Marx, Fanon & Biko: Touchstones in a Time of Crisis?

Unemployed People’s Movement

Marx, Fanon & Biko: Touchstones in a Time of Crisis?

Arts Major, 5:00p.m., Tuesday 16 September

Our country is slipping into serious crisis. The state has been captured by a ruthless and predatory elite bent on plunder. The people’s struggles are being seriously repressed. From Ficksburg to Marikana and Durban activists are being murdered.

Last week we marked the anniversary of the assassination of Steven Bantu Biko. This week we are hosting a public discussion on the light that Biko, and other radical humanists like Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, can shine into our darkening present.

Karl Marx's End of Year Departmental Assesment

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

Marx at the Margins

by Kevin B. Anderson

Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed.  To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America.  But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis of non-Western societies, as well as race, ethnicity, and nationalism. While some of these writings show a problematically unilinear perspective and, on occasion, traces of ethnocentrism, the overall trajectory of Marx’s writings was toward a critique of national, ethnic, and colonial oppression and toward an appreciation of resistance movements in these spheres.

To Grasp Things by the Root

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

Julius Malema, unlovely as he is, is a symptom, a morbid symptom to be sure, of the crisis that we face. Any assumption that his effective expulsion from the ANC allows us to continue with business as usual will guarantee the emergence of more symptoms, different but equally morbid.

Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx

by Stathis Kouvelakis
Preface by Fredric Jameson
Translated by G. M. Goshgarian

A remarkable history of the formation of Marxist thought.

Throughout the nineteenth century, German philosophy was haunted by the specter of the French Revolution. Kant, Hegel and their followers spent their lives wrestling with its heritage, trying to imagine a specifically German path to modernity: a “revolution without revolution.” Trapped in a politically ossified society, German intellectuals were driven to brood over the nature of the revolutionary experience.
In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions.

Marx's letters to Arnold Ruge

This series of letters was written by Marx (at age 25) to his friend Arnold Ruge. Marx and Ruge would later include the full eight-letter exchange in their first and only edition of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, in February 1844.

Marx to Ruge, February 10, 1842

Marx to Ruge, March 5, 1842

Marx to Ruge, March 20, 1842

Marx to Ruge, April 23, 1842

Marx to Ruge, July 9, 1842

Marx and Latin America Revisited - Bruno Bosteels

The Civil War in France

by Karl Marx, 1871

Introduction

The Begining of the Franco-Prussian War

 

Prussian Occupation of France

 

France Capitulates & the Government of Thiers

 

Paris Workers’ Revolution & Thiers’ Reactionary Massacres 

The Paris Commune

 

The Fall of Paris

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Karl Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon between December 1851 and March 1852. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the French Revolutionary Calendar — the day the first Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself dictator by a coup d'etat.