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This paper seeks an articulation between Marxist and anarchist approaches to representation in social movements. A generalised dismissal of representational politics leaves power with too many places to hide and sets unnecessary limits to political imagination. Prefigurative politics should not exclude political representation, as the exclusion can imply a class bias. The paper explores two different paths beyond strict assumptions of horizontality. Using mostly Latin American examples, a distinction is made between more classical state-centric paths and less theorised alternatives of non-state representation. Finally, the article approaches global democratisation from a non-state-centric perspective, tentatively called transnational libertarian socialism.

Assuming the ‘neoliberalisation’ of academic life to be axiomatic, this article delves into the operations of its political economy with the aim of expanding critical vocabularies, analytical categories and research trajectories. In particular, it indicates where an immanent critique of neoliberal academia can be begun. While the capitalist transformations of academic life are justified by ideological claims eulogising ‘production’, ‘competition’ and ‘marketisation’, the neoliberal regime has proven decidedly ineffective at fulfilling these claims. An effective critique of neoliberal reform must, therefore, explore and interrogate the degree to which the practical effects of neoliberal reform diverge from its underpinning theoretical claims, and why this might be so. The principal question here pertains to rent and rent-seeking behaviour in the academic space, as a mode of activity inconsistent with the legitimating tenets of capitalist ideology. To the extent that rent-seeking activities can be identified in neoliberal academia – in distinction to ‘value-producing’ labour or ‘profit-making’ entrepreneurialism – a more potent critique of neoliberal reform will be forthcoming and an immanent critique of the neoliberal regime of capitalist accumulation in the academic space put into motion. By positioning the neoliberal regime within a broader shift towards accumulation by ‘appropriation’ in the world-system, a strategic reason can be identified for the proliferation of rent-seeking behaviours in academic life and beyond. The article argues that these rent-seeking behaviours have materialised in a range of gatekeeping techniques across the academic space, with which many inhabitants of that space have become complicit, resulting in the increasing dispossession of surplus through the practice of tolling realised in those techniques. The article develops a Marxian critique with additional insights from world-system theory, critical social theory and critical geography. Examples of gatekeeping technique considered throughout the article include master degree programmes, journal publication structures, conference fees and Graduate Record Examinations.

Jacques Ranciere Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, Vol. 1, Verso, London, 2011; pp. 239, 9781844676972, 19.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Jacques Ranciere The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People, Vol. 2, Verso, London, 2012; 177 pp: 9781844678600, 19.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Within these two volumes by Jacques Ranciere are compiled a dozen or so essays from 1975-85, most published originally in the journal Les Revoltes Logiques. This was a journal headed up by Ranciere at the Centre de Recherche des Ideologies de la Revolte. The essays marked his movement away from an earlier influence under Althusser, with whom he collaborated in Reading Capital (1965), and a movement toward the post-68 critiques of structuralist Marxism. These essays thus begin a 'critical stance toward Marxist dogmatism' in these terms (Volume 1:8), and a process of profound reappraisal of Marxist fundamentals, particularly regarding class. In particular, the articles are an attempt to understand why the movements of '68 were such a failure, and second, to understand and counter the consequent coagulation of disillusionment and cynical resentment on the part of the frustrated 'intellectuals' towards a proletariat that had infuriatingly failed to stick to the dialectical script of historical materialism. Fundamentally, Ranciere begins here an argument he lays out more explicitly in the Emancipated Spectator (2011b: 32), in which he counters the charge (now axiomatic) that the signs of '68 have been appropriated by capital. The take-home message from this now dominant attitude being that we should all accept the futility of class struggle in the face of capitalism's mighty adaptability and assimilability (Volume 2: 42). Instead, for Ranciere our frustrated cynicism stems from a persistent and compulsive return to a highly problematic positionality as intellectuals, thinkers, artists, etc. This positionality is that of the intellectual--whether radical or cynical--who says to some objectivated and auto-generated other, 'Here is the reality that you cannot and wish not to see'. In the 19th and 20th centuries, intellectuals in Marxist and socially critical movements have constituted the proletarian class as just such a auto-generated 'other'. However, in his line of thinking, this does not mean that critical theory has failed or become irrelevant, or that it is epistemologically passe. Ranciere reasons that today's cynical apologetics regarding the futility of class struggle through critique is mobilised out of exactly the same assumptions and modes as the critical theory that such cynics deem superannuated (201 lb: 29). Though the 'message' today is different--cynical, rather than critical --it is the failure to break out of the same 'positionality' that is the common characteristic and common problem. This presentation shows us how the enduring validity of the emancipatory struggle is wrongly discredited, and that emancipatory critique itself still has life in it, but only if we can desist from the compulsion to resume the discursive positionality defined above. The title of the volumes plays on a pun between the ostensible contents, which revolve around historical instances of theatrical production, spectacle, and dramatisation, on the one hand, and Ranciere's theoretical argument regarding 'the distribution of the sensible' in the political aesthetics of oligarchic capitalism, on the other. Evidently, Ranciere wishes these essays to contribute to a 'staging of the people'. He is attempting to counter the positionality of the intellectuals through the kind of historical scholarly practice attempted in these essays. Therefore, together the two volumes do not construct a systematic argument. As a collection of thematically and critically related articles, the effect is rather to meander contemplatively through a variety of empirically vital and textual settings: from the California Gold Rush through 19th Century French theatre to the trade unions of Vichy. …

Just as scholars used culture to ‘fill in’ our understanding of what was happening inside structural processes, so emotions can fill in many cultural concepts deployed in theories of social movement recruitment, decision-making, and impacts. Looking at the controversy around Moscow’s Renovation, a giant urban renewal project launched in 2017, we describe how both sides tried to recruit and persuade others. We analyze two examples of carriers of cultural meaning that are often described in idealistic, cognitive fashion, to reveal the emotions that give them their power to move people. Moral batteries are pairs of emotions, one positive and the other negative, which draw people toward one pole as they repel them from the other. In particular, we discuss binaries based on time, before-and-after contrasts, which have not previously been adequately recognized. In addition to moral batteries, we look at public characters, especially villains who get blamed and minions who are ridiculed; these are often contrasted with good characters such as victims or heroes. Characters can be applied to public figures such as politicians or take the form of group stereotypes. Like moral batteries, characters fuse cognitive elements, such as words and images, with the emotions that are supposed to accompany them. Energized by the recent inclusion of emotions, cultural theory still has something new to offer to explanations of social movements.