Robin D. G. Kelley: Revisiting Black Marxism in the Wake of Black Lives Matter

Can the Working Classes Consciously Unite?

'The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s' - A review

Glen Moss, The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2014

Reviewed by: Benjamin Fogel, Journal of Asian & African Studies

The New Radicals is a generational memoir, or rather a political memoir of a generation of white South African student radicals that came of age in the early 1970s through the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This generation formed a key part of the emerging movements that awakened South Africa from the political slumber of the 1960s. As Glenn Moss puts it, his book “records how they (a group of students) moved from the relatively liberal protest and symbolic politics of an elite university to help in creating the preconditions for a radical challenge to the society that had formed them” (p.vii).

Charles Mills Interviewed by George Yancy

New York Times Opinionator

George Yancy: You are a philosopher who thinks very deeply about issues of race. Can you provide a sense of your work?

Charles Mills: I think a simple way to sum it up would be as the transition from white Marxism to (what I have recently started calling) black radical liberalism.

G.Y.: So, how does “white” modify Marxism? And what is it about the modification that helps to account for the transition to what you’re now calling black radical liberalism?

We are the authors and actors of our own history

By Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, ROAR Magazine

Neoliberalism is in crisis. Some of the elements of this are fairly obvious: the financial crisis of recent years and elites’ inability to chart an effective strategy for long-term profitability; the decline of US geopolitical hegemony, most visibly in its one-time backyard of Latin America and the strategically central Middle East and North African region; a legitimacy crisis around surveillance and military intervention more broadly; severe problems with making the WTO, FTAA and other such arrangements actually produce the intended results; the EU’s increasing inability to secure mandates for austerity in referenda or elections; not to mention the medium-term threats to fixed assets (and supporters) caused by climate change.

Prospects for a Happy but Contested Future: The Promise of Revolutionary Humanism

by David Harvey, The White Review

From time immemorial there have been human beings who have believed that they could construct, individually or collectively, a better world for themselves than that which they had inherited. Quite a lot of them also came to believe that in the course of so doing it might be possible to remake themselves as different if not better people. I count myself among those who believe in both these propositions. In Rebel Cities, for example, I argued that ‘the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold’. The right to the city, I wrote, is ‘far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and re-invent the city more after our heart’s desire … The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is … one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.’[1] Perhaps for this intuitive reason, the city has been the focus throughout its history of an immense outpouring of utopian desires for happier futures and less alienating times.

A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?

A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?

- Notes on the Necessity for our Democratic Imagination to Take Better Measure of the World

Richard Pithouse

Retrieving life and the human from waste

Achille Mbembe has argued that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and 'the human' from a history of waste”. He adds that “the concepts of 'the human', or of 'humanism', inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of "the human" as waste.” Mbembe is not the first to want to hold on to the idea of the human in the face of the systemic denial of the full and equal humanity of all people and to insist that the idea of the human needs to be delinked from what Aimé Césairecalled 'pseudo-humanism' – colonial particularities masquerading as universal. Césaire aspired to “a true humanism . . . a humanism made to the measure of the world”. Steve Biko envisioned a “true humanity”.

A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?

A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?

- Notes on the Necessity for our Democratic Imagination to Take Better Measure of the World

Richard Pithouse

Achille Mbembe has argued that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and 'the human' from a history of waste”. He adds that “the concepts of 'the human', or of 'humanism', inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of "the human" as waste.” Mbembe is not the first to want to hold on to the idea of the human in the face of the systemic denial of the full and equal humanity of all people but to insist that the idea of the human needs to be delinked from what Aimé Césaire called 'pseudo-humanism' – colonial particularities masquerading as universal. Césaire aspired to “a true humanism....a humanism made to the measure of the world”. Steve Biko envisioned a “true humanity”.

The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism

The Gramscian Moment

Click here to download this book in pdf.

“The Gramscian Moment demonstrates the extent to which Gramsci’s thought represents a singular synthesis of virtually the entire tradition of Western political thought. This work succeeds in presenting Gramsci as a 'living classic', an author central to our understanding of modernity. Given its scope, richness and originality, I have no doubt that this work will represent a milestone in Gramscian scholarship and an important contribution to contemporary debates in political theory and philosophy.”

—Stathis Kouvelakis, Author of Philosophy and Revolution and Co-editor of The Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism

Marxism, Modernity and Post Colonial Studies

Marxism Modernity and Post Colonial Studies Cultural Margins by Adie Marzuki

Marxism & the Legacy of Subaltern Studies

E. San Juan, Jr: Edward Said's Affiliations; Secular Humanism and Marxism

E. San Juan, Jr. - Edward Said's Affiliations; Secular Humanism and Marxism by Che Brandes-Tuka

Marxisms past and present

Kirk Helliker, Rhodes University, South Africa

Peter Vale, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract

Marxism was central to the understanding of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. This article provides a critical analysis of Marxist literature on South Africa since the 1970s, drawing out its relevance for contemporary analyses of the post-apartheid state and for radical politics today. It suggests that while the literature offered important insights into the character of the apartheid state, it failed to provide a critical appraisal of the state per se. Moreover, the capturing of state power by the liberation movement was not grounded in an understanding of the oppressive character of the state-form. The undermining of mainstream Marxism under neo-liberalizing conditions in post-apartheid South Africa has opened up the prospects for anti-statist radical libertarian thinking (including autonomist Marxism), and this thinking is consistent with the practices of certain autonomist popular politics currently emerging. Social theorizing on South Africa has had a complex relationship with Marxism. This article is interested in drawing on this experience in an effort to understand its implications for the ‘new’ South Africa where, 20 years after apartheid’s formal ending, social transformation remains caught in the logic not of Marxism but neo-liberalizing capitalism.

Himani Bannerji - Thinking Through Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism (1995)

Himani Bannerji-Thinking Through Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism(1995) by Tija Na

When Marxism becomes a dogmatic abstraction rather than a critical praxis

Marxist theory… can become a false consciousness if, instead of being used for the methodical investigation of reality through theory and practice, it is misused as a defence against that very reality… Those who wish to deprive Marxism of its critical, subversive power and turn it into an affirmative doctrine, generally dig in behind a series of stereotyped statements which, in their abstraction, are as irrefutable as devoid of result.

-E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays (1978)

Stathis Kouvelakis: Marx's Critique of the Political: From the Revolutions of 1848 to the Paris Commune

Kouvelakis, Stathis - Marx's Critique of the Political

Facing Reality

Libcom

Writing in collaboration with Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee, C.L.R. James examines the practical process of social revolution in the modern world.

"Springing forth from the utopian flames of self-emancipation kindled by the workers councils of the Hungarian Revolution, this pivotal book offers a socialist indictment of the miserabilism of state capitalism and calls for the ongoing rejection of both vanguardism and the bureaucratic rationalism of state power." - Ron Sakolsky, author of Creating Anarchy

In this celebrated "underground classic," also known as "C. L. R. James's most anarchist book," the author of The Black Jacobins, History of Pan-African Revolt and Beyond a Boundary examines the practical process of social revolution in the modern world. Inspired by the October 1956 Hungarian workers' revolution against Stalinist oppression, as well as the U.S. workers' "wild-cat" strikes (against Capital and the union bureaucracies), James and his co-authors looked ahead to the rise of new mass emancipatory movements by African Americans as well as anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone among the radical texts of the time, Facing Reality also rejected modern society's mania for "conquering nature," and welcomed women's struggles "for new relations between the sexes."

'Fanon & Violence': A lecture by Lewis Gordon

Click here to watch this video at the Histories of Violence project.

The Histories of Violence “Fanon & Violence” lecture is provided by Professor Lewis R. Gordon (Temple University, U.S.A.). At the time of filming, Professor Gordon was the Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought. He was also Director of the Centre for Afro-Jewish Studies while a Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Gordon has written many works in race theory, Africana philosophy, postcolonial phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social and political philosophy, film and literature, philosophy of education, philosophy of human sciences, and a variety of topics in the public interest. Before joining Temple, he taught at Brown University for eight years, during which the program in Afro-American Studies became the Department of Africana Studies under his leadership as chairperson. He also taught at Purdue University and Yale University, and he is Ongoing Visiting Professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Professor Gordon has presented lectures internationally, and has been a recipient of numerous awards and distinguished fellowships.

The Speculative Left

by Bruno Bosteels, 2005

For Badiou, there emerges a speculative type of leftism whenever communismis disjoined, and nowadays supposedly set free, from the historicity intrinsic to the various stages of Marxism. The critique of speculative leftism in this sense is actually a constant throughout Badiou’s work. At the same time, though, a common objection among readers of this work holds that Badiou himself, by sovereignly divorcing the theoretical fidelity to an event fromany concrete genealogical inscription of the event, over the years increasingly would have painted himself into a similar corner as a dogmatic, absolutist, or even downright mystical thinker. According to this objection, Badiou himself would be yet another example of ‘‘left-wing communism’’ as the ‘‘infantile disorder’’ of Marxism, to use Lenin’s well-known words, even if we might have to turn these words around today, following the example set not so long ago by Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in terms of Marxism as the ‘‘senile disorder’’ of an eternally youthful and invariant ‘‘leftism.’’ Once we grasp the logic behind Badiou’s critique of speculative leftism, however, we will also be better equipped to address this objection, according to which he himself, if not earlier then evermore clearly so in recent years, falls prey to precisely such a leftist temptation of wanting to be a communist without also being a Marxist.

Racism and the Political Economy of Domination

Charles W. Mills interviewed by Tom Mills, New Left Project

Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University.  He is the author of The Racial Contract and has written extensively about racism and political theory.  In an interview with Tom Mills he discussed his views on race, liberalism, capitalism and the potential for social change.

The concept of race as an objective category has long been discredited by anthropology and biology, yet the social sciences show that racial disadvantage persists. How do you understand the concept of race and racism?