Archives: Online Posts
Review of David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History
Charles Post and Nick Nesbitt review David McNally’s 2025 book “Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History.”
Spectacles of Fascism in an Age of Exhaustion
In a reading of Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism, Benjamin Balthasar argues that today’s far right channels popular disillusionment into apocalyptic fantasies of destruction. The left, he insists, must respond with a politics of collective freedom rather than appeals to a return to neoliberal normalcy.
On US Intervention and the Venezuelan State
Spectre editors Shireen Akram-Boshar and Charlie Post interview Federico Fuentes, a longtime Venezeula solidarity activist, as part of Spectre’s ongoing evaluation of the conjuncture in Venezuela.
LA’s Left-Liberal Electoral Problem
Promise Li argues that Los Angeles’s left has grown stronger than ever, but without political independence, its electoral gains may never translate into working-class power.
Notes on Trans Migration
In a deeply personal piece, Nathaniel Dickson reflects on the interconnected violence of borders and antitrans bigotry.
![Kathryn Updegraff, Hadja showing me [Kathryn] how a hand grenade is held, August 1957, The Degraff/Updegraff Archive.](https://staging.spectrejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/algeria-5.png)
Lost History
The work and life of Kathryn Mathews Updegraff (1926–2018) has been untold for sixty-eight years. Her work captures a layered politics of resistance in Algeria—where women’s labor, both visible and concealed, formed the backbone of a revolutionary struggle too often narrated without them.
The Problem with the “Build the Wall” Left
Doug Hornstein argues against leftist support for immigration restriction by challenging their assumption that immigration hurts workers.
Naturalized Dialectics
In response to China Miéville’s argument for metaphysical idealism, Joshua Nicholas Pineda articulates an antireductionist and naturalistic view of materialism.
Review of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy
Dominick Cooper reviews Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy.
The Only Way Out Is Together
From Spain to Rojava to Myanmar, James Stout argues that the fiercest struggles against oppression don’t just resist power—they build new ways of living together.