Introduction : the ideas of American independence in comparative perspective -- The ideology of Creole revolution -- Alexander Hamilton in hemispheric perspective -- Simón Bolívar and the contradictions of Creole revolution -- The Creole conservatism of Lucas Alamán -- The end of Creole revolution -- Conclusion: from the Creole revolutions to our Americas
"Since the so-called dematerialization of currencies and art practices in the late 1960s and early 1970, we have witnessed a move into what Joshua Simon calls an economy of neomaterialism. With this, several shifts have occurred: the focus of labor has moved from production to consumption, the commodity has become the historical subject, and symbols now behave like materials. Neomaterialism explores the meaning of the world of commodities, and reintroduces various notions of dialectical materialism into the conversation on the subjectivity and vitalism of things. Here, Simon advocates for the unreadymade, sentimental value, and the promise of the dividual as a means for a vocabulary in this new economy of meaning. Reflecting on general intellect as labor and the subjugation of an overqualified generation to the neofeudal order of debt finance--with a particular focus on dispossession and rent economy, post-appropriation display strategies and negation, the barricade and capital's technocratic fascisms--Neomaterialism merges traditions of epic communism with the communism that is already here." -- Publisher's website
AbstractThis article offers a new interpretation of the Cuban intellectual José Martí's international political thought. It argues that Martí's analysis of early US imperialism and call for Spanish American unity are best understood as an immanent critique of the "unionist paradigm," a tradition of international political thought that originated in the American independence movements. Martí recognized the impediments that racism had placed in the way of both US and Spanish American efforts to stabilize the hemisphere's republics by uniting them under regional institutions. He argued that, in his own time, Anglo-Saxon supremacism had deprived US-led Pan-Americanism of all legitimacy, causing a crisis of international political order in the Americas. In the context of this crisis, he developed a revised, antiracist unionism that, he argued, would free Spanish America's republics from imperial aggression and interstate conflicts, making the region a global model of stable and inclusive self-rule.
The growing prominence of comparative political theory has inspired extensive and fruitful methodological reflection, raising important questions about the procedures that political theorists should apply when they select texts for study, interpret their passages, and assess their arguments. But, notably, comparative political theorists have mainly rejected the comparative methods used in the subfield of comparative politics, because they argue that applying the comparative method would compromise both the interpretive and the critical projects that comparative political theory should pursue. In this article, I describe a comparative approach for the study of political ideas that offers unique insight into how the intellectual and institutional contexts that political thinkers occupy influence their ideas. By systematically describing how political thinking varies across time and over space in relation to the contexts within which political thinkers live and work, the comparative method can serve as the foundation for both deconstructive critiques, which reveal the partial interests that political ideas presented as universally advantageous actually serve, and reconstructive critiques, which identify particular thinkers or traditions of political thought that, because of the contexts in which they developed, offer compelling critical perspectives on existing political institutions.
This paper explores the ways in which financial speculation and disruption have become common traits defining our artistic and political imagination. In this discussion a variety of notions emerge – namely, the move from value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption, and from avant garde to speculation. Finance is speculation on debt. Speculation is commonly used in recent years in philosophy, literature, politics, the arts and the sciences. As varied as the usages of the term may be, the current emergence of speculation in these different fields stems from the world of finance capital and its premise of managing risk. Speculation proves to be a form of pragmatism that generates more and more extreme models within the current system of control and accumulation by dispossession. Whatever the extreme scenarios it generates might be, they always depend on a stable variant – the continuation of finance capital. This paper wishes to offer in addition, the notion of counter-speculation by using the work of contemporary thinkers and artists. Counter-speculation invites potentials for actualization. While exploring new forms for being in uncertainties against financialization, counter-speculation assigns scenarios and narration that actualize onto the present its own potentials. By that it opens a new horizon for our political imagination beyond finance.
The disparities in per-capita wealth and national productivity that divide the United States and Latin America today have often been understood as results of institutional variations introduced during each region's period of imperial rule. According to this interpretation, path-dependent processes preserved institutions installed by Britain, Spain, and Portugal across the centuries, propagating their positive or negative economic effects, and eventually producing a marked "development gap" in the hemisphere. This article aims to improve this account by highlighting the direct and indirect economic effects of the success or failure of the political unions establishedafterindependence in both the United States and Latin America. It demonstrates that influential political theorists throughout the hemisphere understood the developmental advantages to be gained from unifying former colonies and employing the political authority newly at their disposal to abolish the stifling institutional legacies of European rule, suggesting that if Spanish America's unions had endured, or conversely, if the United States had collapsed, the two regions' economies might not have diverged as dramatically as they subsequently did. This illustrates an important contribution that the emerging subfield of "comparative political theory" can make to comparative political science in general, and to the new institutionalism in particular, by providing uniquely direct insight into the choices available to political actors in consequential moments of institutional genesis and change, and revealing the contingency of institutional variations that might otherwise appear inevitable.
Solution 275-294: Communists Anonymous is a document of some imageries of communism and a testament to the current predicament of our political imagination. Atomized, privatized, and deprived of any infrastructure for solidarity?without any internationalist project, with moralizations compensating for the disappearance of political organization, with micro-politics replacing macro-politics?communists can only be anonymous in this world of ours. Edited by writer Ingo Niermann and curator Joshua Simon, this collection of essays and stories?written from the fields of art, literature, law, philosophy, activism, design, and science?proposes resolutions to current social contradictions, covering topics such as bacteria, bliss, immortality, queerness, interculturality, poetry, transportation, childhood and motherhood, and all-encompassing sensual love
