Nihilist Optimism

Review of Abolishing Capitalist Totality. What Is to Be Done under Real Subsumption? Jason Bonilla This book, comparable to a grenade, was published in 2026 by Minor Compositions, founded on collective intelligence. It is an ambitious anthology, eagerly awaited for a decade, whose war machine – borrowing from Deleuzian-Guattarian terminology – traces lines of flight that unfold from communist theory and the problem of communization – Théorie Communiste and Endnotes – to critical philosophy and the problem of totality – Kant and Hegel – , revolving around a relatively obscure but enormously powerful concept: subsumption in Marx, specifically the distinction between formal and real subsumption of labor as stages in the organization of productive processes under capital. Although the volume does indeed revolve around the concept of subsumption, in my view the two vital concepts that run through the discussion, across its nearly 600 pages, are communization and totality. Communization, fol...

Louise Toupin’s Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77 arrives as both an archival excavation and a provocation, as an invitation to re-enter a field of struggle whose coordinates feel uncannily contemporary. What Toupin reconstructs is not merely a campaign organized around a contentious demand, but a political experiment that sought to recompose the very terms through which labour, value, and subjectivity are understood. In this sense, the book operates in a register that is at once historiographic and strategic: it is concerned not only with what happened, but with what remains possible. At the centre of this reconstruction lies a deceptively simple gesture: to take seriously the proposition that housework – long dismissed as natural, private, or pre-political – is in fact “multi-faceted, invisible, and unrecognized labour” that is indispensable to capitalist accumulation. From this starting point, the Wages for Housework current unfolds less a...

There is a recurring tendency in contemporary debates about communism to oscillate between two unsatisfying positions. On one side lies a melancholic archaeology of lost revolutions: the twentieth century revisited as a graveyard of organizational forms, exhausted strategies, and failed futures. On the other side is a speculative enthusiasm for post-political transformation – networked uprisings, decentralized swarms, and algorithmic collectivities – that sometimes dissolves politics into a metaphysics of circulation. What tends to disappear between these poles is the question of how revolutionary thought mutates as it travels through different historical and geographical conditions. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s Communism After Deleuze is a fascinating intervention precisely because it situates itself in that terrain of mutation. The book asks what it might mean to think communism through the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but it does so by displacing the familiar E...

Characters • LEX – a tired lecturer holding a placard. • PAT – another lecturer, equally tired, eating a slightly stale biscuit. • A PASSING ADMINISTRATOR – occasionally appears with confusing updates. • A VOICE FROM MANAGEMENT EMAILS – disembodied. Outside the gates of the university. A picket line. A banner flaps in the wind: “SAVE OUR JOBS.” A coffee thermos sits between them like a sacred object. LEX: Well? PAT: Well what? LEX: Has she gone yet? PAT: No. LEX: Ah. (Pause.) PAT: Maybe today. LEX: You said that yesterday. PAT: Yesterday had promise. LEX: So does a restructuring document, apparently. (Pause.) PAT: What are we waiting for again? LEX: Frances. PAT: Right. (They stare at the university buildings.) PAT: You’d think if someone threatened half the place with redundancy and hinted at shutting a campus, they might… I don’t know… appear? LEX: Communication is happening. PAT: Where? LEX: In principle. (Pause.) PAT: I heard she said she can’t take a pay cut. LEX: Yes. PAT...

Michael Muhammad Knight’s Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism arrives less as a contribution to “Islam and philosophy” than as an intervention into how theory travels, who it forgets, and what it cannot see from where it stands. Published by Fordham University Press in 2023, the book refuses the polite format of comparative theology. It stages instead a set of collisions: between shrine and seminar, baraka and assemblage, the Qur’an and the Orientalist residue sedimented even in radical European thought. If Deleuze once treated the Qur’an as the exemplary authoritarian “root-book,” Knight answers not by defending Islam within Deleuze’s schema but by prying Deleuze loose from his own archive and forcing him to think from the dargah outward. The book opens at a tomb. Knight purchases the musty orange paperbacks of the Inayati order and approaches the grave of Inayat Khan, remembering that his former mentor Hakim Bey had stood there decades earlier. The scene is intimate and crac...

Today we’re reading two sections from Workers and Capital : “Marx Yesterday and Today” and “Factory and Society” by Mario Tronti. What strikes me immediately is that Tronti is not trying to interpret Marx historically. He’s issuing a methodological and political challenge. He writes that any research project concerned with the contemporary validity of Marxism “has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own.” Capital should be judged on the basis of the capitalism of today. So the question is not: what did Marx mean in 1867? But: what does Marxism become when confronted with the most developed form of capitalism now? Tronti insists on a key methodological principle taken from Marx: it is the most developed point that explains the backward, not vice versa. Capital explains ground rent, not the reverse. This becomes a way of thinking politically: the highest development of capitalism reveals its inner structure most clearly. That means analysis must begin from the advanced forms ...

To say that Rancid’s second album Let’s Go is the punk equivalent of James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners might initially sound like either overreach or playful provocation. It is meant neither way. Rather, it is an attempt to take both works seriously as realist cartographies of working-class life: as composite portraits in which the true protagonist is not any singular character but the city itself, understood as a collective subject and structuring space of experience. James Joyce gives us Dublin not as romantic capital but as dense social atmosphere: clerks, daughters, drunks, minor political operatives, each moving through the muted light of empire’s periphery. The stories of Dubliners are individually modest. Their power lies in accumulation. Paralysis is not simply a theme; it is a climate. The famous snow of “The Dead” falls “general all over Ireland,” dissolving the distinction between living and dead, success and failure, into a shared condition. Rancid’s Let’s G...