Month: September 2025

Original at the Boston Review

More than a century before Zohran Mamdani declared he wanted a New York City network of grocery stores “focused on keeping prices low,” socialists in Spain were furious about a network of grocery stores that kept prices low. An archipelago of tienda-asilos (shelter or asylum shops) had opened across the country in 1886, offering low-cost food for the burgeoning population of urban poor people. For the store’s proponents, tienda-asilos offered a way for working people to buy a square meal without the indignities of charity.

Continue reading “The Opposite of MAHA”

Decades ago, Richard Pithouse and I were reading Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, and discussing his ideas with our comrades in Abahlali baseMjondolo. If you’re picking up a trace of Badiou’s set-theory-as-ethics in this quote by the organisation’s General Secretary – “Every human being, everywhere, must be counted as a human being” – then this might explain it. Thapelo Mohapi, who offered this counter to the xenophobia of South Africa’s Operation Dudula, wasn’t part of our original discussion group, joining Abahlali years after those first conversations. But the trace seems to persist.

Continue reading “Badiou’s Spinoza in the Field”