In this essay, I explore the far Right’s embrace of Lenin. I return to the Hegelian roots of Lenin’s politics to explain what he meant by “smashing the state machine.” I then argue that the Left should reclaim Lenin’s dialectics and his call, in the April Theses, for a second wave of social movements to overcome President Trump’s revolution. [Read more…]
Bernard E. Harcourt
56 posts
Confronting Hegel and Project 2025 of the Heritage Foundation leads to a burning question: Does the Left need a new framework, and, if so, where would that new approach begin? Certainly not with the traditional family as in Hegel’s Principles of the Philosophy of Law, or in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. [Read more here]
Hegel 13/13 is a multi-year project that explores the historical confrontations with G.W.F. Hegel’s thought, from the nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of developing new critical perspectives and practices for today’s times. The ambition of this multi-year project is to serve as a catalyst to produce new forms of critique and praxis to address the present political conjuncture. [Continue reading here]
Foucault does not merely flirt with the vocabulary of Capital volume 1 but proposes instead to expand the Marxian theory of capitalist exploitation by analyzing the techniques of power that constitute proletarians as productive—and thus exploitable—subjects. [Continue reading here…]
What makes the final texts of Karl Marx so utterly fascinating and important is that they encapsulate Marx’s post-economic political thought: his political thinking after he had fully articulated his mature political-economic theories. [Continue reading here…]
A return to some of Marx’s lesser-known texts may help us articulate the links that exist between the commune as modern political form or strategy, typically associated with the heroic case of the Paris Commune, and the community or communality as forms of life with deep roots, especially in Latin America, in indigenous uses and customs that otherwise are alien or even opposed to the dream of Western modernity. [Continue reading here…]
Few historical events or great defeats have inspired as much hope and inspiration, against all odds, as the Paris Commune of 1871. Voltairine de Cleyre’s “The Commune is Risen” (1912) and Plotino Rhodakanaty’s “The American Commune” (1877) are two brilliant illustrations of the lasting spirit of the Commune in the Americas. Marx’s address “The Civil War in France” is of course another standard-bearer. With Bruno Bosteels, we will be exploring these texts and their interrelations. [Continue reading here…]
Politically Red is a magnificent reading of Marx and his companions, Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jameson, Cedric Robinson, and their interlocutors and readers. It is an archive embedded in a gallery of images, gorgeously reproduced, inspiring, mobilizing in their beauty, and evocative. Politically Red is a work of art, an ode to the red common-wealth. [Read more here…]