Jesse Goldstein

Student Fellow

Jesse Goldstein is a PhD candidate in Sociology at CUNY’s Graduate Center. His research aims to understand the shifting forms that waste has taken through the history of capitalism. His dissertation focuses specifically on how proposals to ‘green’ capitalism are re-working the category of waste, which is increasingly being articulated at the scale of impending planetary, or biospheric, destruction. Before coming to CUNY, Goldstein received an MA in Politics at York University, and before that was a practicing artist and member of the collective art studio Space 1026 in Philadelphia, Pa. He is a founding member of the Historical Materialism: New York organizing collective, and the Space Time Research Collective. His work has appeared in Capitalism, Nature and Socialism and Socialism and Democracy.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?