Judith Revel | Foucault, Alter-Marxist? On Law, History, and Subjectivation

Foucault, alter-marxist? Return to the question of illegalisms: Law, history, and subjectivation Judith Revel Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne [NB: The original text in French is below, following this English translation] First and foremost, of course, I’d like to thank Bernard Harcourt for organizing this great seminar series – I was thinking this morning that I have taken part in five CCCCT seminars since 2016. This year is my sixth, and I’m delighted and proud of it, thank you. I can’t begin, however, without apologizing a little for my presence in this context: I’m not a Marx specialist, and what justifies […]

Bernard E. Harcourt | Introduction to Marx 2/13: On Marx’s 1842 Articles on Thefts of Wood and Foucault’s 1973 Lectures on The Punitive Society

By Bernard E. Harcourt Marx’s articles titled “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” published in the Rheinische Zeitung in October and November 1842, were fetish texts among critical legal scholars, critical sociologists, Marxist historians, and radical lawyers during the late 1960s and 70s.[1] The articles do not typically appear in the canon of Marx’s political writings. They are absent, for instance, from the classic, exhaustive, American compendium, The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker—that thick red volume that every undergraduate in social studies carries with them. They are considered by some, following Louis Althusser, as still tainted […]

Bernard E. Harcourt | Introduction to Marx 1/13: On Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and Ernst Bloch

The content and concepts in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach model the kind of philosophical method and argumentative strategy that might serve us well today to get beyond, not the conservative Hegelian Idealism that dominated Marx’s intellectual milieu at the time, but the present political liberal hegemony that prevents collective cooperation and political action… [continue reading here]

Bernard E. Harcourt | Return to Marx: General Introduction to the Marx 13/13 Seminar Series

In Marx 13/13, we return to Marx’s key texts and read them through the lens of world-historical interpretations that pushed Marxian thought and praxis in new directions: toward operaismo or workerism, Black Marxism, feminist, queer and transgender theories, postcolonialism, cultural studies, Freudian or Foucauldian strands of Marxism, as well as Leninist, Maoist, and social democratic forms of Marxism. [Continue reading here…]

Bernard E. Harcourt | Degrowth

André Gorz first used the term “décroissance” (degrowth) in 1972 as a hypothesis in an international conference he had organized in Paris, and it sowed an idea. It was picked up in 2004 (not long before Gorz’s death in 2007) by the main movement of anti-advertising and anti-consumerism campaigners in France, as a “punch word” (un mot coup-de-poing) title for their activist newspaper. From there it quickly became a polarizing slogan and the name of a large and diverse movement, many of whose members recognize Gorz as an intellectual forebearer. [Read more here]

Bernard E. Harcourt | Evgeny Pashukanis & Yakov Staroselsky: On Soviet Legal Thought and Ideology

… If that is true, it presents a real challenge to Soviet legal thought, as well as to Jeremy Kessler’s minimal historical materialist account of law. It introduces a large element of contingency, which may be difficult to square with historical materialism. In the end, this may bring Yakov Staroselsky closer to Nietzsche and Foucault, than to Marx…

Bernard E. Harcourt | On Axel Honneth and the Democratization of Work

In his new book on the democratization of labor, *The Working Sovereign*, Axel Honneth takes a realist and pragmatist approach, advocating both for alternative democratic changes to the organization of labor and reforms to capitalist labor structures. It is a formidable intervention; but does Honneth’s account adequately take into account that the valuing of labor was itself a motivated project: labor became an object of value—whether in the work of Locke, or the early Protestant work ethic, or Hegel—driven or inspired by a deliberate (though perhaps not fully articulated or conscious) effort to make work appear valuable to laborers. Labor was transformed or shaped into a valuable performance in these philosophical interventions. But these philosophical constructions may be illusions, fabricated ways of trying to convince workers of the importance of their work as a way to reproduce more workers. If we look at it from this instrumental perspective, then the question that would arise is: What work are those philosophical discourses doing? And why might it be important to look at the work that they were doing? [To continue, read here….]

Bernard E. Harcourt | Imagining a Coop University

The university, as a collegium of scholars and students, is under threat across the globe and in the United States. State governments are interfering with academic freedom and knowledge, dictating what can and cannot be taught. Private donors are interfering with the scholarly project and the discourse of learning. University administrators are throwing our shared values away. Whether at public universities or private universities, the climate of learning has become intolerable.

Join us for an exploration of another model: a multi-stakeholder cooperative university run by and for those who want to learn, to develop critical thinking, to share community–the faculty and students, staff and workers, and the community. The model dates back to the Middle Ages at least, when universities were first born as cooperatives of faculty and students. Let’s explore together a new model for critical thought in the twenty-first century!