressively suppressed the US working class directly through the exercise of political power, and indirectly through the structural reorganization of capital accumulation. The structural and organizational decomposition of the working class diminished its power, with large sections of the class protesting – often in vain - its dissolution via defensive struggles. Concomitantly, as the trajectory of long-wave shifted from the pursuit of surplus profits to the stabilization of the system to extract profits from new waves of fixed capital investment, neoliberal hegemony faces a legitimacy crisis. With right populism and reformed liberalism two competing blocs, the trajectory of the new bloc depends on the loyalty of the working classes. Today, the US working classes remain deeply fragmented and atomized despite re-composition into new spaces and workplaces, diminishing the ability of the class to exercise power to enact changes the class broadly desires. Strategically imperative to a more just future is creating new class organization that bridges the divides in the new working classes. I argue that Amazon.com is at the heart of working class re-composition in the United States, socializing both high skilled tech workers and diverse low wage suburban logistics workers into shared spaces of exploitation and domination. Structurally located in the heart of capital accumulation, organized Amazon workers contain both the potential structural and associational power to shift the dynamic of capitalist restructuring more in the working class’s favor as the long-wave cycle matures. Building autonomous class organization – at Amazon and in other workplaces and working class neighborhoods - is crucial for not just winning reforms, but also generating a counter-hegemonic force that, in the long-run, may challenge bourgeois political hegemony in an era of increasing calamity.
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    A Speculative Theory of Politics: Logic of the Party-Form
    (2017-03) Valverde, Sergio
    The dissertation provides a defense of political partisanship from a philosophical perspective by a) arguing that classical and contemporary philosophy have been unable to understand such phenomenon due to its moral and metaphysical prejudices, b) that the Hegelian speculative tradition has been almost alone in defending something like a partisan conception of truth, and that c) Marx and the socialist and communist tradition that followed preserved this speculative conception of truth by tracing it to the social universe and applying it to the practical tasks of party building and organization. In tracing and reinterpreting that history, the dissertation provides a marker on how to connect abstract philosophical questions with practical matters of politics. I believe following Lenin that there is no revolution without revolutionary theory, no politics without philosophy, and conversely, that there is no political philosophy if it does not provide guidelines for political practice and exercise.
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    Texts as tactics: how people practice politics with books.
    (2011-07) Hengen, Nicholas
    My dissertation focuses on the uses of literature in public spaces by large groups of diverse people tied to particular political ends. I document and study these "tactical readings" in the process of arguing that in the United States, between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, literature has helped people transform their communities and their world. I document how Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn intervenes in discussions of women's rights among soldiers during World War II; how poems by William Shakespeare and Amiri Baraka, W.H. Auden and Lorna Dee Cervantes become a mass voice against racism and imperialism in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; how John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath becomes a tool for discussing immigration reform and organizing communities against foreclosure during the "Great Recession" in 2009. In each of these chapters, I specify particular texts being used at particular times by particular actors and leading to particular ends. In linking texts, their readers, and the political consequences of reading, my critical approach runs contrary to the specter of New Critical hermeneutics that still haunts literary criticism in rarefied close readings or Derridian deconstruction. My approach also runs contrary to previous literary-critical attempts to situate literature in the world, such as reader-response theory with its focus on solitary, elite, or imagined readers. To challenge these paradigms, my sociological approach draws on the intersubjective theories of language pioneered by Jurgen Habermas. With Habermas's theory of communicative action and deliberative democracy, I produce a methodology for literary studies that allows for a focus on texts, their readers, and contexts of consumption--both particular (at the level of reader and text) and general (the way texts relate to particular cultural climates, for instance). Habermas offers a way to move between systemic analysis, institutional contexts, and the particularities of the way texts are used by everyday readers. I work to show literary studies what we might learn from such tactical readers in the hopes that working collaboratively with them, we can shape new tactical interventions.