The following snippet is from an interview with Colin Leys conducted by Edward Lewis for New Left Project. (Colin Leys is an editor of the Socialist Register and author of a number of books.) EL: But…there will have been opportunities for the left to step in and develop a different discourse and programme, potentially? CL: [...]
Posts under ‘Revolutionary Strategy’
Marxism or anarchism or —?
We need a politics we haven’t got John Steele In another context in which I’m involved the subject has come up, sometimes rather heatedly, of the critique of Marxism from an anarchist perspective. Now this is a debate I’ve heard for 40+ years, from both sides, and usually posed in the same rather abstract terms. [...]
What will happen in China?
It’s obvious that what happens in China will be of crucial importance for the future course of world history. Western analysts tend to play variations on the theme of China becoming the new world hegemon — even Arrighi (Adam Smith in Beijing) seems not far removed from this. Could there be a more emancipatory possibility? [...]
What is communization?
Communization (to give it anon-British spelling) is the name for a theory or approach developed by Gilles Dauvé and others. Perhaps its central thesis is that a communist revolution begins its work of “communization” from the very first day. But, although the approach stems from this basic anti-stagist thesis, it does not represent a revolutionary [...]
Doesn’t the class struggle affect economic developments?
We’ve posted a number of essays on this site relating to analyses of the current crisis, the trans-nationalization of capital (etc.), their effects on social structures and the conditions of the people, and the implications of all of this for politics and class struggle. But don’t implications run both ways? Nat W. has been an [...]
John Steele: Why is Badiou of political value?
Following is the paper I gave yesterday at the Platypus convention in Chicago, as part of a panel titled Badiou and Post-Maoism: Marxism and Communism Today. Other panelists were Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Mike Ely of Kasama, and Joe Ramsey. Cutrone’s paper strongly attacked Badiou, whom he characterized as a typical ’60s new leftist, deeply [...]
‘Students of these movements, not their stupid professors’
What was it that began in Tunisia this year, and ramified in different forms across the Arab world? Is there a comparison to be drawn between these eruptions and the mass action we saw in the Wisconsin state capitol (which has also had its echos elsewhere? Too often the response to these upsurges has been a [...]
Assessing Mao and the Chinese Revolution
Mao Zedong has suffered, perhaps more than any other great revolutionist of the 20th century, from a long history (or campaign) of opprobrium linked with a lack of understanding (or refusal to really investigate), which has spanned most of the left as well as much of the academic world. For the latter it’s been the [...]
Badiou on the Arab revolts
Reprinted from the symptom (edited slightly for typos and paragraphing). The Tunisian and the Egyptian people are telling us: raise up, build up a public space for the communism of movement, protect it by all means while inventing the sequential course of action. The universal reach of popular uprisings Alan Badiou The wind of the [...]
Austerity, butterflies, and the future
A prime preoccupation on this site has been the investigation, discussion, and movement toward theorization of the contemporary configuration of capitalism, its economic, political and ideological aspects. In the following essay Don explores the consequences for bourgeois forms of rule, of the transnational constitution of present-day capital and its movement toward an increasingly decentered global [...]
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