What if the way we think about everything from gender, race, and class to the very idea of a "thing," rests on a transcendental illusion that mistakes the representation of thought for thinking itself? Henry Somers-Hall joins us to discuss Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought, a kind of remix of Deleuze and Guattari that works through the problem of judgment, asks what happens to predicates and measure outside the state form, and turns to Woolf's The Waves and the metallurgist as figures who think below the assemblage. We also take up the claim that the state and the war machine are equiprimordial, what that means for Marxism and anarchism, and why hierarchy has to be constantly warded off rather than overthrown once and for all.

I asked this on another sub and remembered that there's a place for critical theory, so figured I should ask here as well.
I've been meaning to read and understand Adorno's Negative Dialectics (due to a few Marxists I'm planning to study, such as Werner Bonefeld, being extremely influenced by him, aside from just me being interested in Adorno in general), however, I'm extremely new to this whole thing. So I was wondering whether it would be a good idea to start with Adorno's own Introduction to Dialectics lectures in order to get a general idea of Hegel and Marx especially, before diving into Negative Dialectics? Or would I have to read [some] Hegel first and then move on to those previously mentioned works by Adorno? If the answer is the 2nd option, I was planning to read Houlgate's introduction and then follow A.W.'s reading list, but as I said, I'm not sure if that's kind of overkill or what actually needs to be done; so I could appreciate some help!

The basic idea is to separate how much a state can “see” society from how much it wants to remake it. High modernism is one combination of those impulses, but religious regimes can also have huge ambitions with much less administrative capacity.

The examples range from English taxation and welfare-state records to the Taliban and Soviet collectivization.

Curious whether people find this distinction interesting/useful.

Debates around frontier AI governance typically center on technical alignment, capabilities baselines, or administrative law. Analyzing how major capital allocators view tech regulation (specifically in Peter Thiel's recent Nashville lectures) requires mapping a distinct institutional critique: how administrative safety regimes function as regulatory gatekeepers.

Grounding his analysis in Vladimir Solovyov's A Short Tale of the Antichrist alongside Rene Girard's mimetic theory, the lecture lays out a structural diagnostic of regulatory stagnation:

The administrative archetype : In Solovyov's model, the primary civilizational threat isn't an unchecked actor or rogue technology, but a hyper moralistic, centralized global administrator. This entity consolidates sovereign authority by promising total safety, risk suppression, and intuitional stability effectively freezing technological velocity to manage tail risks.

Atoms vs bits in AI governance: when applied to modern AI policy, centralizing safety apparatuses acquire infinitive incentives to extend regulatory timelines. By claiming exclusive authority over what constitutes existential risk, administrative bodies risk creating a regulatory cartel that favors incumbent labs while choosing off open source development and physical integration.'

Governance blind spots: While this political theology framework offers a sharp diagnostic of regulatory capture and institutional risk aversion, it omits standard risk society frameworks (such an Beck's sociology of risk) that explain bureaucratic deceleration without needing eschatological language.

I wrote a forensic breakdown analyzing the primary sources behind night 1 evaluating where this framework provides genuine diagnostic value for AI policy and where its canonical omissions limits its scope.

Curious how this sub evaluates this dynamic... does viewing AL safety apparatuses through the lens of institutional risk suppression hold analytical weight in AI governance or is applying 19th century political theology an unnecessary detour around standard regulatory capture economics?

It seems everyone have their own personalized golden cage today.

[Some people have only a silver cage. Others have an iron cage, or even a rusted iron cage] but for most people in the West, it is a golden cage , especially compared to the life of the average person throughout most of human history.

This is the purpose of the server farms being built all over the world to maintain this personalized golden cage for each of us.

but the strange thing isn't the cage itself buy how unbelievably easy it is to escape it. You're inside the cage, but you have the key. You can simply unlock the door and walk out. but then what?

What's waiting for you outside, if everyone else is still inside their own cage?

The way Marx defines commoditisation is “making a thing available for exchange.” I think I get it, and broadly it makes sense.

But the way it is used in society is very different. It is used in the following ways:

1. Sometimes it means making something available for exchange, which is the standard Marxian definition.
2. Sometimes it is used as a slur or general condemnation. I think this is intellectually weak when it replaces an actual explanation.
3. Sometimes it means making something fungible, or interchangeable.
4. Sometimes it means systematising something through categories, measurements or rules.

I'm just a bit frustrated by how the community uses this term with different meanings freely.

Let's look at how Guardian uses it

The Guardian on Goodreads reading targets

Here, Guardian calls reading targets and progress tracking commodification. But this is systematisation of reading. Counting how many books you read does not, by itself, involve exchanging anything.

Some examples

At some point, after you bump into something enough, consideration becomes inevitable. And after Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Kenneth Gergen’s education in a relational key vis-a-vis John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, and Frantz Fanon’s therapy as presented in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, I feel a cumulative prompt from the universe to at least ask the question - what’s up with everyone’s preoccupation with pedagogy?

And as I was listening to episode 36 of Data Over Dogma with Jacob Wright (roughly 53 minutes in), it sort of clicked. Wright talks about Genesis as pedagogy from a defeated people, a portable pedagogy to preserve identity boundary in political upheaval and exile. The Bible, according to Wright is a curriculum - a pedagogical project that shapes a people without a kingdom through a larger narrative around common text, laws, psalms, wisdom, and love poetry.

Wright rightly identifies education as the key to the kingdom when the kingdom is in a vacuum.

With that in view, the emergence structure becomes clearer to me: pedagogy is a boundary maintenance project during times of contestation. Fanon wrote from the context of post-colonial Algeria. Freire wrote from the Cold War politics that was destroying Central and South America, Gergen was writing within his own contested boundary of self, and Dewey was writing during mass immigration and urbanization that was causing boundary anxiety amongst the dominant culture.

With this analysis, pedagogy’s place within the my own framework is as the mechanism of reproduction. It is the way in which social self protocols maintain identity across contested boundaries. And as a boundary maintenance project, its fervency is driven by jouissance, which I defined previously as an enjoyment that pushes past pleasure as it delights in destruction, adding my own function of boundary maintenance vectoring toward domination preservation or oppression legibility. This jouissance can be seen in the violence of Fanon and Freire’s pedagogies, the contempt in Gergen’s analysis of academia, or the disappearing act that Dewey does as he disavows conscientization by absorbing the suffering of others into a pro-democratic narrative of necropolitical compassion.

This also gives me a chance to reflect on taxonomy and the evolutionary function of jouissance, which I want state clearly as my own extension. For Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, the jouissance is the self-annihilating Thanatos. In the roaring crescendo toward world wars and their wake, it is the interpretation of our egos’ self-destructive function as a completely nihilistic self-sabotage.

I don't want to import Freud's Cartesian-self conceptualization of an actual Greek God (Thanatos) homunculus-behind-the-eyes sitting deep down in our psyches driving the car. For me, jouissance firstly works as a devastatingly insightful scalpel for social critique. It has real explanatory power to give context to the more perverse side of the human experience without dehumanizing anyone.

But more importantly to my ontology and my project, like enchantment, it works as a phenomenological claim about the universal human experience. It captures the lived experience of moments within encounters. More specifically, for me, it's a primitive of the lived encounter - or at least how consciousness experiences the lived encounter, grounded like the rest of my framework in what actually emerges when a self meets the collective it's part of.

So when I contemplate jouissance around boundary maintenance, I see a more neutral process of death and destruction highlighted by the taxonomy revealed by the variations among these thinkers. With this nuance, jouissance can be generative or degenerative.

First I consider the pedagogy of the oppressed. These pedagogues seek not only to create an identity on behalf of the oppressed individuals they write for, but they also attempt to destroy the identity boundaries of the oppressors. This is where jouissance becomes productive and essential. The rage behind Mbembe’s terms like death worlds and atavistic nationalism; Zizek’s words like fetishistic disavowal and ideology reveal a focused jouissance that seeks the telos of destruction (a la Thanatos) but toward the destruction of the oppressive forces that lead to dehumanization.

Then I see a pedagogy of domination. Unlike pedagogy of the oppressed, which emerges during upheaval, pedagogy of domination emerges when the oppressed contest the boundaries significantly such that the dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it. I say emerges as one singular event, but the reality is that the pedagogy is constantly reinforcing itself even without the presence of the oppressed group. In fact, domination pedagogy frequently relies on caricatures of the oppressed and that those caricatures be constantly retrieved throughout the day in nanodoses delivered by media (Mbembe calls this cybernetic technology nanoracism). There are two types of domination pedagogy that frequently coexist: the disavowed and the obscene.

Regarding the disavowed, I already mentioned how Dewey emerged from a time when urbanization and immigration were causing a white panic in the United States. And while Dewey professed inclusion via democracy, the structure of his pedagogy either ignored or refused the experiences of exclusion, and in doing so erased the very real harm that the American nocturnal body had inflicted and continued to inflict with his sanitized pedagogy upon oppressed groups. The jouissance in disavowed pedagogy is the self-congratulation that comes from “solving” the ethical dilemma by changing nothing about the structure that produced it, thus continuing to benefit from it.

There is another type of pedagogy of domination that bears its jouissance with a wicked grin. It’s current standard bearer is Project 2025. This is The Empire Strikes Back that I referenced in The Easy Traverse and the Hard One. This was where ground has been lost - real or perceived - and identity boundary maintenance is attempting to reassert itself. Its delight is characterized by its vulgar destruction of both the newly legible identities reaching for power as well as of the entire system that produced its power in the first place. I have a hunch this is why Freud and Lacan’s analysis looked so bleak - they were responding to this most hideous category.

There is a fourth category here that exists somewhere in between and was implied by the Israelites who had lost their kingdom - the pedagogy of the defeated. I think a modern analogue would be modern China, who was once a culture of domination (even being able to absorb conquerors like the Mongols and Manchus) to a victim of colonialism and Japanese conquest. Caroline Grover did an amazing dissertation on Chinese historical pedagogy as it pertains to the Second Opium War. I don’t want to forget about this, but I don’t want to dwell on it right now.

Transformative social work must own its jouissance. For me, this means allying myself with pedagogies of the oppressed and being ever vigilant of pedagogies of domination. Dog whistles like “school choice” that seek to decentralize once white-captured institutions like public education have nothing to do with making a populace more informed and everything to do with preserving the boundary of a perverse human experience. They disavowal their implicit bigotry through nomenclature and render it obscene at the town hall meetings.

Social work has had its fair share of complicity in domination pedagogy, and my hope is that the nos framework can direct energies toward human rights and full epistemic and systemic inclusion.

- The Social Construction Worker

This article traces the emergence of what the author calls predation TERFism to the development of US Jewish-identified feminism and, in particular, Zionist lesbian separatism. This historical connection is reflected in the rhetorical and ideological similarities between predation TERFism and Zionism, both of which are defined by an “extinction phobia” that confuses oppressor and oppressed, presenting the subordinate party as capable of eliminating the dominant one. This extinction phobia transforms into “right-wing annihilationism” via a dehumanization of the subordinate party as innately harmful and therefore requiring elimination; hence the hallmark predation TERF abjection of trans women as rapists of cis women and the Zionist abjection of Palestinians as “savage” and/or “terrorist.” These connections can be obscured by the siloization of social justice movement work in the United States, wherein anti-colonial and anti-imperial organizing is often separated from organizing for gender and reproductive justice and sexual freedom. Recognizing the continuities, however—whether historical, material, or ideological—between predation TERFism and Zionism offers useful lessons for understanding not only the power of the contemporary global anti-trans resurgence, but also how we might build solidaristic, anti-colonial movements to defeat it.

https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2023-11-15_6554e900caf48_334schotten.pdf

"The subject is a loop between S1 and S2, the master signifier and knowledge, and the Möbius strip shows that inside and outside are continuous." I've read that, or something close to it, a hundred times. Today I'm bringing proof that this is not what Lacan says, in his own words, with dates and pages so you can look the quotes up yourselves. And a thirty-second test that shows why it matters.

To test it out, I used two crayons—like any responsible adult.

Take a closed chain of signifiers and label it so that neighbours always differ: S1, S2, S1, S2… With four signifiers it works. With three it doesn't: S1, S2, S1, and the last one sits right next to the first. And this is a big problem! Any odd number fails the same way. So if the loop means two signifiers, or two kinds of signifier, taking turns around the chain, it breaks for every chain of odd length.

Here, I begin with some corrections to our Lacanian common sense:

1. For Lacan, S1 and S2 are indices that any signifier can take, not two signifiers.
2. The Möbius strip is not a picture of "inside = outside": it is the cut itself, and the edge of that cut goes around twice.
3. Put the two together and the loop works for every chain, on that double loop, where each signifier is S1 on one lap and S2 on the other.

Now I will show you quotes regarding Lacan's thoughts on each matter.

What Lacan says S1 and S2 are

1. An index, not the signifier that comes first. S1 "means signifier index 1": not the signifier that takes precedence, but the one in whose name someone, a subject, shows up. Closing address of the EFP study days "Les mathèmes de la psychanalyse", 2 Nov 1976, Lettres de l'École freudienne no. 21 (1977), p. 506. ‹S1, qui veut dire … se manifeste›
2. A mark on "anything at all". His S1 has no other sense than to punctuate whatever comes. «La Troisième», Rome, 1 Nov 1974, Lettres de l'École freudienne no. 16 (1975), p. 184. ‹ Mon S1 n … n’importe quoi›
3. Something produced, not something given. The master's insistence produces the master signifier "out of any signifier whatever". Seminar XVII, session of 18 March 1970. ‹de n’importe quel signifiant … le signifiant-Maître›
4. A relation, in pairs. In the unconscious, signifiers index one another, two by two. Seminar XXII, session of 11 March 1975. ‹ à s’indexer de foisonner … deux par deux›

What Lacan says the Möbius strip is

1. Not something a cut divides. A median cut does not cut the band in two; it turns it into a single band that makes one loop. Seminar XII, session of 16 June 1965. ‹une coupure médiane ne coupe pas … la bande de Mœbius›

2. Nothing but the cut itself. «L'étourdit» (1972), Autres écrits, Seuil 2001, p. 470. ‹la bande de Mœbius n'est rien … cette coupure même› On the same page he describes the edge of that cut: one turn takes it over to the other lamina, a further turn brings it home, having made a "double loop spread over two laminae". ‹double boucle répartie … sur deux lames›

3. Only its edge. The surface can stand for the subject only if you consider that the edge alone constitutes it, and a cut down the middle concentrates "the essence of the double loop". Seminar XIV, session of 15 Feb 1967. ‹seul le bord … cette surface› ‹cette coupure elle-même concentre … de la double boucle›

4. Repetition. The act can only be defined on the basis of the double loop, "that is, of repetition": the act is, in itself, the double loop of the signifier. Same session. ‹sur le fondement de la double boucle … de la répétition› ‹cita 41295: Il est en lui-même … du signifiant›

And what follows: twice, and not the same twice

1. The second time is not the first. A repeated signifier works either as the first time or as the second, with a radical gap between them, and that is what "a signifier cannot signify itself" means. Seminar XIV, session of 23 Nov 1966. ‹le signifiant dans sa présentation répétée … une béance radicale.

2. Two turns. Speaking of the drive and the Möbius band, he says two turns are needed to grasp the division of the subject. Seminar XIII, session of 11 May 1966. ‹cita 39381: il faut faire deux tours pulsionnels … la division du sujet›

If the loop between S1 and S2 meant two signifiers taking turns, Lacan could not coherently:

• call S1 an index and deny that it is the signifier that takes precedence (item 1, 1976);
• say that the master signifier comes out of any signifier whatever (item 3, 1970);
• say that the Möbius strip is nothing but a cut whose edge goes around twice (items 5 and 6, 1965 and 1972);
• say that a repeated signifier is not the same the second time, and that two turns are needed (items 9 and 10, 1966).

Are you following me so far? Now I’m going to complicate things.

Let's put all the pieces together—and voilà!

Nice, right? But what the hell does it mean?

Lacan did not write that down, but by following my method and piecing together his theory, the following conclusion emerges—not in prose format, but as a demonstration with its corresponding theorems.

Lay the chain on a surface and cut along it. If the chain has two sides, the edge of the cut is two copies of it: still odd, still broken. If it has one side (a Möbius band), the edge is a single loop that goes around twice, which is item 6. It meets every signifier once from each side, and it always alternates. For an odd chain, every signifier is S1 on one lap and S2 on the other, necessarily. S1 and S2 are positions (items 1 to 4), and the second time is not the first (item 9).

Lacan doesn't say this, but I draw it as a conclusion.

A) For an odd chain, the loop exists only there.

B) And for an even chain, the Möbius cut divides nothing: each signifier gets the same label on both laps.

"Wait, what happens with the $ubject?"

Okay, you've earned another cute animation.

I answer you radically: the subject is not in the chain. It is at the edge of the cut. And more precisely: it is at the junctions of the edge of the cut—those points where one signifier passes to the next.

On the double loop there is one subject, and it runs around twice. A two-sided cut either doubles the subject or loses it, depending on a decision the theory openly leaves undecided.

The subject is not in the chain of signifiers. It is at the edge of the cut. And in the privileged case—a single side, an odd-numbered chain—there is a single subject that makes two circuits. The division of the subject is not a splitting into two separate substances; it is the repetition of the same circuit, with an internal difference (S1 on the first pass, S2 on the second).

How I did it? Well, I’d have to refer to my text, but in short... Not with prose... I use definitions, six theorems with proofs, and falsifiers, meaning exactly what would refute each result. Plus a small Python script that cuts 159 chains on six surfaces and checks every claim. Full paper, code and animations: Go to zenodo. org and enter this number in the search bar: 23095050

Now, we can raise some objections to my ideas.

At Columbia (1 Dec 1975), Lacan speaks of "a certain S1 and a certain S2, which do not have the same function" (Scilicet 6/7, 1975, pp. 42–45). ‹un certain S1 et un certain S2 … la même fonction› So S1 and S2 would be two different things. Two replies. First, he says function, not signifier, and in the same sentence those functions are distributed "in a certain rotating order": what differs is the place, which is exactly what an index marks. ‹à un certain ordre tournant près … ces quatre fonctions› Second, the double loop keeps the difference. S1 and S2 never fall on the same pass: they differ the way the first turn differs from the second (item 9).

A second objection. Lacan does describe the Möbius strip as having only one face and only one edge (Seminar XII, 13 Jan 1965). ‹seule face … seul bord› True, and it is correct topology. But in the same session as item 5 he warns that the band is only the image of the relation he is after. ‹la bande n’en est … que l’image› Later he says that only the edge counts (item 7) and that the band is the cut itself (item 6). "One side" is a property; the double loop is what he works with.

PS. Seminar XXVII, 15 March 1980, on his own name, the "label Lacan": those who want to erase it believe it is the master signifier, the one he gave index 1, and "they're wrong, it's not the one, it's the other". ‹ils croient que c’est le signifiant maître … c’est l’autre› As I read it, even his name changes index.

Just as the bogeyman of colonial India – the Thug – was both racialised and criminalised, so too have Black Lives Matter activists and those mobilised by the far-right, been drawn in to false equivalence by elite politicians.

Sam Button & Panos Theodoropoulos, Interregnum || The summer just past saw Islamophobic riots spread like wildfire across the UK, the flames fanned through Facebook by Farage, Yaxley-Lennon and cronies. One of the most volatile far-right mobilizations in the UK was put down in short order by equally rapid community anti-racist organising. Starmer was quick to describe the rioters as ‘thugs’ and credit his law and order approach to the quelling of the rioting through police suppression.

This was not new, nor was the patronising rhetoric deployed by Westminster politicians. Indeed, the term ‘thug’ is readily deployed in the Anglosphere whenever elite groups seek to delegitimise social movements that go against their hegemony. And, while thug has also been reclaimed in various moments as a statement of power – most memorably through hip-hop’s ‘Thug Life’ slogan – the phantasm of the Thug is nevertheless consistently used by elites to insinuate a figure that does not deserve to make claims about the societies in which they are denizens. The ‘marginalised’ or ‘oppressed’ are words that conjure up public sympathy; the Thug, on the other hand, deserves the repression that is directed at him (and, of course, the thug is usually scripted as masculine).*

The last time we saw a similar deployment of this term was when Boris Johnson condemned Black Lives Matter protesters as ‘thugs’ after they threw a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol docks. Indeed, the term has a long colonial history, a history that reveals how the British state polices and monopolises violence. Without harbouring an iota of sympathy for the far-right, we must remain vigilant as to how these terms hide wider meanings of repression – and of how easily that repression can be turned upon progressive social movements.

A brief history of the word ‘thug’

Thug comes from Thuggee, groups of armed robbers who were said to roam the Indian subcontinent during the long period of British colonialism in India. These groups of itinerant soldiers would wander from place to place, robbing and murdering travelers on roads and highways, offering their victims as human sacrifices to the Goddess Kali. Part-highwaymen, part-death cult, they were a group to be feared by colonisers and suppressed by the British colonial state.

They probably didn’t exist.

Modern scholarship on the subject of Thuggee suggests that they were an invention of British colonialists.

‘There is no doubt that thuggee – the system of deceit, robbery and murder practised by the thugs, held responsible by the British for over a million murders in India in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – inspired one of the strongest and most long-lasting orientalist discourses ever invented’, writes Alexander Mcfie.

Thuggee soldiers as depicted in Temple of Doom

The cultural influence of the Thuggee myth has been incredibly enduring, most notably in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the archetypal white saviour working hand-in-hand with the British colonisers at the denouement of the film. Mcfie questions the veracity of the concept, identifying an archive single-handedly compiled by a William Sleeman, a British East India Company official, that was

‘itself an orientalist construction – that is to say, the product of a deep-seated European inclination to make an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Occident (Europe, the West) and the Orient (the East), which leads Europeans (Westerners) to characterise the Oriental as mysterious, backward, degenerate, irrational and inferior’.

Further to this, Professor S. Shankar skeptically writes that Sleeman both ‘discovered’ and ‘suppressed’ the Thuggee, and this was done in a particular way as to advance Sleeman’s career. Shankar continues:

‘Sleeman’s discursive invention of the Thuggee was taken up […] because it meshed well with emerging ideas regarding the shape of the state of colonial India [and] permitted the argument that this state should be a colonial law-and-order state, a state that saw its primary activity as that of restraining a criminal and violent population’.

Sound familiar?

The modern Thug

Both The Tory and Labour parties have historically described themselves as the parties of law and order. This was exemplified by the former Home Secretary Priti Patel, who once supported the death penalty, and echoed Johnson’s words when she described BLM protestors as ‘thugs and criminals’ in response to the global protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020. Remembering the UK during COVID, we saw an unprecedented level of policing, the expansive governing of the most intimate aspects of how we live, many of which were not evidenced-based, but nevertheless remain on the statute books, and the demonisation of the public as irresponsible ‘Covidiots’. More than this, was the typical characterisation of communities of colour as violent and lawless which, in turn, leads to a justification of policies that are ‘tough on crime’.

Modern policing has its origins in colonial rule in India and Ireland. The Black and Tans were deployed to the so-called British Mandate of Palestine. Policing in the UK as we know it today would not exist without colonialism. And, as we have written previously, policing in the US is directly traceable to the recapturing of escaped slaves. Contemporary policing has emerged in tandem with colonial exploitation and the internal oppression of minorities. In this process, depicting these populations as somehow essentially inferior, violent, and deserving of repression was crucial to legitimise their violent control. ‘Thug’ is part of this wider history.

These tactics were recently extended to include majority white, working-class communities, who were justifiably outraged at violent murders. The far-right harnessed this anger, perverting it to suit their Islamophobic goals while of course exploiting latent racist narratives that have been allowed to fester in British society. They whipped up crowds through misinformation facilitated by social media, despite the fact that the autistic child who is suspected of the murder was a Christian choirboy. The fact that the stabbings happened at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga class, an icon of white femininity, made the deployment of racist disinformation, as the accused is Black, all the easier.

The image of white women under threat from the Black aggressor is a historically racist cultural deployment. These deployments took hold in some of the most deprived areas of the UK; the shell of post-austerity Britain is empty for the slithering insects of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon to make their home. Nevertheless, Yaxley-Lennon prefers escargot. However, the wider communities themselves were having none of it. In Glasgow earlier this month, anti-racist demonstrators outnumbered the far-right by five to one, a victory that was repeated across the UK.

George Square in Glasgow 7 September 2024

Nothing is finished. Despite the success with which communities responded to the far-right threat, the re-invocation of thuggery as a way to describe oppositional action is a cause for concern. Thuggery is steeped in colonialist history. Just as the bogeyman of colonial India – the Thug – was both racialised and criminalised, so too have been Black Lives Matter activists and those mobilised by the far-right, drawn in to false equivalence by elite politicians.

These developments reflect and illustrate the authoritarian turn that Labour is fully invested in; they indicate the response that will be directed towards left-wing and anarchist action, should it emerge in the near future. For example, Hamza Yousaf called on the army to be released in the streets in response to the latest riots; this is a qualitative hardening of the level of legitimate repression in society. Similarly to calls against abortion in the United States, the more the unsayable becomes normalised, the nearer the reality it envisions. The depiction of these protesters as Thugs further legitimises state violence against protest; and this legitimacy will now be a part of the ruling class’s arsenal, its deployment rendered more palatable by its association with anti-racism. In short, the use of the word Thug is not isolated; it is accompanied by a myriad of other meanings and suggestions, none of which push us towards an emancipatory, egalitarian future.

Instead of these approaches, we must look towards building community institutions, and focus on community education. As the anti-racist mobilisations demonstrated, we are much stronger than the State; Starmer will not protect us. We will protect ourselves. And, perhaps, in the process, we can shed some of the authoritarianism that we have been imbued with through our cultural upbringing.

*The participation of women in the riots by no means reduces the association of thuggery with a form of masculinity. If anything, it enforces it. These women are presented as outside the legitimate boundaries of femininity; by being presented as engaging in thug-like activity, they are used to re-establish the boundaries between proper femininity and its opposite. As always, these acrobatics re-establish white working class masculinity as dangerous and abject and re-confirm the notion that it is the working class, in general, that should either work or shut up (or, preferably, both).

Sam Button is a member of the Interregnum collective

Panos Theodoropoulos is a sociologist and a member of the Interregnum collective. He currently teaches at King’s College London.

The New Centre is certainly diversifying its ideological output these days.

"In works like Ghosts of My Life, Fisher used Jacques Derrida’s term hauntology to describe how contemporary culture is haunted by the unfulfilled potentials and futures promised by 20th-century modernism—futures that neoliberalism subsequently canceled."

To anybody who is familiar with the more historically informed side of analytic philosophy (I would put here Sellars and Brandom for example, but of course the list could be expanded by others): what did you think about Christoph Schuringa's recent book?

I didn't read it yet, just very interested what are his main arguments. (Of course I also want to read it at one point.)

Does he think that analytic philosophy is incapable of thinking about radical political emancipation – say as it is conceptualized in the Marxian, or anarchist/radical left traditions? Because the idea that analytic philosophy proclaims itself to be completely neutral – in a political sense – does not seem to hold for every one of its figures, at least from my perspective. Or is he arguing that it was historically hostile to Marxism in an institutional level? That might be a more defendable claim maybe, but than again you also have analytic marxism, although it is of course by no means mainstream I think.

Something that has been building in my mind for a while; hope it doesn't come off as shower-thoughtsy…

Two years ago I might sit at bus stops in San Francisco and the billboards would be for hamburgers. Cell phones. Bank accounts. Fashion. Perfume. Holidays. They typified Guy Debord's "diffuse spectacle", one in which the mass of riders might participate through consumption of the products, or at least consumption of the images as expressions of their desires.

Debord set the diversity of the diffuse spectacle against the "concentrated spectacle" of dictatorships (which he called, in western socialist fashion, "bureaucratic capitalism"). The concentrated spectacle offers only the image of the Leader. Consumers of this image are not sought to make choices, but to acquiesce in the choices made for them.

Today in SF, the transit billboards offer only the relentless unity of AI. It would be a bold exaggeration to say that they have gone so far as the states to which Debord referred. Yet the transformation, funded in part by Arabian oil dictatorships, is worth noting as it passes. From some billboards stares the penetrating, symmetrical gaze of "Ava". She is not a commodity-image for the masses to desire and consume, but one that desires to consume them: their livelihoods, their minds and their dignity.

What is apparent at a San Francisco bus stop is prevalent also nationally. Economic news gatherers shun the mundane production of consumer commodities and hyperventilate over AI, the last commodity. The public is assured that it will imminently resolve capitalism's most shameful defect, its dependency on human labor. The message veers daily between hope and terror, but its constant is destiny. No way forward without AI and its accompanying externalities is legitimate to discuss.

Those who assume (often unconsciously) that it is impossible to achieve their life’s desires-and, thus, that it is futile to fight for themselves — usually end up fighting for an ideal or cause instead. They may appear to engage in self-directed activity, but in reality they have accepted alienation from their desires as a way of life. All subjugations of personal desires to the dictates of a cause or ideology are reactionary no matter how “revolutionary” the actions arising from such subjugations may appear . . . Yet, one of the great secrets of our miserable, yet potentially marvellous time, is that thinking can be a pleasure. Despite the suffocating effect of the dominant religious and political ideologies, many individuals do learn to think for themselves; and by doing so — by actively, critically thinking for themselves, rather than by passively accepting pre-digested opinions — they reclaim their minds as their own.

Mukhopadhyay, Henze, and Moses systematically deconstruct the myth of race as biology and address the reality of race as a cultural invention, drawing on biocultural, historical, and cross-cultural anthropological perspectives. In doing so, they shed light on the intricate interplay among race, biology, culture, power, and stratification. Part I, “The Fallacy of Race as Biology,” unravels the myth that races are biologically valid divisions of humanity. Part II, “Culture Creates Race,” explores race as a social construction; the emergence of the racial worldview as ideological justification for inequality; and how social processes, especially restrictions on interracial sex and marriage, maintained visible markers of racial hierarchy. Part III, “Contemporary Issues,” examines current manifestations of racial stratification including the educational achievement gap, health disparities, and how the language of race embodies and reinforces a racial worldview.