Reification, Class and ‘New Social Movements’

Reification, Class and ‘New Social Movements’ Paul Browne All significant social movements of the last thirty years have started outside the organised class interests and institutions. The peace movement, the ecology movement, the women’s movement, solidarity with the third world, human rights agencies, campaigns against poverty and homelessness, campaigns against cultural poverty and distortion: all […]

Ordinary Language

immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face •.• Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the […]

Discussion: Merleau-Ponty’s Rejection of Marxism

inst~d of the insignificant and useless knowledge In sum radical philosophy’s attitude to both so often produced. And some research has clearly science and common sense is the same: where it been dangerous, e.g. in biological warfare and helps, use it; where it doesn ‘.t, criticize it; eugenics. where…;i.t gets in the way, remove it. […]

Discussion: Leninism versus proletarian self-emancipation; Laing’s social philosophy; The Trivialily of Althusser

Discussion Leninism versus proletarian self-emancipation Norman Geras argues (RP6, pp20-22) convincingly that Marx’s theory of socialist revolution is grounded on the fundamental principle that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself’. Marx held to this view throughout his entire forty years of socialist political activity, and it […]

Proletarian Self-Emancipation

Ma:rxlsm and pl’oletal’ian sel’emancipalion Norman Geras I claim no novelty for these ideas. Some of them are discussed in a recent article by Hal Draper. 1 They are treated at greater length, and in greater depth, in Michael Lowy’s book on Marx’s theory of revolution. 2 Going back to Marx himself, in 1864, in the […]

The Question of Hegemony

TIB QUBSTIOI or BB8BI1011 G. lowell Smith The question of hegemony can be posed as a political problem. How does it come about that a class or group struggling to free itself from oppression or exploitation remains subordinated politically to the group which oppresses or exploits it? And how does it break free from this […]

Class, Consciousness, Control, Communication

Against this apparatus, which does not merely reproduce bourgeois relations in the form of ideological representations but controls access to knowledge and the instruments of power, the subordinate social groups have, traditionally, little to offer. However, two things can happen or be made to happen. One is that the hegemonic apparatus, so massively and yet […]

Philosophizing the everyday: The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies

Philosophizing the everyday The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies John roberts The following presents a genealogy and critique of the concept of the ʻeverydayʼ, looking at the philosophical, political and cultural conflicts and contexts which radically transformed its contents after the Russian Revolution from a term synonymous with the ʻdailyʼ and […]