Call for Responses

For Socialist Review’s upcoming Special Section
on Anti-Capitalism, we are assembling a Roundtable
discussion. Please send in five copies of your 
responses and commentaries of approximately
500-2000 words (along with a 1-2 line bio), as well as 
other visual forms of creative, radical expression, by 
1 September 2000 to the address below. We look 
forward to your active participation.

{Please distribute this Call for
Responses to other 
people and lists that might be interested. Apologies 
for cross-posting.}


The recent rise in resistance against economic 
globalization and the police state exemplified in the US
by the actions against the WTO, the IMF and the 
World Bank, the rise in anti-sweatshop activism, and 
anti-prison organizing has raised excitement about the 
possibility for fighting capitalism.  At Socialist Review, 
we want to seize this opportunity to ask activists and 
academics, Marxists and postmoderns (yes, we 
acknowledge that these categories are not mutually 
exclusive) to tell us what kinds of theorizing and politics 
are relevant to their practice.  More specifically, we want 
to know what resistance and struggle in the present 
period looks like.  The following questions are offered to 
spark some critical discussion about these critical issues.

1. Is ‘capitalism’ an important category in your politics?  
If so, what exactly do you mean by ‘anti-capitalism’?  
What is the relationship between capitalism as a mode of 
production and capitalism as a discursive category?  Is it 
just one category among others---such as race, sexuality, 
gender, coloniality—or does it have a special centrality in 
your thinking and practice?

2. Are the categories of ‘Marxism’, or ‘postmodernism’ 
useful in your political and intellectual work?  If so, what 
kind of Marxism or postmodernism?  If not, what other 
schools of thought are helpful to you?

3. How important is having an alternative to capitalism, 
e.g., socialism, for you?  If so, what would you call it?  
How would you define and describe it?
4. How is fighting against ‘capitalism’ connected---or 
disconnected---from struggles against racism, sexism, 
homophobia, and other systems of oppression?

5. Does it make sense to envision revolution with a capital 
‘R’ as a necessary condition for a just society?  Or is 
radical democracy a better and more useful concept? 

6. What connections, if any, do you see between 
anti-sweatshop and anti-globalism organizing and an 
anti-capitalist agenda?  Does it matter if activists talk 
about capitalism?

7. How important---and helpful---is it to argue for the 
connections between the prison-industrial complex and 
capitalism when organizing youth of color against 
criminalization of young people?


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are developed, debated, and creatively contested. 
Drawing on a varied and inclusive body of radical 
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