Charles Mills has urged philosophers to turn their attention away from issues of class injustice and towards the deep inequalities in wealth, opportunity, and life prospects that divide racial groups in American society. Mills’s position is that philosophers on the left should make racial justice the higher priority. His argument advances two theses: first, race is a “material” structure with the same causal power Karl Marx attributed to class, and second, a reparations-oriented redistribution of wealth from all white to all black Americans is a moral imperative. Mills’s materialist understanding of race is cogently argued, but undercuts his moral argument favoring reparations. Considering (1) the extreme and growing inequality of wealth between black and white Americans and (2) pervasive white resistance to the goal of racial equality, a radical redistribution of wealth on the basis of class offers the only hope for progress towards the goal of racial justice.

One impediment facing socialists is the widespread belief among their opponents that they advance only by destroying things. Ironically, socialists often help spread this belief by declaring defeat when they are unsuccessful at destroying their targets. The thesis tested in this article is that, instead, socialism at its best hopes to transform the institutions we all inherit. It tries to transform values, culture, governance, production, and finance. Destroying that inheritance leaves no secure basis for generating a better world. The trick for the socialist realist is to find the right balance between radical destruction and timid gradualism.

This paper answers the question what is radical philosophy today by explaining the how, when, and who of socio-political transformation. We need both critical theorizing and a transformative practice to explain how we can change the world. We must theorize the moment of the limit in the objective domain of power, to answer the question when agency becomes possible. I introduce the idea of the “political subject-in-outline” that moves within the tension of minimal closure (the subject) and permanent openness (the outline) to theorize a who that remains inclusive and in a position to transform the status quo. Marx’s and Adorno’s thought remains central to theorize socio-political transformation today.

This essay argues that publicity is a necessary precondition for both politics and philosophy. Against the backdrop of the traditional dismissal of publicity as a leveling of difference, the author develops Foucault’s positive use of publicity in the Prisons Information Group as a technique of differentiation. The essay therefore proceeds in four parts: (1) it contextualizes the Prisons Information Group within Foucault’s life and work, (2) it identifies four specific modes of publicity utilized by the group, (3) it argues that, through these modes, Foucault embraces classically troublesome elements of publicity (like noise, superficiality, and anonymity) as expressly transformative, and (4) it develops a consequently positive account of Foucauldian leveling. The essay concludes that publicity involves the collective transmigration of thought, word, and deed requisite to both the political and philosophical life.

Supermaxes are technologically advanced prisons designed to keep individuals in long-term solitary confinement, structurally eliminating all physical, human contact for months, years, and sometimes decades at a time. Supermax designers and prison administrators explain that supermax prisons contain “the worst of the worst prisoners”—those too violent and dangerous to live in a general prison population. This article explores and challenges the legally and publicly accepted idea that supermaxes control violence. Drawing on interviews with and the writings of former supermax prisoners, I document the often-invisible ways supermax prisoners experience violence. I argue supermaxes should be viewed not just as tools of violence control, but as tools of violence production. Supermaxes are a novel and uniquely modern form of state violence, and their legal and ethical implications should be reconsidered.

The various attempts to find the definitive political thought of Malcolm X, after his break with the Nation of Islam, have resulted in clashing interpretations. Malcolm X’s speeches, writings, and other public forums are the root cause of the tensions. Malcolm X’s thinking is most rich and informative if its ambiguities are accepted as such and each side of a particular tension is explored. Each pole of the four tensions identified here is highly relevant for present American racial dilemmas and racial progress.

This essay attends to the specificity of indigenous peoples’ political critique of state power and territorialized sovereignty in the North American context as an indispensible resource for realizing the decolonizing potential latent within the field of critical prison studies. I argue that although the incarceration of indigenous peoples is closely related to the experience of other racialized populations with regard to its causes, it is importantly distinct with respect to the normative foundation of its critique. Indigenous sovereignty calls forth an alternative normativity that challenges the very existence of the carceral system, let alone its racialized organization and operation.

The many ways in which we interact with food, e.g., eating, cooking, purchasing, farming, legislating, etc., are intersected by ethics and politics. The terms of our interactions with food are dictated in a significant way by how we understand its metaphysical underpinnings; that is to say, by how we define “food.” When food is understood as nothing more than it becomes easier to dismiss our political and ethical obligations since, after all, food is only a thing. This obscures the others who make our interactions with food possible, and who are affected by our choices and those of our communities. In order to revitalize our engagement with the ethical and political responsibilities that we both inherit and produce in our interactions with food, it is helpful to refocus our understanding of what food actually is. I propose that food is better understood as a transformative . Building on metaphysical theories by Aristotle and Emmanuel Levinas, I explain this new understanding of food, and use examples to show how this view of food enhances our political and ethical responsibilities.

Sex offender registries have given way to residency restrictions for people convicted of sex crimes in many communities in the US. Research suggests, however, that such restrictions can actually undermine the safety of the communities they are ostensibly meant to protect. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, this essay explores why such restrictions, and strategies like them, fail and are bound to fail. Then, it considers the work of generationFIVE, an organization that seeks to eliminate child sexual abuse in five generations, to explore modes of response to sexual abuse and assault that build community safety.

In this article I make three inter-related arguments. First, I argue that contemporary critical political theory should re-assert the city as a privileged site of political action. Second, I suggest that in the process of such a re-assertion, the dominant “open” conception of the city, characteristic of much critical urban studies, should be reworked in order to be properly “political”; that is, framed within an agonistic, Left-Schmittian model of politics. Finally, I claim that one way to “politicize” the city in this manner is to think of it as a site of “common property” (as expressed in the work of Nicholas Blomley).