Acknowledgements
Since it has taken so long to complete this book, my acknowledgements should be as thorough as possible. First and foremost, I am grateful to my mother, Charlotte, and my father, Craig, who lived through the Great Depression and conveyed to me an abiding sense of social justice and a biblically grounded faith. They have not lived to see this book, but anything of value in what I have written over the years may be traced back one way or another to how I was raised by them. I miss them both every day of my life.
For my brother, Craig Leigh (no longer with us, either) and my sisters, Tina and Kristen, I also give thanks. Our family has always been supportive of one another, but I suspect they have wondered at times about the wisdom of my academic and political decisions. My brother once asked me from his hospital bed why I was able to be so bold in what I taught and wrote (he worked for Boeing), and I responded that I was fortunate to have the support of academic freedom and a strong faculty union (of which I was president for five years). I still have both, and for that I remain grateful.
I must thank my only philosophical and political mentor, Warren Montag. Warren’s generosity has been inexhaustible ever since I foolishly criticised him when he gave a guest lecture in a graduate seminar on Marx and Ideology for not being radical enough – a false alternative of ‘his’ Althusser and ‘my’ Deleuze/Negri if ever there were one!
My dear friend Richard Hunt has been gone for many years, but I think about him often. We spent innumerable hours working together in a post room at Claremont School of Theology, having lunch, seeing movies, discussing what we were reading, haunting Southern California’s independent bookstores (of which there used to be many). I know he would have read this book, and I’d like to think that he would have approved of its style.
How does one become a socialist? Only through the close collaboration of friends and comrades. I met Darrel Moellendorf and Joe Lynch in the Philosophy Department at Claremont Graduate University, and the three of us formed an informal collective, as we worked together in the anti-Apartheid and Central America solidarity movements. We read Marxist classics together. We also ran together. What is more, Darrel and Joe have been, and will forever remain, my non-biological brothers.
In Claremont I also befriended Wonil Kim and Il-bung Choi, whose passion for democracy and workers’ rights in South Korea offered me my first concrete example of internationalism.
While living in Claremont and then Riverside during the 1980s, I participated in helping to establish and build Southern Californian branches of Solidarity, an admirable socialist organisation whose work provided me with my first real political education and experiences of organising. I am grateful for my work with comrades in Solidarity, in particular, Walt Sheasby and Gene Warren, both of whom conveyed to me the urgency for Marxists to pursue a vigorous ecological critique of capitalism. I also remain the political student of Bob Brenner, whose regularly updated ‘nature of the period’ internal documents for Solidarity unfailingly stressed the possibility of self-emancipatory struggles to change the world.
When I moved from Southern California to the San Francisco Bay Area, I accompanied Carol Stanton, my companion of more than a decade, and my first wife. My debt to her is immeasurable. I am grateful to have met Carol and grateful to have spent so many good years together.
While living, teaching, and engaging in politics in the Bay Area, I was fortunate to meet Ken and Fidel, who kept up my spirits during some extremely difficult periods, helped move me more times than I care to recall, and shared with me their passion for dialectical biology.
I am grateful to all my Muslim students and friends at CSU, Hayward (now East Bay), who in the anxiety-inducing aftermath of 9/11 taught me a great deal about how to maintain critical fidelity to a cause. I pledged to them then, and I again pledge to my Muslim students at Cerritos College, to do everything in my power to challenge Islamophobia wherever I encounter it.
To Mark, my comrade of many years, I owe much for his uncanny ability to combine a deep knowledge of Althusser with equally insightful activism. The study group we once organised on Marx’s Capital that met at Berkeley’s Au Coquelet restaurant was as memorable as our road trip to New Mexico. Our study group on Althusser – with younger comrades like Joseph, Tatiana, and Oscar – that met at Harry’s Place (a restaurant) in Santa Barbara made me feel a bit less theoretically isolated.
To my colleagues in the Cerritos College Department of Philosophy I owe a huge debt of gratitude for their personal support over the last decade and for their devotion to the cause of teaching philosophy to first-generation college students. I would like to single out for praise my former department chair, Ana Torres-Bower, and my wonderful friends over the years: Joseph Van de Mortel, Leslie Stapp, Bob Sliff, Clayton Kradjian, J.P. Pereira, and Corine Sutherland. Also, many thanks to Andrew Rehfeld and Tim Chatman, who served as my ‘interns’ for a year, and who helped me to provide a genuinely collaborative teaching environment. Thanks to all my colleagues for making our department a dynamic and caring place for our students to cultivate a love for all things philosophical.
To Ched Myers I owe an understanding of how to conduct Biblical scholarship in the service of radical discipleship and social transformation.
To Solomon Namala, all my colleagues and brothers and sisters in the Cerritos College Faculty Federation, and Jeff Boxer (the only labour attorney I have known well), I owe many practical lessons in building a democratic and effective union local.
To John Marot I owe a renewed interest in reading Lenin carefully and critically. John and I met in Solidarity, lost touch for many years, but then reestablished our friendship when we both found ourselves teaching at Cerritos College. I’ve read John’s elegant book, and I wish mine were written as precisely.
To the editors at Rethinking Marxism I owe much for their vital journal and conferences, all of which I have faithfully attended.
To Sebastian Budgen I owe frequent injunctions to ‘get back to work!’ Sebastian knows as well as anyone why I have taken so long to complete this book. But if not for Historical Materialism, and especially HM London conferences, I would have had no reason to continue my research and writing.
To Danny Hayward I am in debt for his expertise in cleaning up a very untidy manuscript.
To Hasana Sharp, Jason Read, David McInerney, Sue Ruddick, Tom Carmichael, Bill Lewis, and Geoff Pfeifer I owe their collaboration on various panels at Rethinking Marxism and Historical Materialism conferences, without which I would not have been able to test some of the arguments that gave rise to several chapters in this book.
To Vittorio Morfino and Filippo Del Lucchese, my Italian comrades in arms, I owe their trust in, and publication of, my work on Spinoza. To Filippo I also owe the great honour of having been invited to participate in a remarkably stimulating Spinoza conference in Bologna in 2005.
To Panagiotis Sotiris, my Greek comrade, I am endebted for his remarkable example of the fusion of theory and practice.
To Agon Hamza, my geographically far-removed friend in Prishtina, Kosovo, I owe a comradeship that enabled me to find a new readership for my work. Without his (and Frank Ruda’s) brilliant editorship of Crisis & Critique several of these chapters would not yet have seen the light of day.
To Cindy Zeiher, editor of Continental Thought and Theory, I am especially grateful for her encouragement of my work on ‘Pauline Marxism’.
To Robb Johnson, whose unique musical voice has kept intact my faith in socialism for twenty years, I give thanks: in Robb’s words, winter forever turns to spring.
Finally, my life began anew when I met Launa Nelson a decade ago. We met through our AFT local, she took a huge chance on me, and I cannot imagine my life without her. Every day Launa makes my life worth living.
Thomas, my favourite young socialist – now you know why your dad disappeared so often into his study. I’m finally coming out into the real world again to play with you, as my dad played catch in the backyard so many times with me. Let’s head to Mother’s Beach!
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Most of the chapters in this collection have appeared in previous form:
Chapter 1: ‘What is a Philosophical Tendency?’, Historical Materialism 23.4, pp. 3–38.
Chapter 2: ‘Paul of Tarus, Thinker of the Conjuncture’, in Althusser and Theology, edited by Agon Hamza, pp. 129–51, Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Chapter 3: ‘Paul’s Gift Economy: Wages, Debt, and Debt Cancellation’, Continental Thought & Theory 2, pp. 452–72.
Chapter 4: ‘Althusser and the Problem of Historical Individuality’, Crisis & Critique 2.2 2015, pp. 195–214.
Chapter 5: “ ‘Il mugghiare del mare”: Hobbes e la follia della moltitudine’ [translation], Quaderni Materialisti Vol. 3–4, 2005, pp. 127–46.
Chapter 6: ‘Le tre forme della ribellione secondo Spinoza: indignata, gloriosa et soddisfatta’ [translation], Storia politica della moltitudine: Spinoza et la modernità, edited by Flippo Del Lucchese, pp. 150–69, Roma: Derive Approdi, 2009; and ‘Spinoza on the Glory of Politics’, in Spinoza: individuo e moltitudine, pp. 327–39, Cesena: Società Editrice ‘Il Ponte Vecchio’, 2007.
Chapter 7: ‘Alexandre Matheron on Militant Reason and the Intellectual Love of God’, Crisis and Critique 2.1, 2015, pp. 153–69.
Interlude: ‘An Ethics for Marxism: Spinoza on Fortitude’, Rethinking MARXISM 26.4, 2014, pp. 561–80.
Chapter 9: ‘Hegel or Spinoza: Substance, Subject, and Critical Marxism’, Crisis & Critique 1.3, 2014, pp. 355–69.
Chapter 10: ‘Contradictions of Hyperreality: Baudrillard, Žižek, and Virtual Dialectics’, The International Journal of Žižek Studies 10.1, 2016, pp. 88–100.
Chapter 11: ‘A Marxist Encounter with the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’, Rethinking MARXISM 3.3–4, 1990, pp. 287–96.
Chapter 12: ‘Deleuze and Althusser: Flirting with Structuralism’, Rethinking MARXISM 10.3, 1998, pp. 51–63.
Chapter 13: ‘Marxist Wisdom: Antonio Negri on the Book of Job’, The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume 2: Revolution in Theory, edited by Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, pp. 129–40, Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007.
Chapter 14: ‘A Displaced Transition: Habermas on the Public Sphere’, in Masses, Classes, and Ideas, edited by Mike Hill and Warren Montag, pp. 146–57, New York, NY: Verso Books, 2000.
Chapter 17: ‘Climate Crisis, Ideology, and Collective Action’, Crisis & Critique 1.1, 2014, pp. 137–52.
Coda: ‘Beatitude: Marx, Aristotle, Averroes, Spinoza’, Continental Thought & Theory 4, 2017, pp. 527–65.