Black anarchism’s history and future

Reivew of Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2021). 224pp., £85.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 0 74534 580 2 hb., 978 0 74534 581 9 pb. Should the state be the source of freedom? Should it be a wellspring for the affirmation of humanism? The modern anarchist tradition has […]

Lost at sea

Reivew of Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History
Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History (London: Verso, 2021). 480 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 83976 333 5 The second volume of Peter Weiss’s epic historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance opens in Paris in 1938. Recently defeated international brigade fighters in the Spanish Civil War, the unnamed narrator and his dejected comrades have taken […]
Painting of a ship in storm

Protests against reality

Reivew of John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art
John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020). 300pp., £17.99 pb., 978 1 64259 131 6 This book is a significant contribution to the Marxist reflection on art. This is not a ‘Marxist history of art’, but a Marxist book about art, composed of various essays, some of a general theoretical character, and […]

Agents of change

Reivew of Lilia D. Monzó, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity
Lilia D. Monzó, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity (New York: Peter Lang, 2019). 290pp., £95.59 hb., £36.74 pb., 978 1 43313 407 4 hb., 978 1 43313 406 7 pb. History is usually taught through a white, Eurocentric, male lens, erasing the contributions of women. Women of Colour and Indigenous […]

Revolutions of the past and future

Reivew of Rachel Douglas, Making The Black Jacobins
Rachel Douglas, Making The Black Jacobins: C. L. R. James and the Drama of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 320pp., £83.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 1 47800 427 1 hb., 978 1 47800 487 5 pb. In the same way that there are poets’ poets and communists’ communists, Rachel Douglas is a C.L.R. […]

Lenin and Gandhi: A missed encounter?

The theme I shall address today has all the trappings of an academic exercise.* Still, I would like to attempt to show how it intersects with several major historical, epistemological and ultimately political questions. As a basis for the discussion, I will posit that Lenin and Gandhi are the two greatest figures among revolutionary theorist–practitioners […]

Messianic ruminations: Derrida, Stirner and Marx: Spectres of Derrida Symposium

mind/geist of Europe by its cultural others and inferiors. Derrida’s fascination is with Hamlet-as-geist haunted by the corporeal form of the ghost, as a trope for the irreducible spectral implication of spirit and spook. However, this Vah~ryian reading of Hamlet forecloses his distinctive relation to the premodern, conscripting his melancholic Renaissance proto-modernity into a latterday […]

The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear

The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear Istvan Meszaros 1. ‘Llst der Vernunft’ and the ‘Cunning of History’ The Marxist notion of the ‘cunning of history’ was formulated as a ‘materialist standing on its feet’ of Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’ (Ust der Vernunft). According to Hegel, the latter is: ‘an artful device which, whlle seeming […]

1984 and all that

EDITORIAL 1984 and all that Recent re-organisation of the Editorial Collective’s working practices, aimed at a more equitable distribution of the work-load, has given rise to the new position of ‘issue editor’. Although basically administrative in character (the Collective as a whole still takes editorial decisions), this position is enlivened by carrying with it the […]

Why Habermas?

WBY BA.BERMAS ? LINDA J. NICHOLSON’ There exist two ways to deny an idea. One is to label it false. The other is to call it non-important, more effectively achieved by not discussing it all. Mainstream philosophy in both England and the United states has skilfully employed the art of nondiscussion to deny ideas antithetical […]

Revolution and Discontinuity

rather than sweep them away in a torrent of technical jargon. On the other hand, there can be no general recipe for clarity and good style, if only because the personal flair of the writer will always, and rightly, be a contributory factor, and because the nature of the material under consideration must to some […]

Discussion: Rancière and Ideology

DISCUSSION Ranciere~a~d Ideology The article by Jacques Ranciere, ‘On the Theory of Ideologv’ (Radical Philosophy 7) is one of the most powerful critiques of Althusser’s work so far to have been produced from the left. Given the wide reception that Althusser’s work is now receiving in Britain it is vital that the issues which Ranciere […]

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 […]

On the Ethics of Revolution

became more apparent to him. Tern never acted wrongly ‘without feeling and suffering for it’. ~8 It will perhaps be evident to some readers that I am making a point parallel to the point which leads Wittgenstein to reject the possibility of ‘private’ assignments of names to referents. The parallel is cernplex, and hardly worth […]

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 […]