With essays by today’s leading leftist social critics, Identity Trumps Socialism presents a rigorous and persuasive primer on the problems generated by postmodern and neoliberal challenges to the legacy of emancipatory universality. In addition to the ways in which capitalism has used racialized and gendered forms of oppression to divide the working class, today’s activism must also understand how neoliberal capitalism uses identity politics to undermine socialism. Identity Trumps Socialism advances an emancipatory left universality that addresses the limits of diversity and makes the case for the centrality of class in the struggle against global capitalist hegemony.

With essays by today’s leading leftist social critics, Identity Trumps Socialism presents a rigorous and persuasive primer on the problems generated by postmodern and neoliberal challenges to the legacy of emancipatory universality. In addition to the ways in which capitalism has used racialized and gendered forms of oppression to divide the working class, today’s activism must also understand how neoliberal capitalism uses identity politics to undermine socialism. Identity Trumps Socialism advances an emancipatory left universality that addresses the limits of diversity and makes the case for the centrality of class in the struggle against global capitalist hegemony.

The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.