Lenin’s April Theses can be seen as a rewriting and completion of the Communist Manifesto. This continuity becomes apparent in two prefaces Marx and Engels wrote for later editions of the Communist Manifesto. Let me begin with the preface to the edition of 1872. [Continue reading here…]
Bernard E. Harcourt
53 posts
The Communist Manifesto enclose within it traces of the uprisings that birthed it. It is a document whose theories arise from and are amended by social movements. Importantly, it is written for the ordinary worker, who as Engels commented in its 1888 English preface, acknowledged it as their “common platform…from Siberia to California.” It is in this specific sense of a document arising from a movement that we chose to call our work a “manifesto”, for, although in a less grand scale, our manifesto too arose from the wave of feminist strikes, and both contributed to and were recalibrated by them. In this brief reflection I hope to draw out some of the ways in which our Manifesto stands in the tradition of Marxist theorizing of capitalism, and in one key way makes a contribution to it. [Keep reading here…]
For the longest time, I thought that Marx and Engels were basically right. It seemed to me that our history was that of a constant struggle between a dominant class and a dominated class. The feminist, gay, queer, and trans* revolutions, Black Studies in the US, abolitionism – all these social and intellectual movements transformed the idea of class struggles. But I always managed to fit them roughly into a certain binary, between the dominant and the dominated, between the unjust and the just. Whether it was historically dominated women versus dominant men, or African-Americans versus Whites; whether it was historically dominated queer people versus historically dominant straight people, and so on. I was always in the grip of a certain binary class struggle between dominant and dominated. Today, I am no longer convinced… [keep reading here]
Reading Monique Wittig and Transgender Marxism underscores that Marx’s writings, standing alone, do not properly address sex and gender. For this reason, it is essential that we read Marx through the lens of Wittig’s version of feminist materialism and an abolitionist version of transgender Marxism. Ultimately, if one embraces Marx’s abolitionist position with regard to private property, capital, and class, the resulting vision of society, of solidarity, and of cooperation requires the end of any forms of dominance associated with the category of sex. The abolition of class distinctions calls for the abolition of gender distinctions that create relations of domination. In effect, maintaining the idea of sexual difference undermines the possibility of a genuinely classless society. [Continue reading here…]
Many commentators posit a stark conflict between Marx and Lacan—or, more generally, between Marx and post-structuralist thinkers. But Lacan’s discussion of desire and alienation might be useful for a reading of Marx. It may serve to enrich the questions of desire and alienation that infuse Marx’s discussion in the Paris Manuscripts, rather than undermine them. [To read more, continue here…]
Karl Marx, in the *Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844*, talks a lot about how the goal of the capitalist economic system is the “unhappiness of society.” In his book *Not Working*, British psychoanalyst Josh Cohen points out that he nowadays encounters more and more patients who want the world or themselves to stop. Some patients talk about the bliss of catatonic exhaustion, the festive morning of the weekend, staring at a single line of a newspaper until it acquires a complete emptiness of the Buddhist mantra. Lacanian notions of desire in jouissance become handy in understanding this logic. As Lacan explained in his analysis of Freud’s theory of dreams, neurotic subjects often find a particular satisfaction in keeping their desires unsatisfied. [Read more here…]
Anti-utopian and resolutely historical, Claude Lefort’s thought invites us to abandon all practical prescription, all direction, all programmatic formulation, in order to confront the present of politics in all its complexity, and to imagine from it new openings. [Continue reading here…]
Many years ago, I wrote a book on Marx and endorsed the Lefortian analysis that rejected the reduction of civil to “bourgeois” society, embraced the emancipatory potentials unleashed in both civil society and the formally (if insufficiently) democratic state. Two developments since then call for more thinking on these topics. [Read more here…]