[Still] The Only Conceivable Thing to Do

A new and ominous phase of global politics has opened, which not even the most cloistered of academics will be able to ignore. Even so, what has proved most damaging is the absence of memories of collective, and efective, political action. In his eleventh thesis on the German philosopher Feuerbach, Karl Marx chastised philosophy for its abstract and detached gaze on the world of political struggle: “Philosophers have merely interpreted the world,” he wrote. His writings on ideology and philosophy are indispensable to critics who want to locate political discoursein economic contexts. Mobilized by the contradictions and galvanized by the political discourse of the left, masses of people in nations across the world and at times across modern history have risen up to demand justice. In Operation US Out, activists made arguments about oil and imperialism, about the hypocritical history of US interventions around the world, and about the motives and consequences of war.