Марксизм и критическая теория (Marxism and critical theory)

A.C. Corey - Between Mamdani and Prairieland

A.C. Corey on municipal socialism and domestic repression.

Approaching the midpoint of a second Trump presidency, how’s the US Left doing? It all depends on your angle of vision.

As the post-2008 Left inches closer to a long-dreamed-of accession to state power, the shadow of state repression, even state terror, looms. Yet these parallel developments feel somehow distant from one another, rarely mentioned in the same conversations. How can we explain the gap?

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/between-mamdani-and-prairieland

E. Hoernle - The Communist Party and the Intellectuals (1919)

The capitalist economy draws a sharp line between mental and manual labor, between leadership and execution in production. The “intellectuals” or mental workers here form a particular social strata, a strata which economically occupies an intermediate space between the capitalists proper and the mass of the exploited. By their social position and their attitude to life, the intellectuals can be counted as belonging to the possessing class; their economic situation, however, pushes them year after year ever more hopelessly down into the proletariat.

The corrosion which has seized the whole “middle class” in highly developed capitalist society, from whose ranks the intellectuals are largely recruited, has also created more and more pronounced class oppositions. While some develop into parasites, who as pure freeloaders on the social body participate in some form in the labor-free income of the capitalists, the great mass of mental workers must live in “shameful poverty,” providing servile labor for the greater glory of the capitalist economic and social order. One needs only to contrast the existence of the supervisory boards and directors in industry, commerce, finance and insurance to the deplorable fate of the thousands of functionaries, chemists, technicians and employees, or compare the fashionable celebrities of science, literature, art, music, the theater and medicine to those poor devils who often enough with one and the same gift, but with fewer “connections” and more objectivity, practice the same profession.

https://www.counterattackjournal.org/blog/communist_party_and_the_intellectuals

Fanon & Democracy

Frantz Fanon is most often read as a thinker of colonial violence, racial domination and revolutionary rupture. But what happens if we attend instead to the Fanon concerned with creation, popular participation, self-management and the capacity of people to build new forms of life together? In this episode, we discuss Mark Purcell’s Discovering Democracy in the Work of Frantz Fanon with Purcell and Mrinalini Greedharry. The book proposes a distinction between a “major Fanon,” organised around negation, critique and the destruction of oppressive structures, and a “minor Fanon” who emerges in moments of affirmation, collective experimentation and democratic self-management. This minor Fanon appears in discussions of Algerian villagers taking responsibility for their own affairs, but also in Fanon’s psychiatric practice and his attempts to create forms of institutional life in which patients participate actively in their own care.

The conversation explores both the possibilities and the tensions of this distinction. Can anti-colonialism, anti-racism and anti-fascism be understood primarily as negative projects, or can resistance itself form part of the construction of new relations? How far can creation and affirmation be separated from the work of confronting structures of domination? And might Fanon’s psychiatric practice shaped through experimentation, failure and encounters with the social and cultural realities of Algeria complicate any straightforward division between destruction and creation? The discussion moves through Fanon’s relation to institutional psychotherapy, questions of cultural specificity and postcolonial thought, and the importance of recognising the capacities that oppressed people already possess. Purcell draws on Zora Neale Hurston as an example of attending to Black creativity, life and cultural production rather than allowing racism to determine the entire field of attention, while the conversation considers what might be gained and what might be lost by shifting political emphasis from opposition toward creation. More broadly, the episode asks what a radical politics of affirmation might look like without abandoning the necessity of resistance: how critique, collective experimentation, cultural production and the creation of new forms of life might coexist rather than being treated as mutually exclusive political choices.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=og1TGcxNrL8&ra=m

Isabel Jacobs, Jacob Saliba - Finitude and Freedom

When the political philosopher Stanley Rosen recalled his encounter with Kojève in Paris in the 1960s, he noticed that Kojève often evoked one figure that stood above the rest of his circle: the theologian and Jesuit priest Gaston Fessard, “one of Kojève’s closest friends, perhaps his closest friend in Paris.” Rosen, moreover, added that among everyone he met, including Paul Ricœur and Emmanuel Levinas, Fessard remained “in my view, the greatest” with the exception of Kojève himself. Though little-known in English-speaking scholarship, Fessard was a giant on the French scene. He was known for his public debates with left-wing intellectuals, his resistance to Vichy in the 1940s, and pioneering contributions to the New Theology movement that led to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Throughout, Fessard maintained a close dialogue with Kojève, his friend, teacher, and philosophical sparring partner. This volume is the first systematic collection of the published and unpublished materials that document their exchanges and debates, including letters, essays, book reviews, and lectures. Standing at the intersection of secular political thought and theological discourse, Kojève and Fessard radically reshaped concepts of authority, right, sovereignty, and the end of history. This volume reveals how each thinker developed an original reading of Hegel, and how those readings and the debate that they spurred continue to shape political theology today.

https://communispress.com/finitude-and-freedom/

Михаил Михеев - Советская ведомственность и советский регионализм в их взаимной связи

Под регионализмом мы понимаем действия региональных партийных, государственных, хозяйственных и плановых органов управления, предпринятые с целью повышения значения региона внутри общесоюзной плановой экономики, территориальной реорганизации размещения производительных сил страны в интересах отдельно взятого региона. То есть советский регионализм сопровождает экспансия и модернизация, что отличает его от внешне схожих с ним изоляционизма и областничества, направленных скорее на сохранение самобытности региона и защиту его хозяйственных традиций. На протяжении 1920–1950-х в советской политической системе проблема ведомственности перманентно вытесняла проблему регионализма — и наоборот.

https://nlobooks.ru/upload/iblock/a34/n48rb8lpdbi80ieu5v9nbwvj9n6gcv1c.pdf

Andre Pagliarini - A Blood-Red Tide

Flávio Bolsonaro came out ahead of Lula in the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections. It’s the latest sign of a surging far right across the continent.

https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/blood-red-tide-flavio-bolsonaro-lula-brazil/

Neil Gray in conversation with Andreas Petrossiants - Spatial Composition

In “The Tribe of Moles,” the Italian operaist Sergio Bologna wrote that the Italian urban proletariat of the 1970s began from the idea of “city planning as a space of intervention in class dynamics.” But as Neil Gray describes, a theorization of capital’s spatialization has been overlooked in much of the literature on the movements of Italian autonomy. In his new book Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy, he rectifies this by attending to key theoretical concepts (the social factory, class composition, the tendency) and by historicizing numerous expressions of urban militancy from the period (rent strikes, occupations, feminist organizing, autoreduction). Among many generative offerings, Gray puts forward “spatial composition” as a method for understanding urbanization as a “central nexus of contemporary accumulation strategies.” This tendential conception, Gray argues, can also serve as a critical tool for understanding present-day struggles that take the home and urban space as sites of contestation against a mode of accumulation that has firmly taken hold of land and the built environment. This conversation was conducted over email and has been edited for clarity. 

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/165/6776931/spatial-composition

Claudio Lomnitz - Slavery Pure and Simple

A recent bombshell report documents brutal cases of forced labor in Mexico. Why can’t the government take it seriously?

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/slavery-pure-and-simple/