The value of this text requires some comment. There is of course the intrinsic worth of Horkheimer’s essay, and its relevance to one of the monuments of Western Marxism. What draws this text into the space of nonsite.org’s concerns is the intersection of union organization—what Horkheimer critically elaborates here under a general theory of “rackets”—and Marxism. To say unions and Marxism share a tense

In her classic treatments of the subject, Hannah Arendt made two general remarks on the relationship between revolutions and violence. Writing in the early 1960s, she commented that, like war, revolution was indelibly marked with the occurrence of violence to such an extent that the two phenomena tended to mutate into one another. By the end of the decade, however, Arendt’s essay On Violence introduced an important qualification. Violence, she argued, had not generally been regarded as essential to revolution until relatively recently. While theorists like Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon gave violence a defining role in revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had regarded it as incidental. Violence, according to their metaphor, was a midwife whose interventions may (or may not) be required during the birth of a new society out of the womb of the old. The idea that violence was definitive of authentic revolutionary action was, she maintained, a relatively new one in the twentieth century.

The central purpose of this essay is to initiate a detailed examination of the place of violence in Marxist revolutionary theory and theories drawing on Marxism, thus to understand better their impulses and to map their limits. There are a number of reasons why this subject should still command the attention of political theorists. First, the theme of revolutionary violence has by no means entirely died out from influential currents of western, secular, leftist political theory. Although current analytical Marxism pays much less attention to questions of revolutionary transition than to those of the theory of equality and justice, witness Slavoj Žižek’s recent explorations of the role of violence in Leninist Bolshevism and Stalinist totalitarianism5 and Ted Honderich’s radical approach to democracy and terrorism. The theme of revolutionary violence therefore remains an issue in contemporary theory. It remains important too as a facet of recent revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary political practices. In particular, the emergence of a widespread focus on terrorism as a ‘global’ force demands fresh thinking about the way in which ideological frameworks, whether secular or not, lend themselves to deployment in justification of violence. For much of the twentieth century, Marxism provided the most widely used conceptual framework for contemplating revolutionary violence, but there has been insufficient work in the literature on the history of political thought to map out analytically the ways in which violence is driven or permitted by Marxian theory (though there have, of course, been many denunciations of a more or less polemical nature). To initiate such a map will therefore be useful, finally, for those wishing to understand better the relationships between theory and practice in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century.

Jeżeli realizm rozumiemy jako metodę estetyczną, za pomocą której radzimy sobie z rzeczywistością, i jeśli warunkiem skuteczności takiego postępowania wyjaśniającego jest jego zakorzenienie w określonej postawie wobec świata, to zanim rozważymy kwestię stylu, musimy postawić pytanie o postawę realistyczną. Pytanie to zadać dziś trudno i bywa ono z miejsca wyśmiewane, lecz nie powinno nas to powstrzymać przed jego postawieniem. Ponieważ to, co prawdziwe, nie zawsze jest

In creating a small-scale version of capitalism within the classroom, the simulation I describe below offers a ‘demonstration’ of several ideas at the heart of Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism – in particular, the appropriation of surplus value, but also the alienation of wage labour, the fetishism of commodities and the immanent critique of liberal ideology. ‘Playdough Capitalism’ is an adventure

For more than a generation now, class theory has been deeply influenced by what is known as the “cultural turn.” Although the specific claims attached to it tend to vary across the disciplines, its practitioners share a set of baseline intuitions. Chief among these is the view that social practice cannot be understood outside of the ideological and cultural frames that actors carry with them—their subjective understandings of their place in the world. Social action is fundamentally meaning-oriented, which implies that theories of class have to attend to the ways actors subjectively interpret their social situations and how the frames they utilize are constructed in the first place. While this insistence on the interpretive dimension of social action is a pillar of the cultural turn, it is not the only one. The focus on ideas and meaning has encouraged a turn away from structural analysis and toward the valuation of contingency of social phenomena, and further, an insistence upon the local and particular, as against the more universalizing claims of traditional class theory.

A natural consequence of this shift has been the declining influence of the idea that class is fundamentally about interests and power, and a corresponding turn away from the macro-level class analysis associated with Marxian theory. In the disciplines of history and anthropology especially, but even in sociology, class has increasingly become viewed through the contingencies of its cultural construction rather than as an obdurate structural fact; its relation to social action is seen as working through the construction of agential identities, not via the operation of their objective interests. The transformation has not been total, of course. In the English-speaking world, the work of Erik Wright and Charles Tilly in the United States and John Goldthorpe in Britain has sustained a vital tradition of materialist class analysis. Still, the broad thrust of intellectual production has for some time now veered decidedly away from this approach.

But there are signs now of a growing unease with the all-encompassing embrace of culture. In an era when capitalism has spread to every nook and cranny of the world, subjecting labor and businesses to the same market-based compulsions; when patterns of income distribution have followed similar trends across a large number of countries in the Global North and South; when economic crises have engulfed almost the entire planet twice in less than ten years, bringing country after country to its knees; and when a broad shift in distributive inequalities has occurred across dozens of economies across the continents — it seems odd to remain in the thrall of a framework that insists on locality, contingency, and the indeterminacy of translation. It has become increasingly obvious to many that there are pressures and constraints that stretch across cultures and, more importantly, that these constraints are eliciting common patterns of response from social actors, regardless of culture and geography.

Among critical and progressive academics today, the influence of postcolonial theory is unmistakable. Though born in the narrow confines of literature departments in the wake of Asian and African decolonization, its intellectual apparatus has increasingly become associated with more directly political commitments. Postcolonial theory today is viewed as an indispensable framework for understanding how power works in modern social formations and, in particular, how the West

Many in favor of the legalization of prostitution refer to it as “sex work” and employ concepts such as “consent,” “agency,” “sexual freedom,” “the right to work,” and even “human rights” in the course of making their defense.[1] Consider some of the common claims defenders of legalization advance: sex work is work just like any other form of work, only the social shame and

In his wonderful short text ‘Notes of a Publicist’—written in February 1922 when the Bolsheviks, after winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process, and how it can be done without opportunistically betraying the cause:

«Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible.»

In these circumstances, Lenin writes:

«He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with an alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit.»

Radical feminism is most associated with the “second-wave” or women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite this, radical ideas about actualizing women’s liberation, (or at least bringing about full equality to men) through socio-economic revolution have existed in theory and practice since the dawn of Marxism in 1848 and especially

What is tolerance today? The most popular TV show of the fall of 2000 in France, with a viewer rating two times higher than that of the notorious Big Brother reality soap, is C'est mon choix (It's my choice) on France 3, a talk-show whose guest is each time an ordinary (or, exceptionally, well-known) person who made a peculiar choice that determined his or her entire lifestyle. For example, one of them decided never to wear underwear, another constantly tried to find a more appropriate sexual partner for his father and mother. Extravagance is allowed, solicited even, but with the explicit exclusion of the choices that may disturb the public (say, a person whose choice is to be and act as a racist is a priori excluded).

Can one imagine a better summary of what the freedom of choice effectively amounts to in our liberal societies? Ulrich Beck introduced the notion of "reflexive society" in which all patterns of interaction, from the forms of sexual partnership up to ethnic identity itself, have to be renegotiated or reinvented.' Perhaps the properly frustrating dimension of this eternal stimulus to make free choices is best rendered by the situation of having to choose a product in online shopping, where one has to make an almost endless series of choices: if you want it with X, click A, if not, click B. We can go on making our small choices, "reinventing ourselves," on condition that these choices do not disturb the social and ideological balance. With regard to C'est mon choix, the truly radical thing would have been to focus precisely on the disturbing choices: to invite people like dedicated racists, whose choice-whose difference-does make a difference. Phenomena like these make it all the more necessary today to reassert Lenin's opposition of "formal" and "actual" freedom.

This Leninist forced choice-not "Your money or your life!" but "No critique or your life!" combined with his dismissive attitude toward the liberal notion of freedom, accounts for his bad reputation among liberals. And, effectively, is today, after the terrifying experience of the Realsozialismus, not more than obvious where the fault of this reasoning resides? First, it reduces a historical constellation to a closed, fully contextualized situation in which the "objective" consequences of one's acts are fully determined ("independently of your intentions, what you are doing now objectively serves ..."); second, the party usurps the right to decide what your acts "objectively mean." Is this, however, the whole story? There is, nonetheless, a rational kernel in Lenin's obsessive tirades against formal freedom worth saving today; when he underlines that there is no pure democracy, that we should always ask whom a freedom under consideration serves, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true choice. Formal freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while actual freedom designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates.

Od dłuższego już czasu słyszymy w polityce o prawach człowieka, możemy wręcz powiedzieć, że polityka i jej różnorodne „podmioty” zostały ponownie przywołane do praw człowieka, ich uniwersalnych wartości i bezwarunkowej konieczności. Prawa człowieka stały się na powrót absolutem politycznego dyskursu.

Jednak niewiele albo praktycznie nic nie słyszy się o polityce praw człowieka, brakuje jakiegokolwiek namysłu nad jej stanem, formami i trudnościami [2] . Skąd taka dysproporcja? Otóż, albo takie pojęcie uznaje się za oczywiste samo przez się i w związku z tym za niestwarzające żadnych specyficznych problemów: polityka praw człowieka jest, tautologicznie, niczym innym jak polityką, która po prostu czerpie inspiracje z praw człowieka i stara się je z mniejszym lub większym skutkiem wszędzie efektywnie zastosować. Albo też uważa się politykę praw człowieka za pojęcie wewnętrznie sprzeczne: ponieważ prawa człowieka są jej absolutem czy też jej podstawą, to pozostają zawsze, w technicznym czy też pragmatycznym znaczeniu tego słowa, poza czy ponad polityką. Polityka [politics] (la politique) – ujmijmy to w sposób charakterystyczny dla części współczesnych filozofów – w sensie prowadzenia polityki czy też podporządkowania [subject], włączania nas w politykę nie może być mylona z polityką [political] (le politique) jako czymś zinstytucjonalizowanym czy teoretycznym. W rezultacie nie jest ważne, czy będziemy nad tym faktem ubolewać, czy też będziemy go sobie gratulować, ale musi zostać to powiedziane wyraźnie na głos: „nie ma polityki praw człowieka”, „prawa człowieka nie są sprawą polityki” [3].

A jednak podejrzewam, że sprawy są mniej niewinne, niż może się zdawać i jeśli tak mało słyszy się o polityce praw człowieka, to jest tak dlatego, że w bardzo określonej koniunkturze takie pojęcie musi stwarzać ambaras. Mogłoby ono całkiem po prostu wydobyć na jaw sprzeczności i zasadniczą słabość zarówno samego pojęcia, jak i faktycznego stanu praw człowieka dzisiaj. Czy dyskurs rozpoznania jest rzeczywiście tym, czego im brakuje? Co utrzymuje sceptycyzm co do ich niezbędności, a nawet prowadzi do ich odrzucenia jako iluzji?

I czy tym, czego brakuje, nie jest raczej sama ta właśnie polityka [politics], oczywiście nie po prostu polityka z pamięcią swoich własnych proklamacji, lecz rzeczywista polityka ich realizacji i wprowadzania?

In order to consider the social realities of capital's posthuman empire, however, I believe it is necessary to start outside of it, in what Marx and Engels call the "real ground of history…the material production of life itself" (The German Ideology 164). What I mean by this is that in contrast to Giorgio Agamben's posthumanist declaration in What is an Apparatus? that "what is to be

At the end of the day, the benefits we gain in freedom to pursue our own leisure will only change in degree and not in kind. We will still be limited to what we can afford, and what we can afford may not change as much as we think it would. Our lives would still revolve around the prices and availability to us of

Work is the greatest affront and the greatest humiliation that humanity has committed against itself. This social system, capitalism is based on work; it has created a class of men who must work – and a class of men who do not work. Workers are compelled to work, otherwise they will die of hunger. ‘Whoever does not work shan’t eat’ profess the owners, who pretend furthermore that calculating and protecting their profits, is also to work.

Work is the great curse. It produces men without spirit and without soul.In order to make others work for one’s benefit, one must lack personality, and to work one must also lack personality; one must crawl and traffic, betray, deceive and falsify.For the rich idlers, the work (of the workers) is the means of providing oneself with an easy life. For the workers themselves it is a burden of misery, a bad fate imposed from birth, whch prevents them to live decently.When we will cease to work, then life will start for us.Work is the enemy of life. A good worker is a beast of burden, with rough legs, with a moronic and lifeless glance.When man will become conscious of life, he will never work again.

It has become commonplace to lament the current beleaguered and disoriented condition of the Left. Stuart Hall is among the few who have tried to diagnose the sources and dynamics of this condition. From the earliest days of the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan-Gingrich Right in Europe and North America, Hall insisted that the “crisis of the Left” in the late twentieth century was due neither to

This special issue of Anthropology & Materialism is dedicated to the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. On the one hand, the pieces collected here explore Benjamin’s relation to a range of canonical figures, whose work significantly influenced his own thinking (Kant, Fichte, Marx, Cohen, Husserl, Freud etc.); on the other hand, they put his philosophy into relation with a range of more recent thinkers (Saussure, Blanchot, Lacan,

(PRE-)CONDITIONS OF COMMUNISM

In his projection of the communist society succeeding capitalism Marx, it should be pointed out, drew on the writings of his immediate predecessors – such as Saint Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen – all of whom envisaged a post-capitalist society without exploitation of human by human. However, these pre-Marxian socialists advanced their ideas of the future

The overwhelming focus of research into the phenomenon of globalization has been on the patterns of objective relations. Major works have been written on aspects of objective globalization from the consequences of containerization for global trade to the redefijining efffects of the global intersection of biotechnology and genomic sequencing of DNA (see Levison 2006; Thacker 2005). Digital devices like