Do Not Be Afraid, Join Us, Come Back? On the "Idea of Communism" in Our Time

Nick Thoburn

35 Pages

This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theory. The principal focus is Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “idea of communism” and its “sequences,” which are approached here in relation to the body of work collected in Douzinas and Žižek’s The Idea of Communism. Critical of Badiou, the article argues that communism should be understood as a “real movement” immanent to the mutating limits of capital, and not as a subjective “truth procedure.” In taking the latter route, Badiou not only produces a faulty philosophy of communism but also misdiagnoses its historical record, allowing Lenin and Mao, the spectacle of revolution, to stand as its genuine expressions. In this, Badiou contributes to the contemporary nostalgic image of a “real communism” that in practice was nothing of the sort.

https://tinyurl.com/y8as9o7g

The Nietzschean Communism of Alain Badiou

Ishay Landa

21 Pages

The main purpose of the essay is to claim that Badiou has developed a distinctive understanding of “communism” which is very different from the Marxist one. Several scholars have noticed the differences between Badiou and Marx, sometimes striking ones, but have generally failed to go beyond describing them. Here an attempt is made to trace these differences back to the—largely—Nietzschean footing of Badiou’s philosophy. I claim that we are dealing in fact not with different tactics, but with two different projects, envisioning distinct strategic goals. Marxist communism is about a dialectical overcoming of the capitalist present, in a way which transcends capitalism but which is predicated on the social, political and cultural transformation brought about by capitalism. Badiou’s project, by contrast, aims at achieving a clean break with history. Nietzsche is useful for Badiou inasmuch as he provides a critique of mass society and aims to create a new man, the Overman. The essay discusses the differences between these two projects, focusing on a number of topics, among them the nature of capitalism, the meaning of revolutionary subjectivity, and the attitude to history and to historical possibilities. Marx’s political project is vindicated vis-à-vis the elitism and anti-humanism, which vitiate Badiou’s alternative approach. A dialogue with Badiou’s position, however, is not foreclosed.

https://tinyurl.com/ybwlo8lh

Badiou and the Subject of Dialectics

This is based on a talk given under the name ―Badiou and the Hegelian Dialectic in 1960s

French Philosophy,‖ at a seminar that took place at the Historical Materialism
Tenth Annual Conference in London, United Kingdom, November 7-10, 2013.

In his article, ―Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Badiou and ThéorieCommuniste in the Age of Riots,‖ Nathan Brown presents a comparison between two contemporary tendencies in communist thought. While Alain Badiou extends the consequences of a life-long engagement largely inspired by Maoism, ThéorieCommuniste develop analyses initially rooted in the council communism inaugurated by Anton Pannekoek. While there are obvious and great political differences between these two tendencies, both Badiou and TC have each repudiated the role of the traditional Party and for this reason appear to converge in many of their arguments. Brown indicates that their remaining opposition might best be understood philosophically, and essentially in terms of the inheritance of the Althusserian legacy.

https://www.academia.edu/9744055/Badiou_and_the_Subject_of_Dialectics

“Hot Autumn” Italy’s Factory Councils and Autonomous Workers’ Assemblies, 1970s

Patrick Cuninghame

456 Pages

This chapter examines and analyzes the historical development of workers’ councils within the Italian factory system during the “Long 1968,” based on two rival models: the factory councils and the autonomous workers’ assemblies. Following the 1969 “Hot Autumn” wildcat strike wave, the autonomous workers’ movement aimed to topple the unions from their hegemonic position, while the three Italian union confederations—CGIL,1 CISL,2 and UIL3—attempted to recover their representative power. Conflicts over wage bargaining were used to destabilize the factory system and the capitalist division of labor, thus creating the conditions for workers’ counterpowerinthefactory.Thefactorycouncilsintegratedoftenradically different political positions, but with the shared ultimate objective of restoring the hegemony of the unions as a unitary organizational form while still expressing the will of at least part of the rank and file.

https://tinyurl.com/ydfkrj44

Ours to Master and to Own
Workers’ Councils from the Commune to the Present
___________________

Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini

Editors

Haymarket Books Chicago, Illinois

Re-visiting the Political Context of Manfredo Tafuri's " Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology " : 'Having Corpses in our Mouths'

Emre Özyetiş

Published 2013

216 Pages

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Operaismo,

Architectural practice,

Manfredo Tafuri,

Operaismo, Autonomia and Post-workerism,

Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology

In this thesis I revisit Manfredo Tafuri’s 1969 article “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” (Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology) within the political context of Italy in the 1960s. I address the research question: what is the contemporary relevance of the essay read in this context? I suggest that testing the arguments in Tafuri’s 1969 essay against his complete oeuvre and his subsequent career as a critic or a historian obfuscates and misconstrues the context and the essay. I argue that the essay was published in a moment when operaisti protagonists were processing the implications of the operaisti discourse they constructed in relation to the intensification of the social conflict in Italy in the late 1960s and the 1970s. This provides a convincing context for Tafuri’s application of this discourse as a total rejection of the possibility of the existence of an architectural profession outside participation in capitalist development. I conclude that, located with precision within the context of the journal Contropiano, where his essay was first published, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” is more likely to agitate intellectuals and architects than it has previously. It is important for the generation who has not yet acquired professional autonomy, such as architectural students or interns, to be reminded of Tafuri’s critique within its context as they assume their social vocation. Thus this is my target readership for this thesis. It is particularly important to revisit Tafuri and his 1969 essay at a time when there is a growing discussion around a social vocation or discourse on sustainability, participatory design, radical architecture and such. The social agenda still makes the art and the profession of architecture resilient to transforming political, economic and social structures. In this light, it is not only necessary but also relevant to revisit the nature of the social vocation of architects as it had been criticized in Tafuri’s 1969 essay within the intellectual debates Italian operaisti project initiated.

https://tinyurl.com/y7dz7s4p

The Making of Italian Radical Architecture

james dunbar

49 Pages

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Architectural History,

Italian Radical Thought,

Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,

Radical design,

Radical and Utopian Architecture

This paper is a study of the making of Italian Radical Architecture in its material form, as represented in selected key exhibitions from 1966-1978 and retrospectives from 2003-2012. It seeks to understand the political, cultural, and economic factors that construct 'Radical' as critique, to explore the dialogical relationship between the exhibitions and coeval publications in architectural journals as modes of production, and to assess the reception and impact of the works.

https://www.academia.edu/29380769/The_Making_of_Italian_Radical_Architecture

Deschooling, Manual Labour, and Emancipation: The Architecture and Design of Global Tools, 1973-1975

Jacopo Galimberti

Sara Catenacci

27 Pages

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Critical Theory,

Education,

Marxism,

Critical Pedagogy,

Autonomia,

Operaismo,

Italian Design,

Arts and Crafts,

Pedagogia,

Italian architecture,

Operaismo, Autonomia and Post-workerism,

Radical and Utopian Architecture,

Hippy Culture

 

 

https://tinyurl.com/yb2v3crg

Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents: Art, Architecture, and Photography since 1950

Meredith A Brown

Published 2017

183 Pages

2 Files ▾

Art History,

Architecture,

Photography,

Collaboration

Show more ▾

Collaboration has been a component of art making for centuries—from ancient Greek potters and painters to nineteenth-century photographers Hill and Adamson to the contemporary Raqs Media Collective—yet it remains a complex topic for art historians of all periods. Taking its cue from Sigmund Freud’s 1929 publication, Civilization and its Discontents, in which the psychoanalyst wrestled with tensions between the individual and society, Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents: Art, Architecture, and Photography since 1950 asks what it means to produce work together as individuals and why this might matter for the creation of art and scholarship in the twenty-first century. This digital book stems from The Courtauld Research Forum’s 2013 flagship research initiative, led by Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Meredith A. Brown, which brought together a group of early career scholars based in London and New York who spent the year engaged in transatlantic conversations about collaboration and its influence on the histories of modern and contemporary art, architecture, and photography. The resulting collaboratively written essays and artists’ projects are timely contributions to the growing art historical debates around collaboration and collectivity and their relationship to modernism, feminism, Marxism, and contemporary practice. Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents explores not only what constitutes collaboration in recent art globally but also opens up possibilities created by collaborative historical and artistic research in a field that historically has privileged the traditional single-author text.

https://tinyurl.com/y7wpnxgv

The Origins of Hannah Arendt's Council System

James Muldoon

2015, History of Political Thought

42 Pages

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This article reconsiders Arendt’s frequently ignored proposal of a federal council system. While Arendt’s references to a council system are usually dismissed as utopian, I re-examine Arendt’s political writings in order to demonstrate the centrality of the councils to her thought. The development of the council system is traced back to two primary sources: a council communist tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, and Arendt’s Jewish writings of the 1930s and 1940s. The analysis reveals that Arendt’s republicanism undertakes an anarcho-communist inflection, which has not yet been fully appreciated.

https://www.academia.edu/12641775/The_Origins_of_Hannah_Arendts_Council_System

The Centrality of the Council System in Arendt's Political Thought.docx

Shmuel Lederman

2019, Arendt on Freedom, Liberation and Revolution

22 Pages

2 Files ▾

In this chapter, I seek to show that the vision of radical, participatory democracy plays a much more important role in Arendt’s political thought than commentators usually allow. I begin by discussing the way federalist arrangements Arendt advocated in different contexts were meant to be complemented by a citizen council system, and reinterpret her call for new political structures that would guarantee human dignity in this light. I then turn to demonstrate the close links between Arendt’s conception of “the political” and her support for the council system. Finally, I suggest that Arendt’s discussions on the relations between philosophy, politics and judgment reflect her urgent sense of the need for participatory democracy. Arendt, I conclude, provides powerful normative foundations for the theory of participatory democracy.

https://www.academia.edu/38518348/The_Centrality_of_the_Council_System_in_Arendts_Political_Thought_docx

Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics

James Muldoon

2018, Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics

PaperRank: 3.950 Pages

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 https://tinyurl.com/y9qzxg4t

The return to public assemblies and direct democratic methods in the wave of the global "squares movements" since 2011 has rejuvenated interest in forms of council organisation and action. The European council movements, which developed in the immediate post-WWI era, were the first and most impressive of a number of attempts to develop workers' councils throughout the twentieth century. However, in spite of the recent challenges to liberal democracy, the question of council democracy has so far been neglected within democratic theory. This book seeks to interrogate contemporary democratic institutions from the perspective of the resources that can be drawn from a revival and re-evaluation of the forgotten ideal of council democracy. This collection brings together democratic theorists, socialists and labour historians on the question of the relevance of council democracy for contemporary democratic practices. Historical reflection on the councils opens our political imagination to an expanded scope of the possibilities for political transformation by drawing from debates and events at an important historical juncture before the dominance of current forms of liberal democracy. It offers a critical perspective on the limits of current democratic regimes for enabling widespread political participation and holding elites accountable. This timely read provides students and scholars with innovative analyses of the councils on the hundredth anniversary of their development. It offers new analytic frameworks for conceptualising the relationship between politics and the economy and contributes to emerging debates within political theory on workplace, economic and council democracy.

MARXISM AND ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS; TOWARDS A RED AND GREEN POLITICAL ECONOMY

 https://www.academia.edu/32106183/_Paul_Burkett_Marxism_and_Ecological_Economics_T_BookZZ_org_

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTONIO NEGRI "RESISTANCE IN PRACTICE"

https://tinyurl.com/y8f77gop

Contents

Editors’ Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Real Movement and the Present State of Things
Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha

Part I: The Long ’68 in Italy

1.Into the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the Subjective Caesura (1968–73)7
Michael Hardt

 
2.Negri’s Proletarians and the State: A Critique 
Sergio Bologna

3.Feminism and Autonomy: Itinerary of Struggle 

Alisa Del Re

4.A Party of Autonomy?
Steve Wright

 
Part II: How to Resist the Present

5.The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective
Kathi Weeks

6.Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor
Nick Dyer-Witheford

 
7.Negri by Zapata: Constituent Power and theLimits of Autonomy
José Rabasa

8.‘Now Everything Must Be Reinvented’: Negri and Revolution
Kenneth Surin

The Refusal of Work:
From the Post emancipation Caribbean

to Post-Fordist Empire

Christopher Taylor

https://tinyurl.com/ycgprstt

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

In 1880, the mixed-race Cuban Marxist Paul Lafargue published The Right to Be Lazy: Being a Refutation of the “Right to Work” of 1848

Lafargue’s witty and counterintuitive pamphlet argues that a “love” and “furious passion for work” has colonized revolutionary projects for liberation, leading revolutionaries to imagine “the worst sort of slavery” as the best kind of freedom.

Standing the “dogma of work” on its head, Lafargue asserts that freedom consists in expanding the time of nonwork, an expansion epitomized in the possibility of being lazy.

Although Lafargue’s radicalization of laziness had a precedent in Karl Marx’s own writing, and although Lafargue was himself Marx’s son-in-law, Lafargue’s “hedonist Marxism” failed to exert much influence on Lafargue’s father was the son of a Frenchman and a Haitian mulatto, Catalina Piron, who had sought refuge in Cuba during the Haitian Revolution. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish Frenchman, whose attempts to avoid the upheavals of revolution brought him from Haiti to France and from France to Jamaica. In Jamaica, he would have a daughter, Lafargue’s mother, with Maragarita Fripie, a Carib Indian. In his late teens Lafargue moved to Paris to study medicine, and he became involved with Lasallean and Proudhonist radicals and the burgeoning student movement of the time. Upon expulsion from medical school, Lafargue moved to London to continue his studies. There he met Karl Marx, whose daughter Laura he would marry. 

The twenty-first century already promises to be kinder to Lafargue’s memory. Recent theorists of antiwork Marxism have positioned the creole’s pamphlet as a “precursor” to the politics of refusal and fight popularized in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire and theorized more robustly in Negri’s work of the past three decades.

Yet—despite the history of racial slavery that Lafargue embodied, despite the centrality of the figure of slavery to Lafargue’s pamphlet, despite the pamphlet’s intervention into a discursive environment that spawned both “right to work” revolutionary discourses in Paris and plutocratic discourses in the post emancipation Antilles—Lafargue’s critique of work is never put in relation to his Caribbean genealogy.

The reduction of Lafargue’s creole roots to an accidental biographical datum indexes a broader marginalization of Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation in genealogies of
antiwork Marxism. Consider the epigraph to this essay: Hardt and Negri’s qualification of “work and authority” as a relation of “voluntary servitude” effectively distinguishes their antiwork politics from historical refusals of in voluntary servitude, from refusals of slavery. This hesitation over slavery, I suggest, amounts to a symptom of disavowal, an attempt to exorcise the specter of a Caribbean past that haunts the structures of rule and refusal constitutive of post-Fordist Empire. Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation constitute the political unconscious of anti-work Marxism. If, as Kathi Weeks suggest, antiwork politics is “both a practical demand and a theoretical perspective,” creoles have always served as both subject and object of this gaze.

In contrast to productivist Marxisms, which celebrates labor and the laborer, antiwork Marxism describes labor itself as the site and source of human bondage.

While attending to the various ways laborers refuse work—strikes, slowdowns, walkouts, theft, demands for a basic guaranteed income, and so on—antiwork Marxism also articulates a vision of “a potential mode of life that challenges the mode of life now dened by and subordinated to work.”

This essay explores how Caribbean histories speak in and through radical imaginings of postwork forms of life. In the narrative that I offer, the Caribbean serves a crucial locale—a kind of “laboratory,” to borrow Hardt’s description of Italy—in which the epistemologies and practices of antiwork Marxism were first elaborated.

Yet the spatial and temporal scales adopted by antiwork theory typically elide the formative influence of Caribbean history: antiwork Marxism typically codes itself as a politics for, and the product of, the post-Fordist global North.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/02/black-history-month-paul-lafargue.html

Castor & Pollux? The Marx - Engels Relationship

Jamie Pitman

54 Pages

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[Research Question]
What is the nature of the Marx - Engels relationship, and its consequences for the subsequent development of Marxist theory?

[Abstract]
The thesis presented here is that Engels was unable to follow the change
in Marx’s thinking, which the latter affected during the 1850s. I argue that Engels ’theorisation is impoverished in relation to Marx’s; but that a simple separation between
the two thinkers remains difficult because their union has been consecrated by many, including otherwise critical Marxists. In my concluding argument, I consider the implications of this for contemporary Marxism, and to what extent the problems may be overcome.

https://www.academia.edu/5013016/Castor_and_Pollux_The_Marx_Engels_Relationship