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In this essay the new editorial team introduce themselves, acknowledge the theoretical lineages and problematics that the journal has and will continue to explore, and highlight some of the themes that we expect to explore in the coming volumes. The essay provides both an account of the trajectories of capitalism through the last three decades (neoliberal and neocon counterrevolutions; the insurrection of the multitude, or the global crowd in the aftermath of the 2008 crash; and the return of the counterrevolution in the form of reactionary populisms) and an exploration of the political imaginaries of social movements that work against the grain of the processes of capitalist appropriation and dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a productive engagement with some of the themes brought forward by Carole Biewener and David Ruccio in their respective comments on Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian (MIT Press, 2012). This effort elucidates further some scattered discussions on subjectivity implicit throughout the book, arguing that inscribed in the very structure of the book itself are the contours of a nonreductionist, nonessentialist theory of subjectivity that escapes the pitfalls of both choice-based theoretical humanisms and mechanistic structuralisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years a growing literature on biopolitical governmentality, prompted by the work of Michel Foucault, presents subjectivity as the decisive locus of both the rule of neoliberal capitalism and the production of the common. While sharing its central focus of subjectivity, we are concerned with what this literature leaves out (due to what we discern to be certain implicit tendencies of behaviorism): the constitutive role that subjective investments and “enjoyment” (jouissance) play in the crisis-ridden formations of capitalism and in the constructive turns to communism. We proceed from the premise that there is no balanced relation to jouissance and that class antagonism is irreducible. From this perspective, we propose to approach capitalist and communist subjectivities in terms of two different “forms of the commune”: that is, as two distinct subjective orientations toward enjoying the impossibility of instituting the common once and for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]