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and solidarity as the new revolutionary subject. It was, crucially, also revolutionary thought and praxis from the Global South – Fanon, Cabral, Césaire, Guevara and Mao among others – that dislocated left politics from their Communist Party moorings and decentred both Soviet Marxism and Europe in the radical imagination of May ’68 militancy. 22 The trajectories and local translations of anticolonial
that ‘show[ed] historical development as a process, brought about by conflicting social forces; whereas [Kuczynski] can only discern a succession of neatly labelled social orders’.59 Rather than adopting the crude and reductionist stageism that Kuczynski had learned from orthodox Soviet Marxism, in particular Plekhanov and the Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky,60 in which one mode of production succeeds another – feudalism to capitalism in this case – Hill had presented an account of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England that contained varieties of economic and
rediscovered in the 1960s, as the grip of Marxism on the left began to loosen. Anarchism had never gone away, but now, as students from Paris to Berkeley stockpiled cobblestones and reached for their paintbrushes, it chimed with an urgent and confrontational politics. The importance of anarchism ran deeper than simply inspiring a penchant for disorder and sloganeering, however, and also offered more positive aspects than a dissection of the paradoxes and barbarities of Soviet Marxism. Under the stress of war decades earlier, anarchists had developed critiques of the state
. Marcuse , Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis ( Boston : Beacon Press , 1964 ), 106 . 44 Fraser, ‘Identity, Exclusion, and Critique,’ 322. 45 M. Horkheimer , ‘ Traditional and Critical Theory ,’ Critical Theory: Selected Essays , trans. M. J. O’Connell ( New York : Continuum , 1972 ), 220 –221 . 46 J. Bohman , ‘ Critical Theory and Democracy ,’ in D. M. Rasmussen (ed), Handbook of Critical Theory ( Oxford : Blackwell , 1996 ), 190 ; Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society , 155. For more on the role of utopian thinking in critical
the limits of what is possible and knowable? 8 As a hegemonic movement capable of changing tactics and engineering passive revolutions, liberalism has been more politically astute on this fundamental point than any of its rivals. Idealism makes an epistemological discovery that is crudely inverted in Soviet Marxism-Leninism and effectively hi-jacked in different ways by liberalism in its various classical, humanist and
and expansion of capitalism. First is the mobility of money as abstract wealth. Second is the potential of class and social conflict to kindle varieties of social regulation. Both problematics may have been marginal to Marx’s political economy and historical writings. They hardly translated into twentieth-century Soviet Marxism. Gramsci, on the other hand, represents a different Marxism and one with echoes in Cox’s political economy. Gramsci did not consider civilisation as such, nor was the full range of Marx’s critical political economy available to him. However
of Soviet Marxism and its artistic corollary in the form of Constructivism) are supplanted by consumerist nightmares of coercion, conformity, indifference, and subjective deformation. In recognizing that the ‘attempt to change the world miscarried’, the leftist imaginary turns decidedly grey, while its accompanying discourse becomes circumspect, mournful, hopeless. A brief affective history of the left (II): the exhaustion of utopian energies The utopian motif has been suspended.11 For many commentators, from both the right and the left, the deflation of political
spheres of social life, and not just to the economy. This new commercialisation emerged after the period of relatively wide market restrictions and active social regulation in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the widely used analogues of this term in post-Soviet Marxism is ‘market fundamentalism’, which as far as we know was, paradoxically, coined by George Soros ( 1998 ). The most important of the fundamental contradictions of such market fundamentalism catapults the antagonisms of the epoch of imperialism to a higher level. Its resolution requires the
the reader to not think of anarchism as a “word order” as one would Sovietism, Marxism, or Republicanism, but rather to “think of anarchism as an individual orientation to yourself and others, as a personal approach to life” (CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective 2001, 34). Contemporary insurrectionists have repeated such charges, reminding us that Bonanno himself argued that “Anarchism isn’t a definition that, once reached, can be guarded jealously … safe and conserved” (Rodríguez 2011b). This highly open and individualistic approach to anarchism’s orientation
short step from Nietzsche to Heidegger, post-structuralism and postmodernism. 27 In the process of gradually emancipating subjectivity from all external and objective constraints, humanity liberates itself from the yoke of metaphysical estrangement from the world and finds itself at the centre of all things. In Soviet Marxism, humanity establishes its dignity against metaphysical abstraction and bourgeois law by way of the