Premonitions: Fragments of a Culture of Revolt
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- Published on Monday, 10 December 2018 04:08
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1718 ... December 10, 2018
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Premonitions: Fragments of a Culture of Revolt
AK Thompson’s newest book, Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt, is focused on strategic and analytical insights about how our social movements work, and don’t, and what they yet may be. AK Press interviews Thompson here on some of the ideas that are central to the book.
AK Press (AKP): Let’s start by having you explain the title of the book, Premonitions. You’ve chosen it in relation to the titles of the two classic collections of Walter Benjamin’s essays, Illuminations and Reflections. How do you see your work in relation to Benjamin’s and what analytical premises are implied by "premonitions"?
AK Thompson (AKT): Walter Benjamin’s contributions have always struck me as being a powerful corrective... to those Marxisms that were more narrowly focused on political economy. In Capital, Marx showed us how getting below the level of bourgeois commonsense, which takes the market to be self-evident, made it possible to uncover the "hidden abode" of production where capitalism’s truth was revealed. Benjamin went one further by proposing that this "hidden abode" could be found everywhere. He showed that it was possible to describe capitalism by teasing out the tensions that shot through its culture. In this way, he sought to "grasp an economic process as perceptible."