This article delves into a lacuna at the heart of Hannah Arendt's politics: the cleave of the human world into a set of known and named citizens and a larger set of nobodies. While she writes about the first with lucid care, the second serves only as a vaguely unsettling background. As she was an exile who wrote about exiles with care and fluency, this hiatus in her thinking is a bit puzzling. Nobodies dwell inside what Lewis R. Gordon calls a "hellish zone of nonbeing," a space of traumatic abjection from which they haunt and trouble the polis-and sometimes present themselves to challenge its walls. The trouble for historians is that nobodies in town become alike nobodies in its archive: How can we possibly hear them, twice erased? This article proposes a theoretical framework for doing so by responding to Arendt via Steven Bantu Biko and Walter Benjamin.
The changing relationship between structural changes to global capitalism under neoliberalism and transformations to the global working class has led to debates over the centrality of class and working-class strategy. This article makes an intervention in these debates by bringing recent theoretical perspectives on temporality together with social reproduction theory. By locating the central contradiction of capitalism as that between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of workers, I argue that the sphere of social reproduction represents a unique moment, connected to capitalist production yet temporally distinct. Social reproduction is a key terrain of class struggle precisely because the reproduction of workers represents a circuit internal to yet distinct from that of capitalist production. The distinct temporality of social reproduction gives it a degree of autonomy that lends struggles over social reproduction a potentiality to combat the hegemony of abstract labor time and exert meaningful worker control over the labor process.
This article argues that historians of neoliberalism could benefit from Moishe Postone's call to move beyond the "surface" of market dynamics and engage the "deep structure" of capitalist value. Postone's approach offers several suggestions for historians of neoliberalism: (1) to resituate the neoliberal era as one of many different "historical forms" of capital; (2) to write a history of the 1970s crisis through the categories "value" and the "composition of capital" explicated by Marx; (3) to frame the 1970s less as a "terminal crisis" or "distortion" of capitalism's normal operations than as the latest in a long-term series of restructurings; and (4) to open up the historiographical fixation on north Atlantic deindustrialization and to think about stagnation more expansively. This article offers a suggestive exploration of Asia-Pacific history in the second half of the twentieth century that gestures toward a more global, capital-centered account of 1970s restructuring.
The rise of social democratic parties in the late nineteenth century constituted an important development in European politics. Social democratic parties have been credited as crucial forces behind both democratization and welfare state development. Scholars of social democracy commonly assume that social democrats must choose between appealing to the working class and the people as a whole. This article questions that assumption through a study of early Swedish social democracy. Drawing on archival evidence, the article shows that Swedish social democrats commonly invoked class and people simultaneously. The article further analyzes how social democrats sought to reconcile their appeals to class and people. By demonstrating the party's dual commitment to class and people, the article also challenges the commonplace notion that early socialist parties were exclusively oriented toward the working class.
