Silences on the Suppression of Workers Self-Emancipation: Historical Problems with CLR James's Interpretation of V.I. Lenin

by Mathew Quest, Insurgent Notes, 2012

CLR James (1901–1989), native of Trinidad, was perhaps the most libertarian revolutionary socialist intellectual of both the Pan African and international labor movements. Best known as the author of the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, he also became famous for mentoring anti-colonial intellectuals and post-colonial statesmen such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Trinidad's Eric Williams. Far less understood was James's creative advocacy of direct democracy and workers self-management as found in his analysis of the Age of the CIO, Classical Athens, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Yet undermining our understanding of the contours and absence of popular self-management as a framework for James's visions of the African World and Third World is the lack of a proper assessment of how he understood V.I. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This selection from a forthcoming larger work will attempt to examine this dilemma by uncovering silences and dilemmas for how James understood Lenin.

A Society Adrift Interviews and Debates, 1974-1997

This posthumous collection of interviews and occasional papers given by Castoriadis between 1974 and 1997 is a lively, direct introduction to the thinking of a writer who never abandoned his radically critical stance. It provides a clear, handy résumé of his political ideas, in advance of their times and profoundly relevant to today’s world.

For this political thinker and longtime militant (co-founder with Claude Lefort of the revolutionary group “Socialisme ou Barbarie”), economist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher, two endless interrogations—how to understand the world and life in society—were intertwined with his own life and combats.

An important chapter discusses the history of “Socialisme ou Barbarie” (1949—1967); in it, Castoriadis presents the views he defended, in that group, on a number of subjects: a critique of Marxism and of the Soviet Union, the bureaucratization of society and of the workers’ movement, and the primacy of individual and collective autonomy. Another chapter presents the concept, central to his thinking, of “imaginary significations” as what make a society “cohere.”

Castoriadis constantly returns to the question of democracy as the never-finished, deliberate creation by the people of societal institutions, analyzing its past and its future in the Western world. He scathingly criticizes “representative” democracy and develops a conception of direct democracy extending to all spheres of social life.

Learning from urban revolt

by Yousuf Al-Bulushi, 2012

This paper brings into conversation two texts that were written 40 years apart—Society of the Spectacle in 1967 and The Coming Insurrection in 2007—and yet share great lines of continuity. Both texts are situated within their economic, cultural and political conjunctures in order to ground their theoretical contributions. The paper emphasizes the important influence that urban rebellions in Watts and the Parisian banlieues had upon both texts, and in so doing, highlights the over-looked debt these theoretical projects owe to marginalized and racialized populations in struggle. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of autogestion is developed as a mediator between the two books, and as a way to engage their theories through the eyes of a more obviously spatial and Marxist thinker.