Critique premised on pure rejection to the subaltern fail to generate politics to challenge the status quo---only the perm solves.

Conversely, non-Western cultures, epistemologies, social arrangements are celebrated as situated, concrete, particular, embodied, non-rationalist, non-anthropocentric. Such thinking reinforces provincial notions of place, punctual notions of time, and identitarian notions of subjectivity. It often proceeds as if boundaries between here and there, now and then, us and them are categorical and self-evident. Risky assays, like solidarity politics or attempts to envision actual alternatives (through acts of situated political imagination) are denigrated as immature, naïve, and dangerous – as somehow ignoring or denying violence, hierarchy, messiness. Such thinking tends to treat the given order as the horizon of political possibility. Supposedly critical claims about being stranded in an unsurpassable present perversely mirror triumphal neoliberal claims about the end of history: There Is No Alternative.

In short, my analytic and political frustration with these tendencies also propelled much of the writing that found its way into this book. I organized my interventions as critiques of what I call left realism, left culturalism, left presentism. Likewise, I question supposedly critical work that reproduces normative understandings of clock time, of categorical divisions between past, present, and future, and which treats any given period as temporally identical with itself.

This is the perspective from which, in this book, I call on left thinkers to:

attend directly than to questions of solidarity and temporality;

unthink identiarian notions

of here, now, and us;

recognize and forge transversal connections across evident territorial, cultural, and ideological boundaries — in Lenin’s terms, “transform the imperial war into a civil war;

move beyond negative critique by envisioning and anticipating what Samir Amin called “the world we wish to see” partly through acts of non-realist political imagination;

attend to the oppressive and emancipatory dimensions of untimeliness (anachronism, non-syncrhonism, repetition, haunting) in the service of immanent critique that identifies transformative possibilities that may emerge within the existing order, or by seeking, following Marx’s injunction, to draw our poetry from the future, or by tracing what Michel Löwy calls “the dialectic of past and future,” whereby persisting or repeating traces of unrealized past possibilities, of alternative forms of life, may be reactivated in an untimely present;

pursue the work of concrete utopianism, or what Henri Lefebvre called the politics of the “possible-impossible”

The interventions that compose this book are not merely scholastic. They were also propelled by a kind of urgency. In an unevenly entangled world-order now characterized by intersecting crises on translocal scales (climate change, capitalist instability, social inequality, mass displacement, neo-fascist authoritarianism, imperial geopolitics) it has never been more important to think freedom, equality, and justice on a global scale — it has never been more important to invent new ways of linking collective self-management to human emancipation and planetary politics.