We report the discovery of two Black Widow millisecond pulsars in the globular cluster (GC) M28 with the MeerKAT telescope. PSR J1824−2452M (M28M) is a 4.78 ms pulsar in a 5.82 hr orbit, and PSR J1824−2452N (M28N) is a 3.35 ms pulsar in a 4.76 hr orbit. Both pulsars have dispersion measures near 119.30 pc cm−3 and have low-mass companion stars (∼0.01–0.03 M
⊙) that do not cause strong radio eclipses or orbital variations. Including these systems, there are now five known black widow pulsars in M28. The pulsar searches were conducted as a part of an initial phase of MeerKAT’s GC census (within the TRAPUM Large Survey Project). These faint discoveries demonstrate the advantages of MeerKAT’s survey sensitivity over previous searches, and we expect to find additional pulsars in continued searches of this cluster.
This chapter situates W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) within the context of his evolving critical theory of global capitalism and considers the influence of Marxist theory on some of the book’s central claims. Du Bois did not seriously engage with Marx’s thought until the early 1930s, after he had already developed an independent critical analysis of capitalist imperialism and the class struggle. But his embrace of Marx during the writing of Black Reconstruction affected his analysis in three ways: it sharpened his conception of capital as a social relation of production; it emboldened his disillusionment with liberal ideology; and it reinforced his sense that the irrational contradictions of capitalist modernity could not be sustained. Ultimately Marxist theory was for Du Bois a powerful resource, one that resonated with his own revolutionary project, but it needed modification in order to reckon with capitalism’s racial violence and inequality.
This essay explores W. E. B. Du Bois's evolving sense of disillusionment with the liberal paradigm in an effort to stimulate critical thinking about an American political culture consumed by both the fear and purported legitimacy of private competition. Du Bois always encouraged sustained critical appraisal of an American society torn between winners and losers, the favored and the damned. As his thinking developed into the 1930s, he focused more squarely upon the logic of capital accumulation, or the structural imperative to expand power in the service of private interest, and always in response to a suspicion or fear of the other-the competitor. I suggest that Du Bois's claims about the racially biased character of the competitive society, as well as his argument, put forth in a series of speeches and writings on "Negro education," that Black colleges ought to facilitate the critique of this society, may have some normative import today as widespread, often unreflective acquiescence to the principles of competitive liberalism seems poised to exacerbate and further legitimize racial and economic inequities.
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