ABSTRACT
At the moment of neoliberalism’s beginning, Stuart Hall (2017) declared: ‘When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no “going back.” History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment.’ And here we are, once again in such a moment. For Hall, the method was ‘Marx plus Fanon’, which I will invert for this moment to read ‘Fanon plus Marx.’ Fanon here stands for the politics of decolonization, from the territorial acknowledgement of Indigenous claims to Palestine and South Africa’s Fall-ism: all must fall. Patriarchy must fall, white supremacy must fall, all forms of hierarchical relation must fall (Bofelo 2017). Marx stands for the circulation of socially mediated capital in the era of biopolitical production, which Michael Hardt (2012) calls ‘[t]he production of ideas, images, languages, code, affects, and social relationship’. Unlike Hall’s ‘conjuncture’ in which all aspects of the social were connected via the economic, the present is a moment of disjuncture in which it seems that things fall apart. The rupture with neoliberalism’s ‘common sense’ was felt first in the megacities of the global South and their regions but can be felt everywhere now. For the real conditions of existence have changed. Since 2008, more people live in cities than in the countryside for the first time in history. Since 2011, the global majority is aged under 30. In 2014, half the world’s population gained access to the Internet. And in May 2014, carbon dioxide crossed 400 part per million for the first time in millions of years. Add to this the post-2008 disaster capitalism that has foisted precarity on the 99% to make spectacular inequality structural.
