Revolutionary Hope After Nihilism: Marginalized Voices and Dissent

257 Pages·2022·14.078 MB·English

by  Saladdin Ahmed

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Revolutionary
Hope After
Nihilism
ii
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Revolutionary

Hope After
Nihilism
Marginalized Voices and
Dissent
SALADDIN AHMED
iv
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First published in Great Britain 2022
Copyright © Saladdin Ahmed, 2022
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1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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To the memory of the ever-smiling Nazim, my younger brother.

To the kind of humanity Nazim embodied in his short life.
To those whose voices the world failed to hear.
To a future society in which Nazim’s peaceful humanity would feel at
home, in a world where there won’t be concentration camps, exiles,
borders, and painful departures.
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viii
PART ONE Crises
1 The Philosophy and the Plan of the Present Work 3
2 The Indispensability of Universal Anti-fascist Solidarity: A
Return to Normal Is Neither Possible nor Desirable 37
3 The Two-Headed Beast of Capitalism and
Nation-Statism 55
4 Capitalism and the Ecological Deadlock 79
5 Culturalism as an Ideological Crisis 99
PART TWO Negations
6 Refuting the No-Alternative Rhetoric 131
7 The Marginalized and Their Cosmopolitan Episteme of
Emancipation 163
8 Postnihilist Theses on Revolution Summarized 205
Notes 215
Bibliography 225
Index 239
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am extremely grateful to Bloomsbury’s editors and teams for working so
hard to make sure this book is published in all formats and makes it to its
readers across the world. First, Liza Thompson’s confidence in the project
was key to set off the process. Right from that very beginning, Jade Grogan
worked tirelessly throughout the entire process and was always extremely
helpful. Suzie Nash kindly helped in securing the final stage of the review
process and continued to be of great help throughout the following stages.
Ben O’Hagan did an impressive job overseeing the entire production pro-
cess. As well, I am grateful to Saranya Manohar and Jayashree Aradhyam
for their patience and punctuality as they conducted the copyediting.
I sincerely thank the reviewers for their feedback and suggestions, which
were very helpful in improving the manuscript.
Also, I am grateful to Vasile-Valentin Latiu for doing the indexing at
short notice, and to Rebekah Zwazing and Mona-Lynn Courteau for all
their editing work on parts of the manuscript.
I would like to thank my colleagues in upstate New York, especially,
Vera Eccarius-Kelly, Laurie Naranch, Zoe Oxley, Lori Marso, Brad Hays,
Guillermina Seri, Cigdem Cidam, Tom Lobe, Daniel Mosquera, and William
García for their continued support during my time in the area.
I am thankful to all my students in the United States who have not been
afraid of joining me to learn via unlearning. I have received some of the
most encouraging feedback from them. I am especially proud of my students
who have stayed faithful to my motto: a day in which you do not insult a
fascist is a wasted day.
Parts of the manuscript have been published as articles and commentar-
ies. I appreciate the publisher’s permissions for republication. A close version
of Chapter 4 was published in The World Review of Political Economy, vol.
11, no. 1 (Spring 2020). Some parts of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared on the
Institute for Social Ecology’s (ISE) website in 2019 and 2020. The argument
regarding my rejection of a prefigurative alternative, mainly presented in
Chapter 6, goes back to a paper I presented in 2016 as an invited speaker to
the Institute for Social Ecology’s Annual Gathering in Plainfield, Vermont—
thank you to all the members and the associates of the ISE, as always. In the
following year, I presented a related paper at the Left Forum in New York
City. Then, I presented a more developed version of the paper under the
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
title of “Negation, Despair, Resistance” at the Northwest Critical Theory
Roundtable, which was organized by Joan Braune at Gonzaga University in
February 2018. A version of that paper finally made it to Science & Society,
Vol. 86, No. 3, July 2022, 409–38. That article is primarily focused on pro-
viding a Marxist grounding for my negativity argument. More specifically,
there, I use primary Marxist sources to show that Marx’s communism is
inherently a negative thesis, that is, it does not commit the fallacy of basing
its rejection of capitalism on an imagined positive alternative.
Other passages, ideas, and arguments throughout different parts of
the manuscript have appeared previously in my articles and commentar-
ies in the following outlets: OpenDemocracy, Telos, Roar, ISE’s website,
Contours Journal (published by the Institute of the Humanities at Simon
Frasor University under the direction of Professor Samir Gandesha), and
LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. I have also presented
some of these themes in a number of invited talks over the last several years.
Below, I will briefly mention the place, year, and relevant topic: Wesleyan
University, 2021, Culturalism and Education; Concordia University, 2021,
Culturalism and Human Rights; Simon Fraser University, 2021, Universal
University; San Francisco State University, 2019, Totalitarianism and Space;
Seattle University, 2019, Rojava Revolution and Universalism; Simon Fraser
University, 2018, Hopelessness, Rojava, and Universalism; Williams College,
2018, Aura and Politics of Space.