The following is the transcript of a lecture taken in shorthand by Hans-Georg Backhaus. The transcript was originally published as an appendix in Hans-Georg Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur marxschen Ökonomiekritik, a complete translation of which is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series.

Recent scholarship on fascism has largely centered on identifying the defining features of fascism to determine whether political figures and parties are fascist. These debates take European fascism as paradigmatic, thereby obscuring alternative traditions of antifascist theorizing that can shed new light on the contemporary ascendancy of fascism in the United States and elsewhere. This paper examines one such alternative in the antifascist thought and praxis of the Black Panther Party. Against the widespread claim that fascism could not happen in (...) the United States, the Black Panther Party insisted that the United States had its own forms of fascism. We reconstruct the Panther’s concept of fascism as the generalization of racialized exclusion constitutive of American democracy and explore the antifascist practices to which this definition gave rise. (shrink)

In light of increasing white supremacist violence in the United States, calls to identify such violence as terrorism have surged in public discourse. Federal and state agencies have taken up these demands and included white supremacy in counterterrorism and national security policy. While this classification appears to remove the racist double standard in applications of the terrorism label, it has come under criticism for obscuring the history and distinctly U.S. American roots of white supremacy, on the one hand, and expanding (...) the harmful and typically racially coercive consequences of U.S. counterterrorism, on the other hand. There is, however, a robust yet neglected tradition in U.S. racial justice activism that uses the language of terrorism to make sense of white supremacy. By examining this tradition, this essay offers a more nuanced assessment of the dangers and possibilities of classifying white supremacy as terrorism. Specifically, I look at Ida B. Wells’s analysis of lynching as racial terrorism to recover an alternative narrative of white supremacist terrorism. I argue that the understanding of white supremacy as terrorism in her writings not only exposes the partisan use of these terms and their complicity in constructing a narrowly circumscribed and biased public knowledge about racial domination, but also reveals some mistaken assumptions of the current debate. This essay thus sheds new light on a neglected discourse of white supremacist terrorism and makes it relevant for contemporary purposes. (shrink)

This paper develops a heuristic of different modes of philosophical engagement with Michel Foucault’s work with the aim to aid self-reflection about contemporary uses of Foucault. Drawing on debates in the history of philosophy, I describe contextualism, appropriationism, and methodologism as three strands of Foucault scholarship. I then examine queer and feminist philosophical engagements with Foucault to explicate and illustrate the aims and strengths of each strand. I conclude by spelling out the larger implications for different uses of Foucault for (...) philosophical practice and make the case for a methodological pluralism that draws on all available modes of inquiry. (shrink)

This paper develops a heuristic of different modes of philosophical engagement with Michel Foucault’s work with the aim to aid self-reflection about contemporary uses of Foucault. Drawing on debates in the history of philosophy, I describe contextualism, appropriationism, and methodologism as three strands of Foucault scholarship. I then examine queer and feminist philosophical engagements with Foucault to explicate and illustrate the aims and strengths of each strand. I conclude by spelling out the larger implications for different uses of Foucault for (...) philosophical practice and make the case for a methodological pluralism that draws on all available modes of inquiry. (shrink)