Last month, Bill Fletcher, host of THE GLOBAL AFRICAN on TeleSur, held a stimulating and intriguing interview with Prof. Lester Spence of Johns Hopkins University. Spence just recently published Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, an expansion on a previous paper he published in the academic journal Souls. Later, Fletcher discussed the recent COP 21 climate change summit that took place in Paris.
Both issues share a similar trajectory. The black liberation and environmental movements were radical emancipatory political projects that challenged the basic coordinates of capital from the outset and contained within them the kernel of class warfare. Neoliberalism’s ability to co-opt these efforts and create a pro-capitalist version of these movements is not a new phenomenon, we can see it at work in the domestication of LGBTQQI or women’s or any other number of radical ventures that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s.
