Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left was published in 2017, review copies are available – contact fiimgemail@gmail.com
We need keywords for a new left. Many analyses of the shape of exploitation and oppression have emerged from activists in social movements from around the world, but much of the left finds that language and then also the politics incomprehensible. The ‘Capital’ we are up against now has mutated from that which Marx described a century and a half ago, and generations of activists have had to link anti-capitalism with anti-imperialism with many other kinds of politics. Marxists, including in the tradition of the Fourth International, need to grasp what these words mean and what the consequences are. We need to understand how they work if we are to build alliances for resistance and revolution. The FIIMG ‘keywords’ project is designed to explore, translate and test out a range of terms that enable us to see our lives in a different way, to connect class struggle with the many diverse kinds of struggle necessary to really change the world. Some of the keywords are still trapped in academic debate while at the same time they have provided a valuable resource for Black, feminist and queer activists, and some of these keywords have emerged directly from struggle and they speak of experience that we must learn from. The book ‘Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left‘ explores and puts to work fifty keywords. The keywords were first worked through on this site, and then revised for publication.
Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left describes and explores fifty keywords: academicisation, accelerationism, agency, animals, antagonism, appropriation, campism, cis, discourse, ecosocialism, empire, eurocommunism, event, fascism, feminisation, globalisation, homonationalism, identification, identity, Intersectionality, islamophobia, justice, multitude, neoliberalism, normalcy, occupy, other, pabloism, performativity, postcolonial, postmodernism, precarity, prefigurative, psychoanalysis, psychologisation, queer, realism, recuperation, refusal, spirituality, stalinism, standpoint, Structurelessness, subjectivity, trans, transition, wages, whiteness, young-girl and zionism. These keywords are put to work on Badiou, antisemitism, Audre Lorde, Brexit, bureaucracy, Charlie Hebdo, children’s books, conspiracies, critique, Dalit struggles, disability, education, FEMEN, Freud, fun, Greece, India, Jeremy Corbyn, Judith Butler, Laibach, Malta, Mexico, No Platform, North Korea, paedophilia, patriarchy, Pick Up Artists, Podemos, predictions, prostitution, psychiatry, psychogeography, refugees, Rojava, Russia, safe spaces, sexual violence, Slovenia, Spain, Surrealism, surrealism, Syriza, Taiwan, The Lobster, trigger warnings, Trump, Ukraine, universities, Venezuela and Žižek.
The book includes a detailed reading list with web-links so you can more easily follow the links online, a list which is available here.
There is an introduction and overview of the book prepared for the launch events in 2017 here.
Here are some more keywords not in the book:
Identity (is in the book, but here is another take on this keyword)
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